My Wild Garden in the Olive Grove

The grass is thigh high in the olive grove at the moment and it will soon be time to strim it bare to avoid the risk of fire.  Sad, but very necessary.   But for now it's a beautiful wild garden.  The grasses are a mixture of grains - corn, barley, wheat, spelt - all crops that I presume would once have been grown on these terraces before the olive oil industry took over.  Among the grasses wild flowers proliferate - all colours and types and sizes.  We don't have a European wild flower book so we're struggling to identify them all.  The intention is to try to photograph as many as possible and make our own database, but there are so many!   Here are just a few of them.

These strange fellows with the punk blue tuft, (as prolific as bluebells under the trees), are apparently Tasselled Hyacinths.

These orchids are everywhere.

And so are these bulbs with a big head of white flowers.

This is something we can identify - wild dianthus!  And these rock roses that open in the sun are probably my favourites!

Tomorrow I'm off to Florence to visit the Browning museum and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's grave - a real treat.

Avril Joy over at Writing Junkie is doing a series on book blogs and today she's very kindly featuring mine - it was a lovely surprise.