Lucie Willan, Head Gardener, MGS Sparoza, Greece - 14 February 2024

“Travels Through Greece: Garden of the Gods”
Lucie Willan is currently head gardener at Sparoza the headquarters of the Mediterranean Garden Society. She was passionate about plants and historic gardens from an early age. Having studied Art History at Cambridge, she spent the first ten years of her career working in the art world, latterly as an oriental carpet specialist at Christie’s. It was a seamless transition from woven fields of flowers to real ones. She worked at several historic gardens in England such as Bramdean House, Sissinghurst, Hidcote and Monk’s House. It was at Sissinghurst that she became interested in Greek flora and dry gardening after creating designs for an area in the garden known as the Living Desert and due to a bursary from the Alpine Garden Society she first travelled to Greece and fell in love with the country and its flora.
The garden at Sparoza is in essence a wild garden that celebrates the flora of Greece and plants from the different Mediterranean climate zones around the world. It is a bulb lovers paradise. From the first autumn rains the garden is carpeted with a succession of native geophytes. Cyclamen graecum and Sternbergia lutea give way to a sea of Muscari comosum, Anemone coronaria and Iris tuberosa studded with several different Ophrys species. Greece is considered the botanical paradise of Europe with approximately 6,000 different species of flora and around 1,000 endemic species.
In her spare time Lucie likes nothing more than exploring mountains to hunt for plants in their natural habitats. Greece is 80% mountainous and there are over 4,000 named mountains in Greece so in order to narrow the remit of the talk Lucie discusses plant hunting in places connected to Greek myths and the inspiration these wild places can have for gardeners and garden making.