Jerusalem Botanical Gardens

This guide to the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens follows Michael Avishai, a boy who hid from soldiers in the woods of wartime Czechoslovakia and fell in love with trees, especially oaks. It traces his path from refugee to gardener to botanist, and to 1962, when Michael Zohary asked him to build a second botanical garden for Jerusalem on open ground at Givat Ram, prompting Avishai to empty his own private seed collection into the soil. He kept walking visitors through the grounds himself daily, well into his eighties, until a broken hip finally slowed him down.