Our subject is the Illustrated Flora of Turkey project and we are on the final stretch with one of its most elusive groups, the Crocus.

Until May 17 we were locked down and on May 18 I was out there. No matter what, I shouldn’t miss this May. So, the idea started to see the Iris gatesii on the Helkis Mountain, Sason.

In 1830 the intrepid Italian naturalist Carlo Bertero collected this remarkable fern from a small group of islands some 300 miles off the coast of Chile known as the Juan Fernández Islands.

What a year we’ve had! While the world was shutting itself down and setting up a new kind of life, individually it was quite something too...