This past February we spent ten days on tour of the Holy Land, organized by the United Methodist Church, and on several occasions I was thinking about the Himalaya Balsam. This was my first trip to Israel/Jordan/Palestine, and I was ill-prepared for knowing anything about the flowers that we would be encountering. I could easily imagine being attracted to a plant, oblivious to the plant’s history and what impact it might have had on the local environment. I would see a beautiful flower and a native would see any undesirable weed.
I love reading travel literature, but I’ve often been struck by how so many travel books and essays are written by outsiders, people who are visiting a place for the first time and may know relatively little about the world they are portraying. It’s the natives who really know the place, but often they may know it too well, unappreciative of their surroundings. It is the novice who gets excited about a new experience–and wants to share that excitement with others.
When my wife and I arrived in Tel Aviv, we knew each day’s activities would be bound to a tight schedule arranged by the tourist agency. That focused rigor makes sense. We had a limited number of hours each day, and they could best judge how to maximize our experience so we could visit the Sea of Galilee, Capernaum, Golan Heights, Masada, Megiddo, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Jericho, Basra, the Dead Sea, etc. A lot to see in a few days.
While I did not mind such a tight schedule, I did want to find some way to own the trip, to feel that in addition to the group agenda, I also had my personal sphere of priorities. I chose to focus on plants, particularly blooming flowers. While we were traveling in early February, not a peak time frame for many flowers, I assumed the area’s moderate climate would certainly have some blooming plants worth photographing. So wherever we went, I kept my eye out for flowers. I often did not know what I was photographing or recording in my daily journal, but it was a way for me to feel as if I was an engaged student and not just a passive tourist.
Back in my teaching days, I would tell my students they had two options with regard to doing research: one can be a gatherer or a hunter. The gatherer enjoys strolling through a landscape, collecting whatever may catch one's. Along the way, the gatherer may discover many unexpected surprises. The hunter, on the other hand, is looking for specific artifacts, focused on a few issues while ignoring or dismissing whatever does not fit with the hunter’s primary objective. If you are hunting deer, you ignore the pheasants and turkeys. You concentrate on shooting the deer. On this trip, I decided that I would try to combine both roles: enjoy whatever tidbits I might collect at each historical site, but I would keep my eye peeled for gardens and flowers. And try to create a reasonably detailed record of the plants I encountered during this brief trip to the Holy Land.
Below I’ve posted three slideshows. One slideshow introduces the gardens that we visited. The second are photos of flowers that I think are accurately identified. The final slideshow is of flowers whose identity has so far escaped me. I trust that as I keep reading and studying Mideast flowers, I may on occasion move a photo to the second slideshow. But I know my knowledge is quite superficial. Shooting a quick photo while the bus is waiting for me is not an ideal arrangement. But as I look back on the trip, I’ve discovered that many of my favorite moments include those instances when I saw old friends (encountering hundreds of blooming cyclamen on a hillside in Nazareth) or being introduced to a plant that I’ve still not identified (a vine with orange seed pods near the Dead Sea). ~Bob