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The Gozo late autumn, early winter, is a curious time to an Englishman. In fact there didn't seem to be much of an autumn at
all, the daytime temperature went from being 25° to 15° in the space of 3 weeks during November. It feels like an English autumn, with the cloud, the rain and the shortening days, but to the plants it must feel like spring.
I had still been swimming in the sea and laying prone in the sun until early November, when the weather broke. It's rained ever since. If anyone tells you it's always sunny in Gozo they'll be trying to sell you one of the overpriced houses here. The temperature will lag behind the seasons though, it gets so hot in the summer, the earth absorbs the heat and lets it out again slowly, like some sleeping behemoth breathing.
I wandered over the cliff tops today, during the summer it's mostly bare, barren rock with a light covering of dusty limestone grit, but today I'm met with a profusion of green. The wind is still strong enough to blow the eyebrows clean off your face, but the recent rains have brought all manner of plants out from their summer dormancy. The air smells of honey. Common mallow bursts into leaf from stubby wooden stalks, fennel sprouts ferny leaves from their bases, the sea squill (Drimia maritima) bursts from its fat, huge bulbs. When I arrived in September that was still in flower, stalks of 3-4 feet tall, a profusion of flowers on each, all over the countryside, I thought they were foxtail lilies at first.
It must simply be too hot and arid to grow or transpire properly in the summer, so they go into hiding, to re-grow when the rains come and the weather is more amenable. The prickly pear cactus is not so troubled, it fruits magnificently here in late summer, and the supremely resilient tamarisk, with its drought and salt tolerant scaly leaves, dots the hillside. In the spring there are carpets of wildflowers on the cliffs here, as the heat rises after the cool of winter.
all, the daytime temperature went from being 25° to 15° in the space of 3 weeks during November. It feels like an English autumn, with the cloud, the rain and the shortening days, but to the plants it must feel like spring.
I had still been swimming in the sea and laying prone in the sun until early November, when the weather broke. It's rained ever since. If anyone tells you it's always sunny in Gozo they'll be trying to sell you one of the overpriced houses here. The temperature will lag behind the seasons though, it gets so hot in the summer, the earth absorbs the heat and lets it out again slowly, like some sleeping behemoth breathing.
I wandered over the cliff tops today, during the summer it's mostly bare, barren rock with a light covering of dusty limestone grit, but today I'm met with a profusion of green. The wind is still strong enough to blow the eyebrows clean off your face, but the recent rains have brought all manner of plants out from their summer dormancy. The air smells of honey. Common mallow bursts into leaf from stubby wooden stalks, fennel sprouts ferny leaves from their bases, the sea squill (Drimia maritima) bursts from its fat, huge bulbs. When I arrived in September that was still in flower, stalks of 3-4 feet tall, a profusion of flowers on each, all over the countryside, I thought they were foxtail lilies at first.
It must simply be too hot and arid to grow or transpire properly in the summer, so they go into hiding, to re-grow when the rains come and the weather is more amenable. The prickly pear cactus is not so troubled, it fruits magnificently here in late summer, and the supremely resilient tamarisk, with its drought and salt tolerant scaly leaves, dots the hillside. In the spring there are carpets of wildflowers on the cliffs here, as the heat rises after the cool of winter.