Nahal Masa’ad is located 5-6 km east of our kibbutz; we find it funny and curious that they claim it was discovered in 1983 by the ‘Green Patrol’, because members of our kibbutz in the 1960’s celebrated the beautiful and unexpected flowering of the almost blindingly white narcissuses during a few weeks of December and January. It is a good place for a picnic.
Nahal Masa’ad flows into Nahal Revivim, the slopes are located about 500 meter above sea level.
Walking up the slopes we saw pockets of white color; for desert dwellers, a.k.a. negevists, it is exceptional to have another color than the usual yellowish desert color.
I cannot stop to take photos. Today there were still pools of water from the rain two weeks ago.
Today it was quite windy, but last year we experienced many aggressive flies which we assumed aimed at pollinating the flowers. It is said that the narcissus has a wonderful fragrance that attracts insects for pollination; we did not find the flower to have any smell at all; no, we have not had corona having been fully vaccinated and behaving responsibly with masks in public.
There is an Israeli children’s book by Levin Kipnis ‘The King of the Swamp’ that tells the legend about the king of frogs that fell ill and was looking for a medicine; the only plant ready to go into the dirty swamp, was the white narcissus. The king of frogs was cured and in gratitude he awarded the narcissus the yellow crown and the named it ‘King of the Swamp’.
It seems contradictory to call a desert flower ‘King of the Swamp’ but it is true that the narcissus will grow only in a humid ground on the slopes of hills or in cracks in rocks of hard chalk that will catch as much humidity as possible; the water will be absorbed by the narcissus’s bulbs to keep it safe underground for the period of dormancy and thus protected against heat, drought or cold. Another protective mechanism is that the bulb is poisonous for humans; so, it is interesting that bulbs have been found with mummies from ancient Egypt; what was the purpose?
History and evolution:
The Narcissus is thought to have originated some 20 million years ago on the Iberian Peninsula and spread all around the Mediterranean Basin; when climate change caused the European glaciers to melt, it became too hot and too dry in Israel, so the isolated clusters of narcissus as we see here in Nahal Masa’ad are leftovers of what was once much more widespread.
Apparently, the name ‘narcissus’ was coined by the Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) from Greek meaning intoxicating (narcosis). Over generations the flower has been attributed medical properties and widely used in folk-medicines.
In summary: the narcissus is a geophyte with a storage bulb, it is perennial or long-lived (in gardens it can live 4-6 years); dominant in the summer and actively flowering in the winter about two weeks after the first rain; it is bisexual and very beautiful very white with a contrasting yellow crown.
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