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In Hebrew, the word for land and earth and soil is adama, a word that is closely rooted to adom (red) and dam (blood), but most important is the word “Adam”—son of the earth, named after the earth from which he was created and to which he will return. Adama is the mother of every plant and animal and has also given birth to a few highly charged Hebrew expressions—the land of our fathers, working the land, virgin land, holy land, motherland—but I am talking about land in its simplest meaning, the soil on the ground, the material we stand on which is sowed and planted and within which my plants root themselves, the very substrate on which my bare feet tread.
There are several types of soil in Israel. Those in the know use words like “rendzina,” “alluvial,” “peat,” and “terra rossa” the same way I use “diacritical mark,” “low range,” and “over easy.” But even laymen like myself can distinguish between the heavy dark soil of the valley and the light pale soil of the coast, between the red loam of the Sharon area and the white marlstone of the southern Dead Sea and northern Arava. The truth is that you do not have to go from one end of the country to another. Even within the limited boundaries of my garden the soil changes from place to place, from one corner to another.
As I have already explained, my garden extends across a slope. The soil is rich and dense in the lower section, but porous and light higher up. Here it is brown and there it is blackened, here it is reddish, and there it is permeable and drains easily, and here puddles form, and here it smells like this and there it smells like that. All this is because my house straddles the border between the Jezreel Valley and the Lower Galilee. It is precisely on the border: the short slope upon which it is built is part of the first hills of the Galilee, and the lower part of the garden composes one of the perimeters of the valley. Each side has its own temperature—early morning it is easy to sense that the lower section of the garden is colder than the upper section, and each side has its own soil and plants. The cyclamens, for example, prefer the upper side; the daffodils prefer the lower; the sea squill is happy in both places.
And there is other soil in the garden or, more precisely, soil that was brought here: a few cubic feet of special soil, with extraordinary growing properties. Perhaps the vestiges of soil from the Garden of Eden, and perhaps the same kind of soil upon which Jacob the Patriarch lay, dreaming of angels and a ladder. And perhaps it was mixed with ashes of the altar from the temple or brought from the place where nuclear waste is dumped. Either way, this soil was not here when I bought the house; it was brought here from elsewhere, no one knows from where exactly, and it has worked miracles.
This is what happened: one day I hired a Bobcat operator to do a few jobs in the garden. A Bobcat is a kind of multipurpose small tractor. Aside from a loader bucket there are all kinds of useful parts that can be attached to it. The Bobcat is wheel driven, but the steering is like that of a crawler. I won’t go into further details, but if readers are having difficulty deciding what to buy me for my next birthday—I can solve the problem: I’d like a Bobcat. I will even make do with a secondhand one.
A Bobcat is an agile, efficient contraption, and the person operating it must be agile and efficient, too. I was glad to discover that the person I had hired that day was a veritable magician. While serving in the military, I learned, he was a helicopter pilot. All the aeronautic coordination he had cultivated in order to fly a helicopter he now demonstrated on the face of the earth. He guided the Bobcat hither and thither, its loader bucket rising and falling as it advanced with the kind of smooth reliable flow that evokes envy and admiration, as it is written: “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings.” This is the splendor of the Hebrew language: even before the Bobcat existed, the Hebrew language contrived sentences that perfectly describe the person operating the Bobcat.
At a certain stage we needed a few cubic feet of soil. We spoke to a building contractor who was working in one of the neighbors’ houses, and he said he would try to find some for me. He was not sure he could do it, so he explained, due to the small quantity we required, but he knew someone who could speak to someone else, who could ask someone to send someone else’s cousin, the best friend of a car mechanic who knew someone who owned a truck, and if his partner agreed, he would tell his driver to carry out the task at hand—but only if I paid in advance. I thought about it and decided that if this person was a crook, he would have concocted a simpler and less alluring story than the one he told me. I paid in advance and the next morning awoke to discover that a nice heap of soil had been deposited at the edge of the garden. The Bobcat operator got to work right away, distributing most of the soil between the oak trees in the northwest corner of the garden.
When I began living in the village, this entire corner was overrun with thistles, and aggressive creepers covered most of the treetops, blocking the sun and giving the trees a miserable appearance. I cut down and uprooted the thistles; I trimmed the creepers close to the ground and untangled them from the oak trees with the help of my old pickup truck, ropes, and tow straps.
The trees were extremely happy, recovered swiftly, and grew branches and foliage. This corner quickly became a delightful spot and earned the name zula, or “hangout.” I planted squill bulbs and honeysuckle there and, after the new soil had been distributed, I sowed buttercups. I must stress that these seeds grew and blossomed in my garden, in other words buttercups I am familiar with and that are known to me, the offspring of perfectly normal buttercups in every way.
Like the seeds of other geophytes, the anemone and cyclamen, gladiolus and squill, buttercup seeds produce small leaflets in their first year that increase in size the following year, and the year after that. Meanwhile the bulbs develop underground and produce their first flowers only after three to four years. But the leaflets that sprouted from the buttercup seeds I sowed back then in that same soil grew voluminously, and the leaves were triple their usual size. In their first year these buttercups were already producing flowers double the size of all the others! Since I knew their parents, I had no doubt that this was not hereditary but due to environmental conditions—namely the soil that had been brought to the garden. I made some inquiries, but could not find out who brought the soil and from where.
For some years the buttercups continued to produce gigantic flowers in the zula, but they finally settled down and began producing flowers of a normal size. Today, anything I plant or sow in the zula grows as it does in any other place in the garden. That mysterious soil has lost its special powers and is as earthy as the next clump of soil. What was its secret? What did it have that faded away or simply disappeared? I do not know. A riddle it is and a riddle it remains.