An assignation with the Hellenic seductress frangipani

Here in Syros, a small island in the Cyclades in Greece, I was ambling homeward at night after a memorable meal of kalamari (squid) stuffed with feta cheese, when I rounded a corner and was stopped as dead in my tracks as if I’d walked into a wall, the wall being the overpowering scent of afrangipani tree growing more than 50m away in the courtyard of our guesthouse.

On the following morning, a Sunday, as I looked down on the frangipani from the balcony above (and the bells of heaven boomed and chimed from the Greek Orthodox and Catholic churches at every point of the compass) I saw that it was a magnet for a swarm of hummingbird hawk moths flitting and whizzing vertically,laterally and horizontally over the flowers.