MediterraneanGardenSociety.org
Title
The Mediterranean Garden Society
Description
About the MGS
The Mediterranean Garden Society (MGS), a non-profit making association founded in Greece in 1994, acts as a forum for everyone who has a special interest in the plants and gardens of mediterranean climate regions. The society publishes a quarterly journal The Mediterranean Garden and maintains a garden just outside Athens. The aims of the MGS as set out in the Charter were deliberately drafted broadly to cover all possible directions that the society might wish to go in its life. As an international society, the MGS has members in countries throughout the world and in many of them members have formed branches so that they can meet for various activities. (The word "Mediterranean" with a capital M is used to denote the countries surrounding the Mediterranean Basin, while the uncapitalized word "mediterranean" is used to describe the type of climate shared by these countries and other regions of the world.)
For many years gardening literature has been dominated by descriptions and illustrations of plants and garden designs suited to the climate of northern Europe and the eastern, mid western, and south eastern USA, where water is plentiful. Seduced by these images, mediterranean gardeners have struggled to produce approximations to 'English gardens' which are quite unsuited to the conditions of the mediterranean climate areas.
It is the goal of the Mediterranean Garden Society to develop alternatives, no less attractive or alluring, which are truly based on a mediterranean way of gardening. The plants to be used, as natives to the mediterranean climate areas of the world, will of necessity be more or less drought resistant. Waterwise gardening has to be one of the basic tenets in countries where summer drought can last for four months and more -- areas where the cost of water can only increase and availability decrease.
