The Greek plantsman, better known online as Liberto Dario, on seeing salvias in the wild and inspiring his fellow Greeks to embrace Mediterranean flora
WORDS JENNIFER GAY PORTRAIT RICHARD BLOOM
G reek horticulturist Eleftherios Dariotis is something of a rarity. His native country has the richest flora in Europe – more than 6,000 species with around 12 per cent endemic – but as a passionate plantsman he finds himself among only a handful of Greeks actively collecting and growing plants. Over the past 15 years he has built up a collection of more than 5,000 plant taxa. And he’s a man with a mission: to demonstrate the inspirational possibilities of dry-climate gardening by expanding the range and availability of drought-tolerant, Mediterranean-climate plants.
Eleftherios grew up in Peania on the Mesogeia plain, just outside Athens, famed for its olive groves and vineyards. “I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have access to a garden,” he says. Aged nine, he was already experimenting with growing bulbs in pots. “My grandfather was very influential – he kept bees in the floristically rich foothills of Mount Pateras and Geraneia in eastern Attica. I used to love hanging around with him while he cared for the bees. He would point out and name the flowers bees were visiting, so from a young age I was observing plants in the wild.”
Eleftherios studied horticulture in Greece, but it was the opportunity to continue his studies in California with an MSc in plant biology at UC Davis that really rocked his world. “I remember cycling in on my first day and seeing a huge shrub covered with red flowers, swarming with hummingbirds – I took a piece home and it turned out to be the pineapple sage, Salvia elegans. I was bowled over by how different it was to the sage (Salvia fruticosa) I knew from home, and with it a sudden realisation there were hundreds of Salvia species out there.”
Later, while studying for an MSc in horticulture at the University of Reading, he was able to explore the western Mediterranean – Portugal, Spain, as well as the Canary Islands and Madeira. Succulent euphorbias in the wild properly awoke him to the garden value of Mediterranean natives. Up until that point, he had seen the lack of summer flowers as a barrier to using Greek flora in gardens, but he now began to appreciate their form, structure and seedheads. Eleftherios’ plant interests are wide-ranging – he has a deep love for everything in the Lamiaceae family – but the more he discovers, the harder it is to pinpoint any one plant group.
Back in Greece, various public sector land-management posts came his way
