What is the “Wild Flowers of Palestine” series?

The American Colony Photo Department was a commercial photographic studio in Jerusalem, run by members of a Christian utopian community that settled in the city in 1881. Its photographers worked across Palestine for roughly half a century, and the negatives now sit in the Library of Congress as the Matson Photograph Collection, some 22,000 items covering 1898 to 1946.

Inside that collection is a run of plates captioned Wild Flowers of Palestine. They are careful photographs. Some are specimens cut and pinned to a board in the studio; others are captioned “taken in their natural settings” and show the plant where it grew. Several were shot as stereographs, two near-identical frames side by side for a viewer that produced an illusion of depth.

The series is the most complete photographic record of this flora from the period, and this record has used it on nearly every page. It is also the reason this page exists: a survey that thorough is worth counting, because what a survey leaves out is a fact about the survey.

On 24 August 2026 this record queried the Wikimedia Commons mirror of the Matson Collection for every file whose title begins Wild Flowers of Palestine, and counted 119 distinct plates by their matpc catalogue numbers. Every caption was then read for script and for names.

Not one of the 119 plates carries a word of Arabic.

Not one Arabic character appears in any caption in the series. Neither does a transliterated Palestinian plant name: no za'atar, no akkoub, no khubeza, no maramia. Seventy-one of the captions carry a Linnaean binomial in brackets. The rest carry an English common name and nothing else.

In 2006 a team led by the Palestinian botanist Mohammed S. Ali-Shtayeh interviewed 190 people across fifteen communities of the northern West Bank and ranked 100 wild edible plants by how many people named them. Set that ranking beside the plate list.

The two plants Palestinians name most often are the two the survey never photographed. Za'atar was named by 150 of 190 people and does not appear. Maramia was named by 131 and does not appear, though the series does contain two plates of a different sage. Wild fennel, شومر, is absent as well.

The three that do appear are filed under an English name or a bare genus. A reader of this catalogue in London in 1910 could not have learned from it that any of these plants was eaten, or by whom, or what it was called by the people who ate it.

Seven captions in the series name the plant out of the Bible rather than out of the country.

Whether the Bible actually meant this plant is a separate question, and the Greek does not settle it: what the “lily of the field” is.

• “Lily of the field” for Anemone coronaria, twice. In Arabic the flower is الحنون.
• “Rose of Sharon” for Narcissus tazetta, twice.
• “Bethlehem-star” for Ornithogalum fimbriatum.
• “Jerusalem sage” for Phlomis viscosa.
• “Pheasant's eye” for Adonis autumnalis, carrying the Greek myth instead.

The King James phrase is doing the work of a plant name. A buyer in New York knew what a lily of the field was, having read about it, and would not have known what a حنون was. The captions were written for that buyer.

The photographers were standing in a country where every one of these plants already had a name. They wrote down the one their customers would recognise.

This record has met the same pattern on nearly every page it has built, and it reaches the national flower itself, filed in English under a mountain range and in Arabic under the village on the same ridge.

The mallow plate at the top of this page was made indoors. The specimen is pinned flat to a white board, the board is propped against a wooden bench, and behind it are storage crates on a shelf, a window and a hanging cloth. Nothing is hidden. The photograph is a record of an object on a table.

Both methods appear across the 119 plates, and both are careful. This matters because the difference between that body of work and the photographs on this site is not skill and not equipment.

The difference is the filing. A plate captioned “Gundelia (G. Tournefortii L.)” and a page headed عكّوب can hold the same plant, photographed with the same care, and answer different questions. One tells you what the specimen is. The other tells you it is food, when it is gathered, and that gathering it has put people in court.

The plates are public domain and free to view. They are held by the Library of Congress in the Matson Photograph Collection, and mirrored in full resolution on Wikimedia Commons with their catalogue metadata intact.

A practical note, because it cost this record time. loc.gov refuses automated requests and refuses browsers without a full profile, so a script pointed at the Library of Congress returns nothing useful. The Wikimedia Commons mirror answers a plain API call and carries the same images at the same resolution. Search Commons in the File namespace for intitle:"Wild flowers of Palestine" and the series comes back.

Read the catalogue numbers. Each file name ends in a matpc number, and that number is the stable identifier at the Library of Congress. The mallow above is matpc.02428; the akkoub is matpc.02449. Cite the number rather than the file name, which changes.

Several plates in the series are stereographs. If a plate looks like the same picture twice, it is: crop to one frame.