What the Garden Remembers
It is the last week of September and Miriam Zahavi is in a market she has been visiting since childhood, though the market has moved twice and the city around it has changed almost beyond recognition in the decades between her first visit and this one. The Carmel Market in Tel Aviv — the Shuk HaCarmel, running for several hundred metres through the heart of the city from Allenby Street toward King George — is not primarily a flower market. It is a market for everything: vegetables and spices and olives and cheeses and street food and housewares and clothing and the particular quality of compressed urban noise that Tel Aviv produces in concentrated commercial spaces. But in the days before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, the flower stalls at the market’s southern end expand, and the flowers they carry shift from the year-round cut-flower trade to something more specifically seasonal.
Zahavi is buying pomegranate branches. The pomegranate does not arrive easily in the florist’s vocabulary — it is not a flower in the conventional sense, and its branches, cut when the fruit is still on the stem in September and October, are not something that the mainstream European or American cut-flower market handles. She sources them from a grower she has known for fifteen years, in the agricultural country of the northern Negev, where pomegranate orchards have been cultivated since the Bronze Age and where the variety she prefers — large-fruited, deeply coloured, with branches that retain the fruit long after cutting — is maintained by a family that has been growing pomegranates on the same ground for four generations. The branches will form the structural element of the Rosh Hashanah arrangements she makes each year for a synagogue in the Rothschild Boulevard neighbourhood and for a small number of private clients who have been following her work long enough to trust her choices.
Zahavi trained as a florist in London, where she worked for fifteen years before returning to Tel Aviv. She describes her practice as being about what she calls the garden of the text — the idea, which runs through her reading of Jewish liturgical and legal literature, that the natural world and its materials are not incidental to Jewish observance but central to it, that the flowers and plants that appear in the biblical and rabbinic traditions are there because the people who wrote those texts lived close enough to specific landscapes to think with specific plants, and that recovering this specificity is both an aesthetic and a religious project.
She is not the only person making this argument. But she makes it through pomegranate branches and myrtle and willow and fragrant grasses, which is more convincing than making it in words alone.
The Jewish calendar runs through the year from Rosh Hashanah in autumn through Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Hanukkah, Purim, Passover, and Shavuot, each festival carrying its own associations with the natural world, its own plants and flowers and agricultural seasons, its own argument about the relationship between human beings and the land that sustains them. We traced seven flowers and plants across this calendar — and the stories that make each of them say something specific to the occasion it serves.
01 — The Pomegranate
Punica granatum — the northern Negev, Israel / Valencia, Spain
The pomegranate’s symbolic presence in the Jewish tradition is so extensive and so ancient that tracing it to a source is less useful than noting its ubiquity. It appears in the description of the Promised Land as one of the seven species for which the land of Israel is praised. It appears in the decorative programme of Solomon’s Temple, where pomegranates in bronze were cast onto the capitals of the twin pillars at the entrance. It appears in the Song of Songs, where the beloved’s temples are compared to a slice of pomegranate behind her veil. It appears in the design of the priestly garments described in Exodus, where pomegranates of blue, purple, and scarlet alternated with golden bells on the hem of the High Priest’s robe. It appears in the ornamentation of the Torah mantle, the fabric covering of the Torah scroll, where embroidered pomegranates are among the most ancient and persistent decorative motifs.
The Rosh Hashanah connection is specific and practical. The pomegranate is one of the traditional simanim — symbolic foods eaten on the New Year in the hope that the year will be similarly blessed. The traditional explanation for its inclusion is that the pomegranate contains 613 seeds, corresponding to the 613 commandments of the Torah — a piece of folk numerology that botanical examination does not always confirm but that expresses something true about the fruit’s character: abundance, the sense of a contained multiplicity, the idea that what looks like a single object contains, when opened, an entire world of separate things. To eat pomegranate on Rosh Hashanah is to eat the aspiration toward fullness — fullness of mitzvot, of good deeds, of the life that the new year might contain.
The pomegranate branch — anavim, or more properly the branch of rimon — that Miriam Zahavi places in synagogue arrangements at Rosh Hashanah carries all of this in a different form: not the edible fruit but the visual presence of the fruit on the branch, the deep red of the ripe pomegranate against the dark green of the leaf, the architectural quality of the branch itself with its small, hard fruit hanging from the points where the branch divides. It is one of the most graphically specific of all the festival flowers, and among the most immediately legible in its cultural context.
The commercial cultivation of pomegranates in Israel is centred in the northern Negev and the Jordan Valley, with smaller operations in the Golan Heights and the Galilee. The variety that Zahavi sources — large-fruited, with a skin that deepens from orange to deep red through the autumn ripening — is one of several traditional varieties maintained by specialist growers alongside the commercial varieties bred for the juice and fresh fruit markets. The branches are cut in September, before the fruit reaches full harvest ripeness, so that the fruit will hold on the stem through the weeks of Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot. The timing of the cut — like Karen Donahue’s lily forcing schedule in Oregon, like Ramesh Patel’s assessment of marigold density in Ahmedabad — is a form of knowledge that accumulates through years of practice and cannot be transferred by instruction.
02 — The Four Species
Etrog, Lulav, Hadassah, Aravah — the Sukkot four: citron, palm, myrtle, willow
The arba minim — the four species — are the most precisely specified plant materials in the Jewish festival tradition, and they belong entirely to Sukkot, the seven-day autumn harvest festival that begins five days after Yom Kippur. The Torah commands, in Leviticus 23:40, that on the first day of Sukkot the Israelites shall take “the fruit of a beautiful tree, branches of palm trees, boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook” and rejoice before God. The rabbinic tradition identified these four species as the etrog (citron), the lulav (palm branch), the hadassah (myrtle), and the aravah (willow), and developed over centuries of legal discussion a body of specification for each species that is, by any measure, among the most detailed botanical jurisprudence in any religious tradition.
The etrog — Citrus medica, the citron, the ancestor of the lemon and most other citrus fruits — is the plant around which the greatest elaboration has accumulated. A valid etrog must be grown without grafting onto other citrus rootstock; must be unblemished at the tip (the pitam, the remnant of the flower); must be of a specific minimum size; must not have been grown on land stolen or otherwise improperly acquired; and must, in the most demanding interpretations, be beautiful — the Hebrew term hadar used in the Leviticus verse is translated variously as “beautiful,” “splendid,” “citrus,” and “that which remains on its tree from year to year,” and the rabbinic discussion of what hadar requires occupies significant portions of the Talmudic tractate Sukkah. An etrog of exceptional beauty — perfectly proportioned, deeply yellow, its surface unmarked, its fragrance strong — can command prices that make the tulip mania of 1637 look measured: in the 19th century, Hasidic communities in Eastern Europe reportedly paid the equivalent of a year’s income for a particularly fine specimen.
The lulav — the palm branch — must be straight, its spine unbroken, its leaves unspread. The hadassah — the myrtle — must have three leaves emerging from each node of the branch in a specific triple-leaf pattern; a myrtle with only two leaves at each node, or more than three, does not meet the specification. The aravah — the willow — must have smooth-edged, elongated leaves, without the serrations that distinguish other willow species from the correct type. The four species are bound together in a specific arrangement — the three myrtle branches and two willow branches attached to the sides of the palm spine, the etrog held separately in the left hand — and waved in the six directions (north, south, east, west, up, down) as part of the Sukkot liturgy.
The commerce of the four species is one of the more specialised of all festival flower trades. Etrogim — the plural of etrog — are grown in several regions, the most highly prized being those from Calabria in southern Italy, from the Yanover valley in Israel, and from Morocco; connoisseurs distinguish between them by the texture and colour of the skin, the shape of the pitam, and the intensity of the fragrance. The Calabrian etrog has been exported to Jewish communities across Europe for centuries; the trade that sustained it is one of the longer-running examples of a specialty agricultural product created entirely by religious specification and maintained by a community’s willingness to pay for precision.
The lulav, hadassah, and aravah are traded as a set — available in Jewish communities worldwide in the weeks before Sukkot, arriving in pre-assembled bundles from Israel, where most of the commercial production is concentrated. The myrtle used in the four species is Myrtus communis, the common myrtle of the Mediterranean basin, which has its own independent history in the Jewish flower tradition as a fragrant herb carried and smelled on Shabbat evenings and used to decorate brides and grooms in some Sephardic traditions. The willow is Salix alba or related species from Israeli stream and river habitats. The specification of stream-bank origin in the Leviticus verse — “willows of the brook” — has been discussed for centuries in terms of whether the botanical requirement is for a species typically found by streams or for branches actually growing beside water. Most authorities accept the former.
03 — The Rose of Sharon
Rosa / Crocus / Tulipa — the Song of Songs and its botanical uncertainty
“I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.” The verse from the Song of Songs — the Biblical book whose explicit sensuality has generated two and a half millennia of allegorical interpretation aimed at establishing that it means something other than what it appears to mean — contains one of the most debated botanical identifications in scriptural scholarship, and the rose of Sharon is the centre of the debate.
The flower identified in English translation as the “rose of Sharon” is, in the Hebrew original, havatzelet — a word of uncertain botanical meaning. It has been identified, by various translators and commentators over the centuries, as the crocus, the meadow saffron, the tulip, the narcissus, the asphodel, and the rose. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible produced in Alexandria in the third century BCE, translated havatzelet as anthos — simply “flower.” The Vulgate, Jerome’s Latin translation of the 4th century CE, used flos campi — “flower of the field.” Neither was committing to a species.
The modern scholarly consensus, in so far as one exists, leans toward the crocus or the tulip as the most likely candidates — both grow wild in the Sharon plain, the coastal strip between the Carmel range and the Yarkon River, and both flower in early spring at the period when the Song of Songs situates its pastoral world. The red tulip, Tulipa sharonensis, is endemic to this specific region; a species evolved for and named after the landscape the text describes, it is a reasonable candidate for the flower a poet writing in this landscape would have reached for as an image of beauty. The fact that the tulip had not yet been identified as such by European botanical science when the most influential Western translations were made — the rose being the obvious candidate for a European translator reaching for the most beautiful flower available — may explain the persistence of the rose identification rather than its accuracy.
The rose of Sharon as a concept has, in any case, achieved an independence from its botanical origin that makes the identification question partly moot. It has been used as a given name, as a place name, as a title for theological works, as a term of endearment across several centuries of English literature, and as a floral synonym for the beloved in enough contexts that it functions now as a cultural reference regardless of what species it originally denoted. Miriam Zahavi, who has strong opinions on this subject, uses the wild red tulip of the Sharon plain in her spring arrangements — the Tulipa sharonensis grown from bulbs by a specialist in the Samaria foothills — and considers this the most faithful available interpretation of the text. She may be right. She is certainly making the more interesting argument.
04 — The Myrtle
Myrtus communis — the Galilee / Andalusia, Spain / the Italian Riviera
The myrtle appears in the four species of Sukkot as the hadassah, where it serves the practical function of providing fragrant green boughs for the lulav bundle. But its significance in the Jewish tradition extends well beyond this specific festival use, and its history in the broader Semitic world is among the richest of any plant in the region.
Hadassah is also, significantly, the Hebrew name of Esther — the Jewish queen of Persia whose story is told in the Book of Esther and whose deliverance of the Jewish people from the genocidal plot of Haman is commemorated at Purim. The name Hadassah, like the plant it refers to, carries connotations of fragrance, hiddenness, and a beauty that is present but not immediately obvious: the myrtle is an evergreen shrub whose flowers are small and white and easily overlooked, whose leaves are dark and unremarkable in appearance, but which produces, when the leaf is crushed or when the evening air is warm and still, a fragrance that announces the plant’s presence from a distance. Esther, in the narrative, hides her Jewish identity at the Persian court — she is present but not immediately seen for what she is — until the moment when concealment becomes impossible and she reveals herself to save her people. The connection between the name and the character is not incidental.
The myrtle is used in Jewish tradition in several additional contexts that extend its significance through the year. At a traditional Jewish wedding, it is customary in many Sephardic and some Ashkenazi communities to place a sprig of myrtle in the buttonhole of the groom and in the bouquet of the bride — the fragrance understood as a blessing, the evergreen leaves as a symbol of the durability being invoked. At the end of Shabbat, in the Havdalah ceremony that marks the transition from the sacred day to the ordinary week, the traditional practice of smelling a fragrant spice — besamim — is fulfilled in many communities with a bound bunch of myrtle branches, whose fragrance when the leaves are gently crushed is among the most immediate and specific of all the ritual plant experiences in the Jewish calendar. The Havdalah myrtle is held, its fragrance breathed, and returned to its box until the following Saturday night.
The commercial cultivation of myrtle for the Jewish ritual market is centred in Israel, particularly in the Galilee, where Myrtus communis grows wild in Mediterranean scrub vegetation and where cultivated groves supply the Sukkot four species market. Myrtle is also grown in Andalusia and along the Italian Riviera, where the climate is similarly suitable and where the plant has been used in local tradition — the Moors of al-Andalus used myrtle extensively in garden design, and the tradition persists in some of the historic gardens of Granada and Seville — alongside its specifically Jewish ritual use.
05 — The Anemone
Anemone coronaria — the Galilee, Israel / the coastal plain
The anemone appears in this series for the third time — it has appeared in the Easter guide and the Valentine’s Day guide — but its Jewish calendar associations are distinct from both of those appearances and are, in some respects, the most deeply rooted of any flower in any of the guides in this series.
Anemone coronaria is not a specifically Jewish festival flower in the way that the etrog is, or the pomegranate, or the myrtle. It has no prescribed festival role; it does not appear in the legal literature as a required material for any observance; it is not associated with a specific holiday in the way that the lily is associated with Easter or the marigold with Diwali. What it is, instead, is the wildflower of the Israeli spring — blazing in its millions across the Galilee and the Negev and the Sharon plain from January through March, the most visually spectacular expression of the land itself in its season of most visible beauty — and it is associated, through this ubiquity, with the festival that has the deepest and most specific relationship with the land: Passover.
The Passover Haggadah, the liturgical text read at the Seder table on the first night of Passover, contains a passage from the Song of Songs that has been associated since the medieval period with the spring landscape of the land of Israel: “For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.” The flowers that appear on the earth in this verse — ha-nitzanim in the Hebrew, the blossoms, the things that bud and break open — are, in the Israeli spring, most visibly and most dramatically the anemones. The red fields of the Galilee in February and March, visible from the roads that connect the ancient sites of the north, are among the most immediate natural expressions of the verse’s meaning available to anyone who is in Israel at Passover time.
The Israeli national anemone reserve around Kibbutz Nir Am in the northwestern Negev has become, over the past thirty years, a site of significant public visitation in the weeks when the anemone is at its peak — a pilgrimage of secular as much as religious character, combining the desire to see a natural spectacle with something that is harder to name but that is, in the Israeli context, connected to the idea of the land itself as a participant in the Jewish calendar. The anemone season, which varies by year depending on rainfall, is tracked by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and reported in the national press with a level of public interest that has no equivalent in most other countries for a wildflower bloom.
Miriam Zahavi uses anemones in her Passover arrangements, sourcing them from growers in the central coastal plain who cultivate Anemone coronaria for the cut-flower market alongside the Italian and Dutch commercial crop that supplies the rest of the year. She pairs them, typically, with branches of almond blossom — the almond being the first tree to flower in Israel each year, its white blossoms appearing in January and February and carrying their own deep resonance in the Jewish calendar: the almond branch appears in the Book of Numbers as the staff of Aaron that miraculously blooms overnight, a sign of divine election; it appears in the Book of Jeremiah as the first image in a series of divine visions, paired with a wordplay on the Hebrew words for “almond” (shaked) and “watching” (shoked) that is one of the more elegant puns in prophetic literature. The arrangement of anemone and almond blossom that Zahavi places on the Seder table is not described in any legal text. It is an interpretation — of the season, of the landscape, of the texts that were written in this specific place about these specific plants.
06 — The Wheat and the Barley
Triticum and Hordeum — the Jezreel Valley / the Shephelah
The wheat and the barley are not flowers. They are the founding agricultural reality of the Jewish calendar — the crops around whose planting, growth, and harvest the festival cycle was originally organised — and they appear in this guide because their presence in the Jewish festival tradition is so structurally significant that omitting them in favour of more conventionally floral entries would be a distortion of what the tradition is actually doing.
The omer — the measure of barley — is at the centre of one of the most unusual counting practices in the Jewish calendar. Beginning on the second night of Passover, the Torah commands the counting of forty-nine days — seven complete weeks — to the fiftieth day, which is the festival of Shavuot. The sefirat ha’omer, the counting of the omer, runs from the barley harvest (which begins around Passover in the Israeli agricultural calendar) to the wheat harvest (which is complete around Shavuot seven weeks later). The counting is not abstract. It is timed to the grain harvest: the forty-nine days between the first sickle stroke of the barley and the completion of the wheat harvest, marked each evening with a blessing and a number, is a liturgical calendar that is also, in its original agricultural context, a farmer’s calendar. The two are the same thing.
Shavuot — the fiftieth day, the festival of weeks — is the harvest festival par excellence, and its floral tradition is among the most visually distinctive in the Jewish calendar. The custom of decorating synagogues with greenery and flowers for Shavuot is ancient and widespread, though its specific origins are disputed: the Talmud records that the Temple in Jerusalem was decorated with bikurim — first fruits — at the time of Shavuot, and some authorities connect the synagogue decoration practice to this Temple custom. Others connect it to the tradition that Mount Sinai bloomed with flowers when the Torah was given — that the revelation at Sinai was accompanied by a flowering of the land, so that the anniversary of that revelation should be marked with flowers in its memory.
The flowers used for Shavuot decoration in contemporary practice vary by community and geography. In Israel, the Shavuot arrangements favoured by many synagogues and homes emphasise white flowers — roses, lilies, irises — whose colour connects to the purity of the Torah and to the white of the counting, and seasonal greenery, particularly the branches of deciduous trees that are in full leaf by early June when Shavuot falls. In Ashkenazi communities in the diaspora, where the custom of synagogue decoration was maintained through centuries of European Jewish life, the flowers of Shavuot were those available in the local spring — peonies in northern European communities, roses in the warmer south, whatever was in bloom in the week of the festival.
The barley and wheat themselves appear as decorative materials in some Israeli Shavuot arrangements, their ripening heads providing a visual connection to the harvest context that the festival carries. The combination of white flowers and grain heads — purity and abundance, the Torah and the land that produces the food that makes Torah study possible — is the aesthetic statement that the better Shavuot arrangements are reaching for.
07 — The Hanukkah Flower
Matthiola incana — a note on absence, and on what winter requires
Hanukkah — the Festival of Lights, observed for eight nights in December, commemorating the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem and the miracle of oil that burned for eight days when only one day’s supply remained — is the Jewish festival that has the least specific flower tradition and the most to say about what that absence means.
The absence is partly seasonal. Hanukkah falls in the Hebrew month of Kislev, typically in December, when the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean landscapes that gave the Jewish festival calendar its original agricultural logic are at their most dormant. The olive harvest, which provides the oil whose miracle the festival celebrates, is complete; the almond trees have not yet bloomed; the anemones have not yet come; the pomegranates are long past. Hanukkah falls in the gap, the dark of the year, when there is no agricultural event to mark and no obvious plant material to carry.
This is not, in the Jewish tradition, a problem to be solved. It is a theological condition to be inhabited. The festival is about making light in darkness — the oil that should not have been enough, burning beyond its expected duration, providing light for the Temple menorah through the eight days required for new oil to be prepared. The symbol of the festival is not a flower but a flame: the chanukiah, the eight-branched candelabra whose lights are kindled each evening and placed in the window or the doorway, visible from outside, announcing that in this house the lights are burning. The light is the offering. The flower is, for once, beside the point.
And yet Miriam Zahavi, who does not like to leave her clients without flowers for any occasion, has over the years developed a Hanukkah arrangement that she considers an honest response to the season. It uses Matthiola incana — the stock, the winter gillyflower, one of the few cut flowers with a fragrance comparable in intensity to the summer blooms, produced in the winter months in the greenhouses of the Negev and available in Tel Aviv’s markets from October through March. It uses the branches of the olive tree — not flowering, not fruiting, but carrying the grey-green of the leaf and the gnarled texture of the branch that is the olive’s year-round character. And it uses the pomegranate, now in its dried winter form, the fruit shrunken but retaining its colour, the seeds visible where the skin has split, the red deepened to a dark that is closer to the colour of old blood than fresh fruit.
The arrangement says, in Zahavi’s reading: it is winter. The land is resting. We are making light in the dark, as we always do, with the materials available to us. We are not pretending that it is spring. We are not importing the symbols of another season into this one. We are working with what the season actually offers, which is the olive branch, the dried pomegranate, the fragrant stock, and the eight flames in the window.
This is, she says, a more honest form of decoration than filling the winter synagogue with forced tulips from a Dutch greenhouse. She acknowledges that her clients do not always agree.
Coda
It is the evening of Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year — and the synagogue is empty of flowers. This is deliberate. Yom Kippur’s laws of abstention include, in most traditional practice, the prohibition of washing, of wearing leather shoes, of anointing with oil, of marital relations: the body’s ordinary comforts are set aside for a day of fasting and prayer that strips the observant Jew back to something more fundamental than the year’s accretions. Flowers, in most synagogue traditions, are removed from the sanctuary for Yom Kippur. Their fragrance would be a comfort. Their beauty would be a distraction. The day does not want them.
Miriam Zahavi, who closes her studio for Yom Kippur and does not work on the day, says that the absence of flowers on that one day makes the return of flowers at Sukkot — five days later, the festival of joy, the festival of the harvest — more meaningful than any arrangement she could devise in advance. The contrast is the argument: you notice what was missing when it returns. You understand why it is back when you have briefly known what it was like without it.
The Jewish calendar makes this argument annually and specifically, cycling through the year in a pattern that was designed, in its original agricultural context, to keep the community in contact with the land — with what the land was doing, what it was producing, what it required from the people who lived on it and what it gave in return. The flowers of the festivals are not decorative choices. They are markers of time as the land itself keeps it: the pomegranate in autumn, the olive branch in winter, the anemone and almond in spring, the wheat and the grain heads at the summer harvest. The land’s calendar and the liturgical calendar are, in the Jewish tradition, not two different systems running in parallel. They are one system, read from two different directions.
A landscape scholar named Daniel Orenstein, who teaches environmental studies at the Technion in Haifa and who has spent twenty years studying the relationship between the Jewish festival cycle and the ecology of the land of Israel, describes the festival flowers as “a curriculum that the land is teaching.” Each species that appears at a specific festival — etrog at Sukkot, anemone in the Passover spring, barley and wheat across the omer — is a lesson about what this land does at this time of year, offered in a form that is beautiful enough to be remembered.
The curriculum has been running for approximately three thousand years. The land, which predates the curriculum by somewhat longer, continues to teach it with undiminished accuracy. The anemones will bloom in January. The almond will flower in February. The barley will ripen in April. The pomegranates will redden in September. None of this requires human management. It requires only, as the Song of Songs instructs and as Miriam Zahavi has built her professional life around demonstrating, that someone pay attention.
Hayden Blest recommends
Shuk HaCarmel, Tel Aviv — the Carmel Market in the days before Rosh Hashanah is among the most concentrated sensory experiences of the Jewish festival season available to visitors: pomegranate branches, etrog vendors, fragrant myrtle bundles, and the particular energy of a city preparing for the New Year simultaneously in its secular and religious registers. Most directly accessed from the Allenby Street end of the market, early morning.
Etrog Orchards, Calabria, Italy — the Calabrian etrog, grown in the area around Diamante on the Tyrrhenian coast, has supplied Jewish communities in Europe for several centuries. Some growers offer orchard visits in September and October when the fruit is being assessed for ritual quality; contact the Calabria citrus consortium for participating growers. calabriaetrog.it
Anemone Bloom, Kibbutz Nir Am, Negev — the anemone reserve in the northwestern Negev is at its most spectacular between mid-January and early March, depending on winter rainfall; the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel publishes a current bloom forecast throughout the season. spni.org.il
Miriam Zahavi Studio, Tel Aviv — Zahavi’s studio in the Florentin neighbourhood accepts commissions for festival arrangements throughout the Jewish calendar year; her Sukkot four species arrangements and Passover Seder table compositions are her best-known work. Commissions for Rosh Hashanah must be placed by late August. By appointment only.