الحنون

In Palestine this flower is الحنون — hannun — or دحنون, dahnun. It is also زهرة النساء, the women's flower, and زهرة الدم, the blood flower. The formal Arabic name, شقائق النعمان, is the one that reaches the dictionaries. Hannun is the one people say (حمزة العقرباوي, ألترا فلسطين).

It is not a poppy. Anemone coronaria belongs to Ranunculaceae, the buttercup family; the true poppies of Palestine, Papaver rhoeas and its relatives, sit in Papaveraceae. English-language writing conflates them almost universally. The hannun has broad rounded petals and a dense violet-black centre ringed in white, with finely divided leaves gathered at the base. A poppy has four crumpled petals on a bristly stem and leaves a pepper-pot capsule when the petals drop; the hannun leaves a cottony seed head.

The species occurs in white, pink, purple and yellow across the Levant. In Palestine the deep scarlet form dominates, and it is the one carrying everything else on this page.

The hannun flowers from December into April and marks the turn of the agricultural year. Palestinian farmers used it to close the grain-sowing window:

طلع النرجس والحنون
ظبّ بذارك يا مجنون

The narcissus and the hannun are up — put your seed away, you fool. A working instruction, not a metaphor: once these two are flowering it is too late to sow (ألترا فلسطين).

A single flower lasts one to two weeks. The stem is slender, the petals thin, and the warming sun finishes them. What persists is the colony. The hannun does not grow alone — it seeds itself in dense stands across wide ground, and it favours الأرض البور, fallow land, rain-soaked and unworked. Where a field goes unfarmed for a season, the hannun takes it.

That is worth sitting with. In Palestine, land goes unfarmed for reasons — and the flower that floods into it is the same one people associate with their dead.

Every account of where شقائق النعمان comes from arrives in the same place by a different road.

The most repeated attaches it to al-Nu'man ibn al-Mundhir, the Lakhmid king of al-Hira, who saw the flower, loved it, and ordered it protected and planted around his palace at al-Khawarnaq. In a second telling it came up on his grave after the Persian king had him killed. In a third, his sisters — شقيقات, the same root as shaqa'iq — wept over that grave until the red flower grew, and it took their name.

Arabic points the same way on its own. النعمان is one of the Arabic words for blood, which makes this flower blood's sibling in colour. A separate reading traces Nu'man to nahman, from the Syriac نحم — to rise from the dead.

Older than any of it: the blood of Adonis in Phoenician myth, the scattered blood of Ba'al in Canaanite. This flower was carrying murder and resurrection in this soil before there was a language here to write either down.

Which settles something. The link between this flower, blood and the dead is not a recent political reading laid over an older pastoral symbol. It is the oldest layer there is, running back through Arabic into the Canaanite and Phoenician substrate of the same ground (ألترا فلسطين).

The hannun runs through Palestinian speech and song. A red-cheeked face is «وجهه أحمر مثل الحنون». In the dal'ouna, sung at weddings and gatherings, the flower stands in for the beloved and for longing:

قلبي مزهر مثل الشقايق
بالله اسمعي كلامي وارحمونا

My heart is in flower like the anemones — for God's sake hear me out and have mercy. Other verses set the beloved's cheek beside the wild hannun, or wish it would come up in the orchards (ألترا فلسطين).

It is the flower of the martyrs. Red petals, black centre, white ring, green stem — the four colours of the Palestinian flag, assembled by the plant itself, coming out of the ground with nobody arranging it. Palestinians read it as blood that watered the land, and it recurs constantly in poetry, in tatreez, in painting, on walls.

Given Register 03, this is not a flag borrowed by a flower. It is the oldest meaning the plant has, arriving at its most recent name.

The hannun is not eaten. Like much of the buttercup family it carries protoanemonin, which blisters skin and inflames the mouth and gut. It has no place in the Palestinian wild-food tradition — which is otherwise among the richest in the Mediterranean, and which is the subject of the register below.

It does have a place in Arabic pharmacology. Dawud al-Antaki catalogued its uses at length in his Tadhkira, the seventeenth-century Arabic medical compendium. The plants of this region were being described, named and classified in Arabic for centuries before European botany arrived to rename them in Latin (ألترا فلسطين).

The hannun appears on a protected-plants list that Israeli authorities enforce inside present-day Israel and extend, through the Civil Administration under military command, into the occupied West Bank. Picking it is nominally an offence.

It is worth being exact about what kind of instrument that is, because the flat phrase "Israeli law" does real work in obscuring it. Under the Hague Regulations of 1907, an occupying power must respect "the laws in force in the country" unless absolutely prevented (Article 43), and is "regarded only as administrator and usufructuary" of the territory's public property, including its agricultural land — entitled to use it, not to deplete or appropriate it for its own population (Article 55). Fourth Geneva Convention Article 64 permits new legislation only for the occupier's security, its obligations under the Convention, or the orderly government of the territory. An occupier's authority to make rules over occupied land is narrow, exceptional and temporary by design. Al-Haq's term for what has happened instead is de facto annexation — the Knesset extending sovereign authority over the West Bank through legislative acts, "in breach of its limited administrative authority as a belligerent occupant."

So this is not a park by-law. It is a regulation written by a legislature Palestinians cannot vote for, delivered through a military administration, governing what they may pick from their own hillsides.

And it is not enforced. The list runs to dozens of species. Surveys show Israelis pick anemones, narcissus and primrose. Court archives contain no indictment for any of them. The prosecutions are for the three wild plants Palestinians eat: Origanum syriacum (za'atar), Gundelia tournefortii (akkoub) and Salvia fruticosa (maryamiyya). Between 2004 and 2016 Israeli courts decided 61 za'atar and akkoub cases plus dozens more for sage, and every defendant was Palestinian, as the lawyer and researcher Rabea Eghbariah has documented (القدس العربي; Oxford Symposium). Settlers who pick or burn the same plants are not charged.

A list that shields a flower nobody is punished for taking, while criminalising a herb only one people is punished for gathering, is not protecting plants. It is regulating a population's access to its own land.

In 2019 the Palestinian legal centre Adalah demanded the designations be cancelled and criminal enforcement suspended, arguing the ban had no reliable factual basis, did not serve the purpose of the law, and disproportionately harmed a population that has gathered these herbs for centuries. Adalah documented 26 indictments and 151 fines between 2016 and 2018 alone. Each March, ahead of the akkoub and za'atar season, the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority runs a public warning campaign.

This is not the first photographic record of the hannun. Between roughly 1900 and 1920 the American Colony Photo Department in Jerusalem — a foreign Christian community running a commercial photography business — produced a series of 166 glass-plate negatives titled Wild Flowers of Palestine, now held in the Library of Congress (LC 2019696097).

They captioned it “Lily of the field.” The phrase is from the King James Bible. A flower Palestinians had been calling hannun for centuries was catalogued for a Western audience under a name taken from someone else's scripture — plated, sold as a stereograph, and archived in Washington. The same series files cyclamen under C. latifolium, a name botany has since abandoned.

The series is also, unmistakably, the same project as this one. The American Colony photographers made specimen plates and plates marked "taken in their natural settings" — the studio and the hillside, the same pairing made here a century later. What has changed is not the method, and not the flowers.

It is who is holding the camera, and which name the picture gets filed under.