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One day, traveling from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, I noticed on the northern verges of the highway, a little after the Shoresh interchange, that genocide was about to occur. The victims were wild plants I knew and loved: an established group of great snapdragons that flowered at the beginning of every summer in a wonderful purple array, bringing joy to travelers on the road or, more accurately, bringing joy to those whose hearts were receptive to such things and took notice.
The great snapdragon is the father of the cultivated snapdragon, which blooms in a variety of colors in gardens and squares, and I have been told that they also crossbreed. Botanists are deeply horrified by such crossbreeding, because they are punctilious with regard to the purity of race and species. I certainly understand them, but secretly I admit that this crossbreeding arouses an excitement of the literary type within me, such as one finds in Jack London’s stories about crossbreeding dogs with wolves, and theories of researchers into human evolution on the likelihood of mating between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, particularly in Greek mythological stories about human-animal hybrids.
It is not only the great snapdragon that has cultivated versions but also the poppy, buttercup, and cyclamen. They are larger and, in my opinion, unsightly and rougher than their wild matriarchs. The same thing is true of cultivated tulips that are treated with additional colors until they resemble plastic flowers in both shape and hue.
The Madonna lily that flowers in my garden is the mother of lilies that are not exclusively white but also pink and yellowish and have lost some of their lovely fragrance through this unnatural selection. All these flowers, to my mind, are comparable to ridiculous types of lap dogs and fancy cats—all kinds of Siamese cyclamens and Angora poppies. To my great relief, the cultivated squill has yet to be invented, but that will happen, as things do, and then we will have a short, fat squill that will flower by springtime in yellow and pink.
Either way, what was threatening this group of great snapdragons was the widening of the road leading to Jerusalem, preparations for which had just begun. Measurements had been taken, and the heavy machinery had already arrived. The great snapdragon does not have a bulb or tuber that can be transplanted from place to place, but luckily all this happened a little after the flowers began blossoming. I managed to gather up some seeds there, and that very autumn I sowed them in my garden.
As happens with most of my wildflowers, I expected the great snapdragon to sprout after the rain, to grow during winter, and to flower in spring. However, it did not sprout at all, not even one of its seeds. I wondered if something about the garden was bothering it. I even felt happy that, like the plants themselves, I had reserved a few seeds—think of it as a kind of sperm bank—that I stored in a jar and the plants stored under the soil.
Meanwhile, the snapdragon continued to behave strangely in my garden: winter passed, and not one seed sprouted. Spring passed and nothing happened. And then, the snapdragon seeds surprised me by sprouting precisely in the middle of summer! At the hottest and driest time of the year, fresh little green sprouts rose up in the garden. Sometimes seeds sprout out of season in the watered berms that circle my pomegranate and citrus trees, but these seeds sprouted in a completely dry area. At first I did not recognize them, but because I wanted to find out who these unfamiliar, unexpected guests were, I watered them with a watering can for two to three weeks until they grew a little more, and then I realized it was the snapdragon I had rescued from the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv highway.
The surprises did not stop here. Rather than flowering in April on stalks almost three feet high, my snapdragon flowered in January on very short stalks. I asked it the meaning of such behavior; the dragon neither snapped back at me nor roared an answer. I gathered the new seeds it produced and sowed them the following autumn. Since then my snapdragons sprout at the right time, and they blossom and roar as usual. It could be that they had been suffering from a little jet lag or were just overcome by a pleasant dizziness, the same way I suffered when I left Jerusalem and came to live here. Either way, if anyone is wondering what happened to the great snapdragon that once flowered along the verges of the highway leading to Jerusalem, not far from the moshav of Shoeva—well, today they flower in the Jezreel Valley, and all is well with them.