These images, which make up the series Wild Flowers of Palestine, were captured between 1900 and 1920 by photographers from the American Colony of Jerusalem, a utopian Christian society established in the 1880s. Rendered in luminous black and white and preserved on glass plates, they show amaryllis bulbs, rockrose, mandrake and more in striking detail. The context, as noted by the Public Domain Review where the pictures are hosted, is complicated: for one thing, the cultural importance of these plants to Palestinians is not reflected here. But the photographs do show that, contrary to former Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol’s assertion in 1969 that “we made the desert bloom”, the region was in flower long before.
