4

 

I have already mentioned how I came across a few ornamental bushes and cultivated trees near the house, planted by whoever lived here before me: jacaranda, chinaberry, a large rosebush, a small almond tree, a lilac bush, a pear tree, and a large and overbearing mass of leadwort. I was forced to cut down the chinaberry, of which I will tell more later, and I cut down much of the leadwort and transplanted a fraction of it to a different corner of the garden, to serve as a hedge. The others still grow here, and although they are not wild trees, I let them be.

There are trees of both forest and grove, remains of the natural flora that covered the area before people settled there: two Tabor oaks, two Palestinian buckthorns, one mastic, and three terebinths. I added two Judas trees, two sweet bay seedlings, snowdrop, laurustine, three spiny brooms, two honeysuckles, a few rush brooms, two eastern strawberry trees, and a bear’s plum.

Both spiny brooms were destroyed by a murderous tractor driver who was working on the periphery of my garden. That very morning, I showed him the two shrubs and asked him to be careful, and in the evening I found them uprooted and mangled. One Judas tree died soon after it was planted—I have no idea why—and the second one grew and blossomed, but because it is not the type of Judas tree that produces flowers prior to foliage, the purple blossoms are obscured by its green leaves and it is not the most beautiful of its kind. The plum tree acclimatized well but grows very slowly. One day, when it is larger, it will bloom in white and will be the loveliest tree in my garden.

The rush broom shrubs adapted well, and they flowered with such a bountiful and radiant blossoming that they began to self-sow and spread throughout the garden, and I was forced to uproot their offspring the same way I uproot dog’s-tooth grass. The styrax also grew and blossomed and, like the rush broom, it pleases not only the eye but also the nose. The rush broom bears yellow flowers with a sweet fragrance. The styrax bears white flowers with a lovely fragrance, too, but I do not possess the words to describe it. I can only say that the smell is as white as the flower that produces it, and leave the rest to the readers’ imagination, or suggest the reader go to the trouble of smelling these white flowers in order to come up with superior adjectives.

Incidentally, the spiny broom contains toxins. Once upon a time, fishermen used to grind them up and scatter them in the Sea of Galilee in order to stun the fish. A shepherd, who came up to my house from the forest asking for cold water, was surprised to see spiny broom growing in my garden. He told me to be careful because “sheep die from that tree and goats just go crazy.” I do not know if this story is true, but I left the two spiny brooms where they are, because I do not have a herd yet, neither sheep nor goats, and I myself do not eat their fruit.

As for the eastern strawberry tree, it usually grows in places that are higher and colder and in soil that is chalkier than I am able to offer in my garden. I know of a number of groves scattered around the Galilee, the Carmel, and the Judean Hills. One of the most beautiful and stunning groves is at the top of Mount Giora, situated above the point where the Refaim and Soreq Rivers meet.

Here and there, exceptionally beautiful eastern strawberry trees grow in solitude. Anyone wanting to reach them must kindly ask where they might be found, and then search far and wide, wearing out one’s legs while navigating the way. The effort pays off: the tree’s leaves glow, its blossom is lovely, its trunk is smooth and red, and every year the tree sheds its bark, taking on the appearance of a creature shedding its skin. This red color explains its name and is connected to a folktale in which a son murders his father.

My friend Professor Amots Dafni, a man of plants and letters, told me that the largest eastern strawberry trees in Israel can be found in Ein Kinya, east of Ramallah. The biggest one I’ve ever seen grew in the garden of the botanist Atai Yoffe on Kibbutz Netiv HaLamed-Heh. It is so tall and expansive that its huge branches are considerably thicker on their lower sides to avoid breaking under their own weight. In describing a righteous believer, the psalmist and prophet Jeremiah wrote about a tree like this: “For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit”—and who knows, since Jeremiah was a prophet, perhaps he was even referring to that same eastern strawberry tree when he predicted that, in another two thousand five hundred years, the tree would flourish above the hydrophyte pond in the garden of Ati Yafa on a kibbutz named Netiv HaLamed-Heh.

One of the two eastern strawberry trees I planted died a few weeks later. I managed to save its brother, who was also at death’s door, and I am proud to say I did it all myself. I first asked the experts, and they told me it’s common knowledge that the eastern strawberry tree is difficult to grow and often dies soon after planting, and there is nothing to be done about it. But I didn’t give up. I read and researched and discovered that the eastern strawberry tree needs a type of fungus that grows at the root of the tree and which has a symbiotic relationship with the tree known as mycorrhiza. The eastern strawberry tree provides the fungi with nutrients, and the fungi helps the tree to absorb nutrients from the earth. That’s nice to know—usually only the parasite benefits from the situation, whereas here each helps the other until they are unable to exist separately.

I surmised that my eastern strawberry trees, purchased in a plant nursery, had not found the fungi they needed in my garden, and because I did not know how to attach fungi to roots, I sat and thought about it, and then thought about it some more, and then, like a happy ending to a children’s storybook, I had an idea: I took a shovel, a hoe, and two buckets and drove to an eastern strawberry tree grove I know in the Carmel. I dug for a while and then gathered up a bit of soil from between the trees in the hope that the soil contained that fungi. I returned home, dug gently and carefully around my poor pup of a tree, tipped the soil I had brought back into the hole, watered it, and this time I didn’t need the patience my garden has demanded of me on numerous other occasions. Within a few weeks the ailing tree recovered and thrived.

But this was not the end of our trials and tribulations, the tree’s and mine. The strawberry tree did indeed begin growing, but rather than growing upward it inclined severely to one side. This kind of growth indicated I had carelessly planted the tree in a place that was too shady, and the tree was striving toward the rays of sun that still managed to penetrate. To correct this, I removed a few oak branches that overshadowed the tree, pruned it a little, and within a short time my eastern strawberry tree grew new upright branches that added to its height, and today—with loving fungi at its roots and a shining sun above its foliage—it continues to develop and redden, and one day it will be a beautiful big tree.