الكبّار

This plant carries an unusual number of Arabic names, which is generally a sign that people have had a long and practical relationship with something. Barari, the Palestinian open-science platform for wild food plants, records among others القبّار (qabbar), الكبّار (kabbar), الشفلح (shafallah), الأصف (asaf) and العلّوق (alluq) (براري).

The European name arrives late and second-hand: caper, and the botanical Capparis, come through Latin from Greek kapparis — a word Greek itself appears to have taken from further east, along with the pickle.

Spinosa is for the spines: a pair of small hooked thorns sitting at the base of each leaf, which is how you know the plant in the months when it is doing nothing else.

The kabbar's habitat is, roughly, places with no soil. It grows from cliff faces, from the joints of limestone outcrops, from scree, from terrace walls, and from the mortar courses of built masonry — sending a root system down into the rock far deeper and further than anything visible above it suggests.

The round, thick, waxy leaves are the second half of that strategy: built to hold water and to survive full sun on bare rock through a Palestinian August. It is in flower from April into September (براري) — which is to say, it is at its most spectacular in exactly the season when the hillsides have gone brown and the anemones and cyclamen have been finished for months.

Almost everything else in this record needs the rains. The kabbar needs a crack.

It is one of the most extravagant flowers in the Palestinian flora and it is built strangely. Four white petals sit underneath, and above them a wide fan of long stamens — white at the base, deepening through pink to violet at the tips — spread out like a brush. Out of the middle of that fan, a single stalk carries the ovary well clear of the flower, held out in the air above the stamens.

The flowers are short-lived, opening and going over quickly, which is why a kabbar bush in season carries every stage at once: fat closed buds, one or two flowers wide open, and the spent stalks of yesterday's. The photographs on this page were taken at that moment.

They are worked hard by large bees and beetles while they last — one is sitting in the middle of the flower at the top of this page, which is not a defect in the picture. It is the plant doing the only thing it opened for.

Here is the peculiar thing about capers. The crop is the bud — picked hard, green and tightly closed, before any of the above happens. What is on the table is a flower that was prevented.

Buds and young leaves are gathered in Palestine in May and June and are eaten pickled or in salads (براري). Salting or brining is not optional garnish-making: the raw bud is bitter and sharp, and the cure is what converts it into food. The fruit that follows a flower that was allowed to open — the caper berry, on its long stalk — is pickled in turn.

Gathering is slow, hot and awkward work, done by hand, on rock, in summer, around the spines, and it has to be repeated as new buds come. A plant that asks that much is one people keep going back to for a reason.

The kabbar sits inside the Palestinian herbal tradition as well as the kitchen. Barari's entry records community knowledge of preparations made as decoctions from the flowers, buds, leaves, root bark and roots, with recorded uses including analgesic, anti-inflammatory and diuretic (براري).

Two things are worth saying plainly about a register like this one. The first is that this is documented, community-held knowledge being recorded by Palestinian researchers, not folklore — the whole point of a platform like Barari is that the knowledge has a source and a chain of custody. The second is that recording it here is history and ethnobotany. It is not medical advice, and this record does not offer any.

The broader pattern matters for how this site reads the Latin names. The plants of this region were named, catalogued and prescribed in Arabic for centuries before European botany arrived to rename them — a point this record also makes on the hannun, where Dawud al-Antaki's seventeenth-century Tadhkira catalogues a flower that Linnaean botany would reintroduce to the world a hundred years later under a different name.

The American Colony Photo Department's series Wild Flowers of Palestine, made in Jerusalem in the first decades of the twentieth century, includes a caper. Unusually for that series, the caption is exact — the plant is given its correct binomial rather than a scriptural nickname.

What the photographer chose to shoot is the better detail.

Not a caper in a landscape, and not a caper on a cliff. A caper growing out of the courses of a dressed stone wall — running horizontally along the joint it found, in full flower, holding onto masonry somebody cut and laid.

A hundred and twenty-odd years later the same species is doing the same thing on the same kind of stone, and the photograph above and the photographs at the top of this page were taken by two people with nothing in common except the subject.

That is the whole argument of the archival register on this site, in one plant. The method has not changed. The flora has not changed. What has changed is who is holding the camera, and what the picture is being made for.