Featured on PDR in the collection The American Colony of Jerusalem’s “Wild Flowers of Palestine” (ca. 1900–20)

“I could at any time fill my hand with a bouquet of flowers as rich in colour, and as varied in form, as one could gather at midsummer in a well-kept garden at home”, wrote Henry Baker Tristram in an introduction to missionary Hannah Zeller’s Wild Flowers of The Holy Land (1876). “The chief interest of the plates will lie in the fact that they represent to us the very flowers on which our Lord’s eye must so often have rested in childhood”. Tristram wasn’t alone in coupling botanical admiration and biblical fantasy. In 1899, the American reverend Harvey B. Greene published Wild Flowers from Palestine, a limited edition containing real pressed flowers, which opens within a familiar colonial register: “Palestine is a land of…