Of Bedouins, Beetles, and Blooms 



//; the Judean desert, wildflowers roll out the red carpet to attract pollinators 

 by Bemd Heinrich 



The winter had been an unusual one. A 

 tenth of an inch of snow and rain — two 

 and a half times the average precipita- 

 tion — had fallen on the Judean desert. In 

 late March, two months of springtime 

 weather remained. The nights were pleas- 

 antly cool, the days warm, and the land re- 

 freshed with rains. Rain means life in this 

 small desert, which stretches from 1,200 

 feet below sea level in the east, where it 

 borders the Dead Sea, to 2,400 feet at the 

 water divide about twelve miles to the 

 west. Along this transect of bare and rocky 

 hills are such well-known biblical sites as 

 Jerusalem and Bethlehem, as well as 

 lesser-known towns such as Beit Fajjar, 

 Abu Dis, Ramallah, and Bir Zeit. 



Average precipitation is, however, not 

 what this land sees. Rainstorms are erratic 

 events, and despite this year's winter "ex- 

 cess," the desert would soon be dusty and 

 parched again. The eastern slopes of the 

 north-south-ranging hills lie in the rain 

 shadow of the moisture-laden winds com- 

 ing from the Mediterranean, another 

 twenty to twenty-five miles to the west. 

 Maps show numerous blue lines going 

 down to the Jordan River and the Dead 

 Sea. But they are not rivers. At least not 

 now. They are wadis, or washes. Most are 

 flood channels that this spring were dry 

 beds filled with rounded limestones. 



It was cool, but the sun shone through 

 the cloudy sky as my friend botanist 

 Avishai Shmida, of the Hebrew University 

 of Jerusalem, and I swung onto the paved 

 road in Jerusalem and started our rapid de- 

 scent east, down to the valley of the Jor- 

 dan. In the Mediterranean environment 

 near Jerusalem, Avi and his colleagues 

 have cataloged 1,586 species of wild 

 plants. Another 586 species were found in 

 the desert. 



Looking over the bare hills, I could 

 scarcely conceive that such diversity ex- 

 isted in a land that was already being in- 

 tensively used by humans thousands of 

 years before Christ. The rounded lime- 

 stone hills, terraced into horizontal strips 

 of soil a few yards wide, were yielding 

 grapes, olives, and vegetables in Roman 

 times and long before. 



52 Natural History 5/94 



