Tough stuff

Just east of Athens, overlooking the Mesogeian plain, lies a unique garden – Sparoza. Established in the 1960s by the renowned British urban planner Jacky Tyrwhitt, around her private home, it is an organic, experimental, dry garden with a treasure trove of nearly 1,000 different Greek native and Mediterranean climate-zone plants. It has also been the headquarters of the Mediterranean Garden Society (MGS) since 1994.

It is difficult to overstate the specialness of this place. It is one of only a handful of historic gardens in Greece and has been a flagship for the promotion of dry gardening since its inception. Entering the garden today, it’s hard to imagine the lunar landscape of a hill that Jacky bought. As she began to tackle her project, she found herself working on an arid, hot and windy site, with poor stony soil and plenty of protruding bedrock. She even resorted to using dynamite to blow craters into the hillside for her tree-planting holes, and wrote of Sparoza that ‘anything that grew under the difficult conditions prevailing here would be almost certain to grow better elsewhere’.

However, the story of the garden is that of not one but two pioneering plantswomen. On her death in 1983, Jacky left Sparoza to the Goulandris Natural History Museum for the protection and preservation of the native flora. A transitional period followed until Sally Razelou, the Anglo-Irish artist-gardener, took over the reins in 1992, and a new phase of garden reinvigoration began. She not only nurtured and developed Sparoza for nearly 30 years until her death in 2021, but also helped found the MGS in the early 1990s.

Both women championed the use of native flora at a time when it was largely overlooked, and both celebrated the rhythm of a natural Medi