Welcome to the first blog from our newest scholar, Brandon, who arrived at the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens at the beginning of January, having just graduated from Longwood Gardens …

Last Thursday (18 January 2018), Scientific Director Dr Ori Fragman-Sapir took the scholars on an excursion to see wild Narcissus tazetta while collecting leaf samples to be sent to the UK for research purposes.

narcissus tazetta by Brandon Geroge

The first site we visited was on steep rocky slopes of limestone just outside the city of Dimona in the Southern District of the Negev desert.  It’s an environment that seems so inhospitable for most plants to grow, I was pleasantly surprised to find isolated pockets of moist soil in the rocks, and it is here where the Narcissus were found thriving and at peak bloom in some cases.

After collecting samples, we drove south to a remote location off route 204. We walked along a low-lying area where a dry stream bed was present. I knew based on what we found at the previous site that this would be the perfect micro-climate to find the bulbs.

Here we found a mass of them and because of the sheltered site, the gorgeous fragrance wafted around us as we approached them. Having only seen Narcissus in cultivated gardens where I come from in the U.S.A, this trip gave me a better understanding of how this Genus grows in its endemic locations, while also realizing the incredible feat of dormancy this species can tolerate.