Chris is just back from a great Greentours trip in Turkey that took an original route from Hatay (Antakya) to Cappadocia , calling in at Osmaniye and Karamannmaras on the way and visiting everything from cave churches and Hittite castles to Selcuk castles and a massive Caravanseri. Of course the flora was the mainstay and there was a superb array of plants some of which will sneak into the book replacing existing pics and even forcing their way in because they were such stunners. Top of these was Iris sprengeri, whose exquisite reddish-purple veined flowers were scattered across an area of bare steppe, closely followed by the magnificent stands of Fritillaria persica whose near black flowers actually glowed wine-red with the backlit sun and a deserved third place should go to the lovely displays of Cyclamen pseudoibericum in the woods near Osmaniye. Other highlights from the trip (all close-but-no-cigar) were the hundreds of gorgeous Iris sari, purple-red Corydalis rutifolia, roadside stands of huge Glaucium grandiflorum, white and rose tubed Onosma albo-roseum, delicately veined Crocus biflorus tauri, the soft yellow Iris caucasica tucked among Cappadocia ’s fine landscape and the hundreds of thousands of Colchicum szovitsii on Erciyes Dag. For me the two most interesting non-floral encounters were the superb and massive Caravanseri at Sultanhan (45kms north-east of Kayseri
Below are five goodies;
Cyclamen pseudoibericum
Fritillaria persica
Iris sprengeri
Iris sprengeri
Iris sari
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