Botanical Garden on Mount Scopus

Brief information

On Mount Scopus, the plants of Israel are gathered as if different parts of the country had been shifted onto a single university campus. In a garden covering more than 25 dunams, over 950 species grow — about 40% of Israel’s wild flora. Its point is not the rare names on labels, but the fact that endemic plants are cultivated in conditions close to their natural habitats: desert, coastal, aquatic, forest, or garden environments.

The garden was established in 1931 at the Hebrew University. The site already had another “living” history: Israel’s first zoological garden of biblical animals was located here. The place can therefore be read as a territory where university science gradually shifted its focus from displaying animals to preserving plants and their natural relationships.

What to Notice First

It makes sense to compare not individual plants, but the environments arranged for them. Within one garden, Mediterranean forests and shrublands, semi-deserts, coastal sand dunes, the Negev Desert, bodies of water, and fruit orchards are identified. These zones show that the collection is built not as an even row of flower beds, but as a map of habitats: a plant matters together with its soil, moisture, season, and neighbors.

A separate layer of the garden is the Cave of Nicanor. Archaeological excavations found here the tomb of Nicanor of Alexandria, associated with the gates of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Later, Leon Pinsker and Menachem Ussishkin were buried in the same cave. This detail changes the way one sees the garden: among the botanical zones there is not a decorative ruin, but a place where the natural collection intersects with an ancient burial site and the unfinished idea of a national pantheon.