It’s that time of year when the weather turns cooler and at long last the first light rains come down on Jerusalemites. It’s Sukkot, the Feast of Booths, when many eat and even sleep in palm-leaf covered huts in their back yards or balconies or in some cases on the sidewalks in front of their apartment buildings. One of autumn’s welcoming signs is the Squill Flower, or Khatsav (חצב) in Hebrew. It keeps its huge liquid-filled tubers dormant throughout the heat of summer. That way it can shoot up its dramatic spikes full of white star-like blossoms, often as tall as you are, when the annual drought is just about over. Without doubt it is one of nature’s more beautiful oddities, and that is what it is, both beautiful and odd.
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| That’s the Monastery of the Holy Cross you see in the distance |
Here is the Hebrew Wikipedia entry on "Khatsav." For fun you can try and put it through Google translate to see what the English looks like.
If you are a real botanist you will love this page, but even if you’re not, it has some fantastically detailed photos of the plant that include all its parts in every season of the year. In case the link just given doesn’t work for you, try searching the web for “Flora of Israel and Adjacent Areas" by Avinoam Danin and Ori Fragman-Sapir. The whole site is worth exploring, and if you are English-reading, start here and give it time to display over 3,000 items.
