April is my favorite month for wildflowers in Palestine. Perhaps I’m being unfair to all the autumn and winter blossoms, but for me, no other flower competes with the beauty of the Anatolian Orchid – which you can find in bloom now. These days when I go out hunting for wild orchids, I’m lucky to find a patch with two or three Anatolians. Imagine my surprise and delight at finding a hillside with hundreds and hundreds of them. I sat there looking at their beauty and wondered that long ago, our hills were covered by hundreds of thousands of wildflowers. Certainly, even in my short lifetime, Palestine’s natural wildflowers that used to cover the hills like carpets have in many places all but disappeared.
This month there is a very special exhibition at the Ramallah Municipality as part of the Nwar Nisan Festival that features over 40 botanic paintings of the wildflowers of Palestine. What a wonderful opportunity to see the stunning beauty of our flora close up and with great detail.
As I do every month, I implore people to think of nature and our responsibility to care for it. We have done so much harm already. And that harm is also done to our own bodies. For if the environment is not healthy – rich in biodiversity and free from pollution and destruction –then we surely cannot continue to live in such an environment!