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The two dominant flowers in my wild garden today, each to its own season, are the cyclamen and the sea squill. Both are geophytes, storing food underground, the cyclamen with a bulb, the sea squill with a tuber, and both are perennials and flower year after year. Their flowers are delicate and refined but are also hardy and sturdy and last a long time. And because I am fond of both of them and they need minimal care, and even the mole rat and the wild boar do them no harm, I have planted expanses of them in my garden, and they bring joy to the eye and the heart.

There is one thing I regret: neither one sees the other’s blossoming, because they flower in different seasons. The squill blooms in the second half of summer and sprouts green leaves only when blossoming is over. And the cyclamen, aside from a few exceptions I will speak of later, blossoms and sprouts leaves at exactly the same time—winter.

The squill is particularly wondrous to me. A versatile creature, and a tough one that makes do with very little, it lives equally well in valleys and hills, deserts and beaches, in heat and cold, shade or light, and in all types of soil. During the most difficult season, when everything around it yellows and grays, when it is surrounded by dry thistles, and the soil is cracked and arid, the squill produces an erect and mighty scepter topped by a dazzlingly white, radiant inflorescence. It does not simply grow it—when the scepter begins to emerge from the tuber, it advances at an enviable rate of four to five inches a day! Why make such an investment during the hottest, driest, and most difficult season? Because the squill is a smart plant: it blooms at summer’s end in order not to compete with other flowers for the attention of insects.

Contrary to what many people think, plants do not produce flowers in order to delight the human heart, nor to be placed in vases or arranged into bouquets and offered to loved ones. Flowers are the genitals of plants, and their blossoms are intended for reproduction. But because they do not possess the ability to move from place to place in order to meet and make contact, the majority of plants rely on insects to transfer pollen from male to female. For this reason, most blossom at winter’s end and in springtime when the ground is moist, the weather clement, and there are plenty of insects flying about and swarming around. The insects frequent the flowers, become intoxicated on nectar, and guzzle pollen before transferring it to the next flower they visit.

The catch is that many varieties bloom at the exact same season, thus competing with one another: Who will attract the most insects? Consequently, they make an effort to create tempting and delectable fragrances, alluring shapes and colors, and an abundance of nectar and pollen. One can generalize by saying that in the animal world the male woos the female, and in the plant world both the male and female woo beetles, butterflies, and bees.

The squill employs a different tactic: it stays far from the budding crowd and blossoms at summer’s end. On the one hand, this is the most difficult and arid of seasons; on the other hand, it is precisely because of this that the squill is almost the only flower on the ground, or anywhere at all. In my own garden, the modest lily blooms at the same time as the squill. Known also as the small-flowered pancratium, its blossoms are as white as the squill’s, and its fragrance is similarly faint, because neither needs to invest in the creation of particularly alluring flowers to compete against others. Insects pounce on them, and more than once I have seen sunbirds perching on the scepters of my squill, wobbling like acrobats on a tightrope or hovering around them, imbibing nectar.

I dare speculate that there is another advantage to this policy: seeds that develop after fertilization do not need to wait months until it rains. They mature only at the end of the summer and are not exposed for any length of time either to the sun’s rays, dry conditions, or gluttonous critters.

It is not easy to blossom in such heat and aridity, and this is why the squill is equipped with an expansive tuber and thick, penetrating roots for both absorbing and storing water and nutrients. The large green leaves busy themselves photosynthesizing through spring and winter, thereby doing their share of the upkeep; in summer the leaves completely shrivel up in order not to waste moisture. The squill also knows how to defend itself against hungry animals: it has a bad, burning taste and contains toxins. Only ibex nibble at the edges of its leaves now and again.

Since I have many squill plants in my garden, I am often asked where they came from. The answer—one that surprises those who ask—is that I sowed most of them myself, but some were salvaged when a ditch was being dug for a sewage pipe, and others by the roadside. It so happened that I passed a backhoe loader working there, uprooting and crushing entire clusters of squill, and I gathered them up and managed to take twenty or thirty tubers before the asphalt was poured.

Happy and excited, I remember debating what to do on the way home: Should I plant the whole lot together? After all, I thought, these tubers all belong to the same family and surely want to stay together. On the other hand, perhaps some of them cannot stand each other and want to keep their distance? Ultimately, I asked them. All those who said “together,” I planted close together, and all those who screamed “alone” or “not near that one” or who were simply silent—in various other places in the garden. I planted some in the cemetery at Nahalal between my mother’s grave and that of her brother, Menachem. I think they are pleased with this arrangement and apparently the squill plants are pleased, too, because they began blooming that very first year and have continued to flourish since then. By the way, I later discovered that the planting of squills in cemeteries is an accepted custom among Arabs, who regard its white color as testimony to the integrity of the deceased.

A large squill tuber usually blossoms the first summer after being planted in a new place. This is all well and good, but the squills I love the most are those I sow myself and for whom I wait patiently to bloom. I follow them from sowing to sprouting, I watch them grow gradually, I wait for them to mature and blossom. Do not make light of this matter: eight or nine years pass from the sowing of the squill to its first flowering! In the first year the seed releases a single leaf, a delicate green dagger, and develops a small and delightful tuber. Year after year it develops and grows, lengthening and broadening its roots, producing scales below and leaves on top, and when it reaches the size of a fist the tuber grows the scepter of a first blossom. After ten years of patient waiting, the first bloom fills the heart with special joy, like the consummation of love after endless anticipation.

By the way, the squill reproduces not only from seeds and backhoe loaders, but also from the development of new tubers under the earth. One day I got resounding proof of this, quite literally. I had placed two large clay pots by the entrance to my house, each one containing two squill tubers. A few years later I happened to be standing right beside them when suddenly I heard a strange noise, a kind of muffled yet powerful popping sound, and before my very eyes one of the pots ruptured and the soil inside it scattered all over the floor. As I bent closer to retrieve the pair of tubers I had planted there, I discovered a third tuber, still attached to one of the others. It was this extra one that had matured and become swollen, eventually applying enough pressure for the pot to break.

Life with the sea squill has taught me that the amount of blossoming varies. There are lean years and there are fat ones. Folklore tells us that if the squill blooms early and enough tubers put forth scepters and flowers, the coming winter will be a rainy one, and if the flowering is scanty it will be arid. On numerous occasions I have tried my luck predicting the weather according to squill blossom in my garden. More than once I have even risked publishing these predictions in the newspaper—and to this day I have been successful. A few botanists, however, were alarmed and corrected me: it is purely coincidental, they said. The quality of the squill blossom is a result of the previous winter, not the one to come. A tuber that receives adequate water, that grows tall and deepens its roots—that produces plenty of large leaves, to provide it with nutrients and absorb sunlight—stores enough nutrients and goodness and is able to produce an impressive bloom, but it is evidence of past rain rather than a predictor of future rain. I listened, I hung my head, I admitted they were right from a scientific standpoint, but for a number of years my annual weather reports have been more accurate than those of professional meteorologists, and I never argue with success, especially when it is mine.

Aside from insects, the squills attract other tiny critters to my garden—the kindergarten children from my village: year after year, class after class, they arrive with their teacher to see the squills blooming. First I hear them approaching, cacophonous and clamorous, and then I see them: four- and five-year-old girls and boys, all in sandals, shorts, and hats, marching behind their teacher like a flock of indentured geese.

The teacher calls out, “Don’t touch, just look!” and the little ones—in contrast to that bride, and her mother, and her future husband and his mother, and the makeup artist, the soundman, and the cameramen, who all trampled across my garden—sit among the squill, and right away the same dialogue from last year begins with the same rhyme.

The teacher: “To whom does this season call?”

The children: “The squill.”

The teacher: “And why now?”

The children: “Because it’s fall.”

And then they sing together “At the New Year, at the New Year,” a children’s song in which Naomi Shemer describes the sea squill so beautifully, blooming like a candle: “At the New Year, like a memorial candle, the squill lights up the field.” And indeed, anyone who sees a blooming squill at dawn or dusk knows that when the sun is at its lowest, the flowers glow like a white-flamed candle. And anyone who makes a habit of visiting the squill empire in nature knows that during these hours he or she will be privy to a particularly spectacular sight.

Similarly, in “The White Squill Candles,” the poet Natan Yonatan writes:

How beautiful then are the squill’s candles,

Lighting up and extinguishing with the sun.

In another poem, “There Are Flowers,” Yonatan describes their beauty:

Did you see such beauty,

Trembling in autumn’s wind?

A golden field dwindles in the dark,

Lighting candles of squill.

Due to the radiance of the sea squill’s inflorescence, its erectness, height, and hardiness, it was used to demarcate borders in days of yore. The sages even said that Joshua Ben-Nun used it to delineate land belonging to the tribes. And indeed, the squill has obvious advantages as a boundary marker: it is cheap, durable, and renews itself after every disaster. It also has a special advantage for farmers: its scepters grow and bloom precisely in the season when the borders of fields need to be clearly seen—the plowing season. And not only during the right season but during the right hours: in the morning and at dusk, before and after the hottest parts of the day, when the farmer goes out to plow his field, the squill’s inflorescence glows, delineating its borders.

On one occasion, I walked out of my house to greet the children and listen to the nature lesson they were enjoying in the garden: Every day, the teacher explained, five new flower rings blossom around the sea squill’s scepter. By tomorrow, they’ll have wilted, and the five rings above them will blossom, and the flowers that have already blossomed and wilted will soon make seeds.

Why is it important for four- and five-year-old girls and boys to know all this? To tell the truth, it is not that important. Even without this knowledge one can grow up to be a law-abiding citizen with a good profession. Perhaps someone will even come up with a new app to save humanity. But a child who learns things like this at the age of four will be a better person when he or she reaches the age of six, and you cannot underestimate a chance like that.