I find that travelling to a new location tends to highlight certain aspects of one’s personality (beyond hating airports and thinking airplane seats are tiny). It brings to the forefront the things that bear a fundamental importance to you (other than access to potable water, and how important clean underwear is). Whenever I arrive in a new location outside of my southern Ontario native range, the first element of a new landscape my attention – and camera – are drawn to is the vegetation. I immediately start looking to the trees, and it creates a quirk in my brain because, depending on where I have travelled to, I can no longer quickly identify what trees I’m looking at.
In July I travelled to Greece – specifically Crete. I travelled there for a friend’s wedding, and while the bride was certainly beautiful, I had a hard time taking my eyes off the trees. The Mediterranean ecozone is very different from southern Ontario, so there was a lot of alien-seeming vegetation to keep my attention. A notable chunk of my photos are of trees, especially from the first couple of days (the other notable chunk are of puppies – because you know I love puppies). I wanted to take this moment to share those photos (the trees ones at least) with you, fellow tree lover.
While on Crete, I was too busy feeling like the sun was trying to burn me off the earth to try to identify the tree species on site. I figured I would just do a quick google search for Mediterranean tree identification when I got home. When I did, I discovered that it was very difficult for me to determine the species of trees I had encountered on my travels. There seems to be a well-developed resource base for tree and vegetation identification in North America, but based on my (relatively brief) quest to identify my Grecian trees, similar resources are limited for Mediterranean climates. It also doesn’t help that when you type in “Crete” anywhere into a search engine, you are treated to a cornucopia of travel links.
So I put this to you, gentle reader – and to my fellow Tree Nerds and LEAF community – can you help me identify these trees?
Oh, and here are some of those puppies I was talking about…
Jen VanderVecht is the Residential Planting Programs Assistant at LEAF.