Anemone is beautiful. Leirion of Chalcedon or otherwise Turkopoulos. Sternbergia yellow, common yellow lily. Queen Olga’s Galanthos or otherwise the Homeric mole, which Hermes gave to Odysseus as an antidote to Circe’s magic potions. Have you seen how quickly the world of plants can captivate you? How ticklish are their names, colors, smells? Now imagine living and breathing among them like research botanist Dr. Keith Tan of the University of Copenhagen, who has been studying the flora of Greece since the 90s.

Because yes, all of the above mysterious plants are found in Greece, especially in the region of Elijah. After studying the plants of Samothrace and Amorgos, Mrs. Kit Tan turned her attention to the Peloponnese and bulbous plants. “This is a separate category of plants that adapt to the hot and dry summers and cold winters of southern Greece,” she tells K herself. As he explains, bulbous plants have underground storage organs (bulbs, trunks, tubers, rhizomes), which fall into a dormant state after their above-ground parts dry out and grow back in the next season. “That’s how they survive months without rain.” Kit Tan has registered 135 bulbous plants belonging to 14 families in Ilia and her work has been featured in the album Bulb Flora of Elijah, published in November under the auspices of the Goulandris Museum of Natural History and funded by the Regional Department of Ilia in the Western Greece Region. An eminent botanist signs the texts, while the physicist Konstantinos Yiannopoulos is responsible for the photographs and distribution maps. “Their distribution in Ilya is not sufficiently documented. Our work will be an important tool for the study and protection of these plants for a long time to come.”

“Less than 20 plant species are found only here and nowhere else in the Peloponnese,” says Dr Keith Tan, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen.

There are about 5900 different plant species in Greece and about 3050 in the Peloponnese. km.

No, Elijah is not the most flora-rich area of ​​the Peloponnese. “It is interesting that there are less than 20 plant species found only here and nowhere else in the Peloponnese,” says Dr. Tan. “Iliya does not have a great variety of relief, mountainous or alpine vegetation, except in the northeast and on the borders with Achaia and Arcadia.” It is noted that in Achaia on 3271 sq. km grows 2209 species of plants, in Laconia on 3636 sq. km – 2011 species, in Corinthia (2290 sq. km) – 1958, in Arcadia (4419 sq. km) – 1875 species of coke plants. “However,” the researcher emphasizes, “the figures also depend on the scale of botanical research, the amount of work done.” As she recalls, from her own meticulous floristic research (and the research of her colleague Professor Burkhard Biel) on Samothraki, on an area of ​​​​only 178 square meters. km, 1050 plant species have been recorded.