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The secret garden By Ariel Hirschfeld Tags: Israel News On Mount Scopus, on the grounds of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, atop the ridge there, lies the university's old botanical garden. It was founded by the botanist Alexander Eig at the beginning of the 1930s, and was partially replanted after the Six-Day War. It is one of the first botanical gardens in this country (the first was at Mikveh Yisrael), and the most important of them in terms of its representation of the flora of the Land of Israel: More than one third of the species that exist here can be found in the garden. Nowadays, when representing the flora of the world and classifying it scientifically is no longer the main business of the natural sciences, those tending this garden are engaged in preserving groups of plants and species on the brink of extinction. The garden grows these rare plants and produces seeds that can be sown anew in nature. But the immense botanical importance of this site does not explain its contents or its unique local significance. It was planted as an "ecological garden" - the first of its kind in the world. It thus consists of a series of sections, each devoted to a different landscape system and natural habitat, including the flora of the coastal plain dunes and of the Negev hills; plants that cling to cliffs; Mediterranean brush and vegetation in its periphery; shrubbery; flora that depend on water sources; and so forth. Rocks and soil from each landscape were brought to the garden. The visitor to the coastal plain section will see, for example, soft limestone, hamra (red soil) and sand, which provide the backdrop for that region's typical flora: the daphne, retama trees, Palestine lupines, Mount Tabor oaks and the magnificent dark purple iris, which carpets the ground at the foot of the cypress trees. Advertisement What is riveting is not just the fact that the plants here thrive and are seeded from one year to the next, as though they were in their natural habitat, but that over the years, the garden's different sections have become miniature landscape pictures - landscapes in the full sense of the word, with their typical scents and spirit. This is a near-miracle, because the site is very small compared to standard botanical gardens (its area is only 25 dunams, a little more than six acres!), enabling the various sections to be taken in at a glance. What has transpired in this garden is a rare occurrence, unique to it: The integration of the sections - that is, the creation of "continuity" between the different landscapes - is done with particular attention to the associations between the plants, and an equally attentive approach to the conditions of the terrain (which are far from simple) on this stretch of the ridge. The proof that the planters knew what they were doing comes from the only witness to truths of this kind: time. This is a veteran garden, in part genuinely old, yet in the wake of the gardeners, the plants that thrived, matured and even grew old in it created much more than anyone could have imagined: While flourishing, they developed into small forests and thick undergrowth, to which they invited birds and lizards and armies of insects. In the midst of the university they brought forth a kind of Shakespearean Forest of Arden. The visitor to the southern section of brush will find old arbutus (Oriental strawberry) trees, whose glowing red trunks thrust out, thick and sturdy, from the earth, bearing folds and wrinkles like the foot of an elephant, and like the largest of the country's arbutus trees; beneath them is deep shade, damp and dark, a paradise for blackbirds and insects and wild rose bushes. Over the years - amid the brush, the oaks and the terebinths in the center of the garden - more and more young arbutus trees and oaks and ivies have sprouted, creating a tangle of thick growth that is not only representative of a region of the country, but constitutes a living extension of it. In some places the tangle is so convoluted that it maintains around it a whole climate of light and air, and, it goes without saying, different coloring and shadows in every corner. What has sprung up in this garden throughout the years is a place of rich vistas, comparable to few others. It is also a compelling gardening and architectural achievement. The gardeners, from Alexander Eig and his two famous pupils, Michael Zohari and Naomi Feinbrun, to Meir Shauat (in the 1970s) and Mimi Ron (the present director), were not driven by far-reaching artistic ambitions: What they accomplished in terms of form and planning was a byproduct of their interest in plants, in the country's landscapes and in ecological systems. The division of the area into sections is not especially sophisticated and is clearly not intended to be an active element in the garden's appearance. But what was done incidentally, out of consideration for the company of plants, was transmuted into a rich act, full of meaning, like the very creation of a garden. Precisely those who feel the efflorescence of the art of gardens around the world today (after its lengthy decline within architecture in the age of modernism) and see the potent connection between the concept of the garden and the preservation of the landscape (not least the attempt to create gardens that are close to being wild and require little intervention in terms of fertilizers and irrigation) - these people will find on Mount Scopus what can perhaps be a "pillar of cloud" for those who think at all about contemporary gardens. They will see that it is one of the most beautiful gardens in the world. One element of form and of beauty in many of the world's gardens, and not only in those that are botanical, is classification: the arrangement by size, form, species, color and so forth. For example, the fascinating Andre Citroen Park in Paris is divided according to colors. Its "red" section contains red stones, red azarole fruits and the scarlet autumnal leaves of the Japanese cherry. The botanical garden in Montpellier, France (one of the first in the world) is actually arranged according to the colors of the flowers! (In the Middle Ages the division by color was related to an understanding of the elements of the world and the parts of the human body.) This is not the place to list the classification principles that are followed by architects of gardens today, but it is compelling to view the Mount Scopus garden as one made of small landscapes, like memory tableaux of places (some of which, including the coastal plain, have all but disappeared). This is a credible garden. It represents the landscape and the landscape lives within it. It would gain the approbation of various Zen masters. For those who hold dear the landscapes of this country and its natural life it is even more precious, because it is a wondrous painting of them, alive, dancing with butterflies. The university, as is its wont, takes pains not to grasp the value of this treasure. Even in the 1940s, Michael Zohari already found himself compelled to draw the university's attention to the garden's value and importance, for fear it would be neglected. Since the university's return to Mount Scopus and the revival of the garden, the institution has attempted to build more structures in its vicinity, and after renouncing that idea made do with reducing the garden's resources to the point of suffocating it and disparaging its existence. The most recent attempt occurred in 2006, when the university tried to fire the garden's few workers and place it in the hands of a gardening company. The workers, as usual, were compelled to defend their garden in the face of the university and to recruit supporters to their cause. More recently, the garden has been partially renovated with a donation from the Jewish National Fund (which considers itself a partner to the garden because it contains the grave of Menachem Ussishkin, the organization's longtime head, who in one of his well-known bouts of modesty, asked to be buried in the tomb of Nicanor of Alexandria, also located within the garden's confines). But the renovation encompassed only the main path, the entryway and Ussishkin's grave. The garden itself needs substantial support to ensure that the profound botanical essence that pulses within it, and which is responsible for its achievements and its extraordinary beauty, will be able to subsist in dignity. And so that its little signs, their inscriptions erased by the rain, will go back to informing us in Latin about the identity of "the tree of the field." 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