Green shoots after Greece’s devastating 2021 fires

Forest fires are scary, hard to control and ever more in the news. In Canada they have been burning millions of hectares and their fallout has blackened New York. In parts of California, there have been successive years of conflagratory horror. Southern Spain and the south of France are beset with it. While you recline by the Mediterranean, there will be images of fire and smoke in a hinterland, possibly one near your sunbed.

Greece is a prime candidate. Fires there are an annual hazard and in 2021 they burnt parts of Attica and devastated the woodlands of northern Euboea. Those Euboean woods are close to my heart. I have holidayed beside them, written about their history and prized them as an asset that foreign tourists seldom appreciate. In August 2021, they became a conflagration, internationally reported. Simultaneous fires in Attica, nearer the big city, monopolised the equipment that could have fought Euboea’s flames.

For four days, villagers had only their hoses and their valiant, self-organised defence. Young men formed human chains to save what they could. They put the elderly’s safety first, escorting them onto boats and floating them at sea, where smoke and ash distressed them less. Food, let alone water, became ever scarcer. The fires produced local Euboean heroes: after the ruination of 100,000ha of woodland, what has happened locally at ground level?

To find out I have been on a fact-finding mission, helped by local Euboeans. After ferrying from north-east Attica to Aidepsos, we followed the roads into higher mountains nearer the northern tip of the island. After a green beginning, recalling the past, the long view becomes one of black woodlands, mostly pines. The fires began near Limni where resin used to be collected from the pine trees, an important mini industry. That industry is now dead.

On a high mountain ridge, before the firescape began, we were guided by a local delivery worker to a vista of blue anchusas and yellow verbascums, interspersed with grey-flowered Echium italicum, carpets of pink-flowered convolvulus and yellow hypericums. The drifts of blue anchusa revelled in the open sunshine and made me think wryly of the garden that won the People’s Choice Award at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show. Blue anchusas had been bedded beneath its instant trees, where they would never flourish in a long-term garden.

Where the Euboean firescape begins, not all is dead and done for. At a lower level, bushes have started to spread into the gaps. Our Euboean guides directed us to what we had hardly dared to hope to find: bushes of the rare Euboean oak, endemic to the island. Beside some of its patches, spikes of purple-blue salvia and blue rosemary are capitalising freely on the lack of overhanging shade. So are clumps of the local hellebore, Helleborus cyclophyllus. In summer, beekeepers used to set their hives by north Euboean woodland, collecting oak honey or chestnut honey for sale. Now they collect flower honey, made by bees from flowers set free of the forest’s edge. Where a river had stopped the advancing fire, we found bigger and better wild gladioli, revelling in the sun without a forest to shade them on the opposite bank.

A distinctive feature of the Euboean oak is the white underside to its glossy, serrated leaves. It stops at a height of about 5ft and I learnt that, genetically, it is a spin-off from Quercus trojana, the Trojan oak. Taxonomists and eco-botanists have explanations for its distribution but I have my own, a fancy based on Homer.

In Homer’s “Iliad”, a prominent oak tree stands near the city of Troy by which gods and goddesses meet and discuss their partisan attitude to the city. Homer gives no more details but in the modern Troad a distinctive Trojan type of oak tree has long been recognised. I have just finished writing a book, Homer and His Iliad, and to mark its imminence I have planted Quercus trojana in our Oxford college garden. As it is hardy in Britain, it has come through the winter unharmed. It is still green after the dry weeks in May and June. In the Iliad, the first Greek hero to die in battle is Elephenor, leader of the Euboean contingent. Whatever science may establish, I enjoy my myth, that fellow Euboeans returned with acorns from the oak near Troy and sowed them in his memory on their island. Some of them branched off to become the local Euboean variation.

In the “Iliad”, Homer compares episodes in the battle to outbreaks of fire in forests. He never ascribes these fires to gods and he never claims they begin when a branch rubs against another branch, a fallacy first attested in the histories of austere Thucydides, c. 400BC. For an even longer understanding of them, I have been directed to the writings of that expert in treescapes and their history, the late Oliver Rackham.

In his excellent 2001 book with AT Grove, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History, Rackham gives a crucial account of forest fires and their consequences. Taking a long view, he disputed their increased occurrence, at least up to 2001: since then, recent patterns would no doubt make him temper some of his views. He also minimised their connection with discarded cigarettes (“even in Greece, in the early 1980s, when we seldom saw any man not smoking, less than 3 per cent of the landscape burnt each year”).

Less idiosyncratically, he traced a “pine-and-fire cycle”, which is still valid. Pine trees, unlike firs, drop seeds from their cones in the wind fanning the flames and, about three years later, seedlings begin to germinate from burnt ground. On Euboea, young pines are indeed appearing sporadically. In about 30 years’ time, most of the pine forests in north Euboea should have regrown.

A better precaution would be to plant circles of walnuts round villages in the future fireline

Will there be flash-flooding, meanwhile? Controversially, Rackham argued there will not be, especially after his experiences on Crete. The roots and stumps of burnt trees, he insists, must be left in the ground to stabilise it. I was reminded of his advice when taken to a new top-down initiative, wished on the river valley up from the village of Asminio across whose banks the Euboean fire failed to spread. A big concrete dam has just been built there to halt the river if floods cause it to rise. Locals who know the valley think the dam will be far too low to stop a major flood. If the burnt trees are left in place on the hillsides, Rackham insisted there will be no such floods anyway.

A better precaution would be to plant circles of walnuts round villages in the future fireline. One of my guides, Michael Moschos, owns and directs a farm of fine walnuts near the coastline at Artemision. Surrounding water protected it but he observed how walnut trees were “suicide trees” elsewhere; they caught fire but they extinguished themselves and stopped the fire advancing as they have such a high internal content of water. As a fire screen, they serve as extinguishers.

Rackham-ed and informed on site, I am not claiming that dire fires have a wholly happy after-story. Rather, in Greece, as elsewhere, burning belongs on a botanical balance sheet, not all of which is one-sided. Wait, and one day you too will enjoy Euboean pine woods like the ones imprinted on my memory.

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