“I could at any time fill my hand with a bouquet of flowers as rich in colour, and as varied in form, as one could gather at midsummer in a well-kept garden at home”, wrote Henry Baker Tristram in an introduction to missionary Hannah Zeller’s Wild Flowers of The Holy Land (1876). “The chief interest of the plates will lie in the fact that they represent to us the very flowers on which our Lord’s eye must so often have rested in childhood”. Tristram wasn’t alone in coupling botanical admiration and biblical fantasy. In 1899, the American reverend Harvey B. Greene published Wild Flowers from Palestine, a limited edition containing real pressed flowers, which opens within a familiar colonial register: “Palestine is a land of ruins, but the flowers of its fields are as beautiful as when they were looked upon by the Master Himself”. A few decades on, the American Colony of Jerusalem would set out to capture the region’s floral abundance in a series of photographs titled “Wild Flowers of Palestine”. Having previously published The Plants of the Bible (1907) and The Jerusalem Catalogue of Palestine Plants (1912), the Colony’s photographers now advanced on their most ambitious endeavor of natural history yet: hundreds of stereographs of rockrose, lupin, bryony, mandrake, and scores of other species.

What began in 1881 as a small community of seventeen settlers, led by Chicago emigrants Anna and Horatio Spafford, quickly burgeoned into a utopian Christian project. By 1896, the American Colony of Jerusalem had approximately 150 residents, due to successive waves of millennialist immigration from Sweden and other nations, fueled by “Jerusalem Fever”. In need of more space, the Colony leased the palatial East Jerusalem home of Rabbah Daoud Amin Effendi al-Husseini, an Ottoman pasha, and set up a school that the Library of Congress describes as catering to “the children of well-to-do Muslim families, visiting diplomats, and a religious and ethnic mix of Jewish, Armenian, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Ethiopian and European youth”. The following decades saw farming cooperatives, artisan weavers, a tennis court, soup kitchens, watchmakers, a museum of natural history, a Dodge dealership, bakeries, a literary club, and photography studios — all under the sign of the American Colony. This cottage industriousness was coupled with heady theological experimentation. The American Colony Photographers were trained and led by Elijah Meyers, the Bombay-born, Oxford-educated son of a rabbi, who wore a green silk turban, was said to build his own cameras and batteries, got his start photographing the First Aliyah for Views of Palestine and its Jewish Colonies (1899), and fashioned himself as the reincarnation of the prophet Elijah.

Photography became a key component of the American Colony’s economic success. Major contributions have been credited in retrospect to: the Swedish trio Lewis Larsson, Erik Lind, and Olaf Lind — the latter of whom settled in Deir Yassin after his expulsion from the Colony, and supposedly sued the young Israeli state after the 1948 massacre — Palestinian Arab Hanna Safieh, who went on to become Public Information Officer in Mandatory Palestine (and the majority of whose pre-1948 photographs were stolen in the aftermath of the Six-Day War and never recovered), American brothers Furman and Norman Baldwin, Fareed Naseef, whose Lebanese mother was a member of the early settlement, and Eric Matson, who inherited the photographic archive after the dissolution of the American Colony. Along with their peers, they created hand-colored photographs, print series, thematic albums, stereographs, postcards, panoramas, lantern slides, and other images. Produced commercially to be sold to tourists as a form of “artifactual memory”, and for illustrating periodicals like National Geographic and Reader’s Digest, the images captured religious ceremonies, political affairs, the everyday activities of a diverse population, and, of course, the biodiversity of plant life in the region.

Many of the herbs and flowers depicted have long been foraged. Artist Jumana Manna describes how the practice continues into the present, as her relatives gather “khubeizeh (mallow), shomar (fennel), za’tar (thyme), ‘elt orhindbeh (dandelion), hummeid (bitter dock), loof (black calla), wara’ zquqiah or tutu (ivy-leaved cyclamen), [and] halayoon (wild asparagus)”. Yet foraging is not free from politics. Gundelia, for instance, known as akkoub in Arabic, is “particularly coveted by Palestinians”, writes journalist Shira Rubin, who have “considered it a vital part of their culinary, medicinal, and cultural traditions for generations.” Since 2005, however, akkoub has joined za’atar (from 1977) on a protected species list under Israeli law, which declared an all-out ban on their foraging. Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah describes how more than 750 on-the-spot fines were issued between 2010 and 2016 for gathering or possessing the herbs, which, as Israeli botanist Nativ Dudai notes, face a far greater threat from urban development and industrial agriculture than from domestic foragers, who have been interrogated and arrested as well as fined. In 2020 — after years of pressure from Adalah (a legal resource center for Arab rights in Israel), Eghbariah, and others, who argued that the policy lacked a sound ecological justification — the all-out ban was softened to allow for personal consumption, though arrests continue on an inconsistent basis.

For the legacy of the American Colony’s wildflower images in the context of contemporary political ecology, see Alaa Abu Asad’s photo essay “Wild Flowers Plants of Palestine”, in which he views the photographs as “deliberately focused on empty swaths of the land ignoring any cultural existence”. For a recent film about the state of Palestinian foraging, we recommend Jumana Manna’s Foragers (2022). For further images by the American Colony of Jerusalem, see our post “Photographs of Life in Palestine (ca. 1896–1919)”.