The Georgian High Caucusus

In June this year I went on holiday to Georgia, a country with diverse cultural and geographic influences; its links with Europe to the west and Asia to the east made it a perfect corridor for silk route traders. Along the north of Georgia run the High Caucasus, a thousand-kilometre range of mountains that border Russia, and Azerbaijan.  The mountains are an almost impenetrable barrier, few roads link Russia and Georgia, the military highway in the Kazbegi region, the Ossetian military road, and Transcaucasian highway; in Georgia there are two disputed territories that are effectively governed by Russia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and two of these highways run through South Ossetia. After a short but brutal conflict in 2008, thick rolls of barbed wire were placed along the disputed areas in a process known to Georgians as borderisation; siblings, family, and friends were cut off from each other, many haven’t seen each other since. Occasionally, overnight, the barbed wire will be moved further onto Georgian land as a provocative move, a way of unsettling Georgians. Georgian people are nervous of the future; political moves and Russian rhetoric make them so. When you talk to them, they are fiercely patriotic. They want to cling on to what they have, and what they have is beautiful.

We travelled around the country on our trip, historic Tbilisi, wine growing Kakheti an area

with an 8,000-year history of wine production (thousands of years ahead of the curve on orange wine), the cave cities and underground worlds of central Georgia, but the highlight for me was walking in the High Caucasus, a multi-day trek in a region called Svaneti. The drive there was stunning, the roads good, then crumbling, then good again; cars overtaking on blind bends with a beep, cows and dogs lying in the middle of the road, bee hives, gas pipelines, walnut and hazelnut groves, precipitous views down into the verdant valleys, and fast running glacial rivers and waterfalls. Forty percent of the country is woodland, and these mountains are green; oak, hornbeam, birch, maple. In autumn it is apparently a sight to see.

 

We started our walk from a town called Mestia; defensive Svan towers built in the 12^th century rise up in every town and village in this region. The first day was climbing, and more climbing. As we walked, it became apparent that this was a special place, it had a feel, a confidence that it’s always been like this and always would be. When the landscape slightly changed, so did the flora; a meadow became a deciduous woodland which became stony scree, which became marshy verdant elevated wetland, which became coniferous, and so on. There has been no industrial levels of agriculture like in the UK; passing through a village you will see pigs, a cow or two, horses, but not massed herds of cattle in the meadows. This stable habitat enables plants to thrive, orchids punctuate the grasslands (fragrant, Caucasian marsh, burnt tip, greater butterfly), Pink Bistort (Polygonum carneum)  bobbing in the wind, Caucasian buttercup, crimson tansy (Tanacetum coccineum); plants that I’d never seen before like Large headed milk vetch (Astragalus macrocephalus) and

Caucasian cow wheat (Melampyrum caucasicum). Among short but assertive birch trees the Caucasian rhododendron

 

(Rhododendron caucasicum) was full of white blooms; the lobed false helleborine (Veratrum lobelianum) fitted in snugly around the alpine currant (Ribes alpinum) and a cranesbill that shared the space. Everywhere I looked was a new habitat and a new group of plants, from our highest elevation (2,800 metres) where we saw Fritillaria latifolia to streamside lower areas where the Georgian lily (Lilium monodelphum) grew. There are 6,400 species of plants in the High Caucuses, a quarter of which are endemic (the UK has 804 endemic species of 3,400); it felt like they were all flowering while we were there. If I were to list them all (with their accompanying photographs…) this would be the longest blog of all time; but special mentions for the houseleeks (Sempervirens caucasicum… I think) that we saw when we stopped for a drink of water growing out of a slatey promontory, Caucasian pink (Dianthus caucaseus) polka dotting the rocky path edges, red bugloss (Echium rubrum) embellishing the grassy slopes of Kazbegi, and of course the orchids, my word the orchids…