Spring and Flowers

Well, I wasn’t wrong about spring. If you’re into flowers, and do not have some pollen allergy, the mountains is the place to be. I ended up in Ejd Ibrine (that’s what it said on the sign) if I remember correctly, which is of course unfindable on the map or GPS, as it is spelled in 5 different ways. Ijd Aabrine, for instance. Or Idjabrine. When googling it, Google suggested I try ‘idlebrain’. Interesting. If you’re familiar with the region, it’s somewhere near Btaaboura (Google Earth knows that one). And that is in the North of Lebanon, same height as Chekka, but more inland.

The region, a plateau overlooking the Mediterranean, is called Koura. Btaaboura is a Greek-orthodox village, but Ejd Ibrine was muslim. The very first book I ever read on Lebanon was ‘The Hills of Adonis' , by Colin Thubron .  It is about a journey the author made in 1966 through Lebanon, and he mentioned that in Lebanon the villages were separated by religion, and that between every christian and druze village, there was a muslim village if peace was to be kept. I know now that not to be completely accurate, but villages in the mountains often do tend to alternate each other in religion. It’s usually the church spire or the minaret that will tell you which is which.

FLying a kite in between the Marguerite/Daisies/Chamomilles ?

There aren’t a lot of trees in Koura. Pine trees are rare; you’ll see an occasional cypress. But the region is known for its olive orchards. Or is it olive groves? It’s a soft sloping landscape, all chalk hills, with terraces of olive trees alternate with newly planted wheat and other crops that I as a city girl do not recognize, other than that it is cultivated.

Picking flowers

 We ended up in one of those olive groves. They had burnt the undergrowth in the winter, and the result is an incredible wealth of flowers in spring. I have this book on flowers in Lebanon, but of course you don’t have It with you when you need it, and right now I cannot find it either, so here’s a website by the same author. But there were a lot of flowers, as you can see.

Here are some flowers I do know. Hana and a type of pink cyclamen.

Some of these flowers I recognized as the ones I always saw in potted versions on the window sills of grandmothers’ houses and old twice removed aunts in Holland. Definitely an old fashioned flower. Here they grow in the wild, and in abundance. There was some discussion as to whether we were lying in between the daisies, the marguerites or the chamomile. The funny thing is that flower names is something you only retain in your native language. And so my SIL can only give me the French names and BIL knows some of them in Arabic (boys don’t know their flowers!), others only in English. I am stuck with Dutch, which is not very helpful at this stage.

Threatening clouds over the Cedars

Today a picnic at the beach is planned. Whenever spring shows up, I always wonder why on Earth I ever wanted it to get winter. But then again, by the end of summer, we cannot wait for it to get cold. Ah, the grass is always greener on the other side.