Ein Gedi Botanical Garden

Kibbutz Ein Gedi stands on a plateau that slants from the hills in the west down towards the Dead Sea, just south of Nahal Arugot and above the oasis. The garden is the whole of that plateau: paths and kibbutz roads running between residential blocks, with planting on both sides. Visitors pay at the entrance and then walk the same routes the residents use to get to the dining hall.

This produces a visit that does not feel like other botanical gardens. There are no glasshouses and no walled compartments. Sections are defined by what happens to grow in a given aspect and how much water reaches it: heavy shade under old ficus and other broad canopies, dry beds of cactus and succulents in the open, palms along the roads, and the strip with a view where the ground drops away east towards the lake. The operator sets out an aroma garden of medicinal and fragrance plants drawn from the Bible, a rock display, a bird feeding area and the Ein Gedi Museum, which tells the kibbutz's own story and opens daily from 08:30 to 16:00.

Because it is inhabited, the garden is also maintained to a standard set by people who have to look at it every day rather than by a curatorial department. The Hebrew account of the garden lists the working problems bluntly: a shortage of water in the summer months, sun damage in the hottest hours, and the job of keeping a garden looking like a garden inside an active community.

The practical consequence is that the walking is easy by the standards of this coast. Nothing here resembles the boulder steps of Wadi David next door, and the shade under the oldest trees is the only reliable shade in Ein Gedi outside a building.

Nothing about this garden is old. Kibbutz Ein Gedi began as a NAHAL military outpost in 1953, down in the oasis near the ancient remains, and became a civilian kibbutz in 1956. In July 1959 it moved a few kilometres south to the plateau it occupies now, and that site was completely barren. Some 80 date palms were planted there in April 1959, a few months before the members relocated. That is the start of the garden.

The early planting was ordinary kibbutz landscaping, and it was ordinary in its aims: fast shade and soft lawn to set against the desert. The Hebrew record credits the first plan to Dov Bnayahu, whose son Dan Bnayahu was one of the founders of the kibbutz. Early choices included Delonix, which flowers red for half the year, date palms, native desert species and rose beds. The Delonix turned out to be a mistake: the trees grew too large, their roots threatened the foundations of buildings, and hard pruning ruined their shape, so their numbers were reduced over time.

What made the difference was that Ein Gedi's climate was of national scientific interest. In December 1960 the kibbutz received a consignment of desert trees from the Institute for the Study of the Negev, and other institutions in Israel began supplying samples from Australia, India, Madagascar, Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas to find out whether they would take. There was room for them because the shade thrown by the taller trees had killed off the grass in places. Many of the introductions failed against the heat or the strict water regime. Some did not.

The formal turn came in 1985, when the kibbutz gardeners established a working relationship with Dr Michael Avishai of the botanical garden of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Avishai and other Jerusalem specialists ran a long process of cataloguing more than 900 plant species across the kibbutz, and it was that catalogue that turned a kibbutz garden into a botanical garden. In the early 1990s, as visitors began arriving specifically to see it, the kibbutz decided to charge a small fee at the entrance. In 1994 the garden was entered on the register of Botanic Gardens Conservation International.

The headline plants are the baobabs. The Hebrew description groups them as giant trees of the Bombacaceae, the African baobab among them, and the operator places them where the ground opens towards the Dead Sea, near the cafe named after them. A baobab in fruit, in a desert, above a lake that is 300 metres lower than sea level, is the image most people take away from this garden.

The rest of the collection sorts itself by water and light rather than by continent. In the open ground there are cacti and other succulents from desert regions; the garden's entry in the Botanic Gardens Conservation International database claims an adjacent cactus park with over 1,000 cacti and desert plants, and about 30 varieties of palm across the site. In the permanent shade under the heavy canopies there is rainforest floor planting: pothos, monstera, colocasia, philodendron and others, which survive there only because they are watered and because the big trees have made a microclimate that does not exist anywhere else at this latitude on this shore.

Two groups are deliberate arguments rather than displays. The first is the Israeli planting: olive, pomegranate and fig, growing beside tropical species from Madagascar, Australian trees and African palms, which is the operator's own way of describing the garden. The second is the bed of perfume and incense plants, which the Hebrew account describes as a memorial to the local agricultural culture of two thousand years ago. Ein Gedi's ancient wealth came from balsam and aromatic crops, and the garden's tour of that bed is built around the biblical perfume plant.

A visitor should not expect labelling on the scale of a university garden. Self-guided maps are handed out at the hotel reception in Hebrew, English and Russian, guided tours run in Hebrew and English, and the garden sells its own dates, organic silan and a cosmetics line, which is a reminder that this is a working agricultural community rather than a research institution.

• African baobabs and other giant trees of the Bombacaceae family
• Cacti and succulents from several deserts, with a separate cactus park alongside
• About 30 varieties of palm, alongside the date palms the kibbutz farms
• Tropical rainforest floor plants growing in the shade of the oldest canopies
• Perfume and incense species, referring to Ein Gedi's ancient balsam trade
• Olive, pomegranate and fig, the local planting, set among the imports

Almost nothing in this garden is native and none of it is old, which inverts the usual question at a Dead Sea site. The test here is not what survives and what was rebuilt, but which claims about the garden trace back to somebody who counted.

The uniqueness claim holds, with a caveat about who is making it. The 2022 microhistory of the kibbutz, published in the Journal of Israeli History by Nir Arielli of the University of Leeds, states that the garden is unique insofar as it encompasses a residential area. The garden's own entry in the Botanic Gardens Conservation International database says the same in stronger terms, and so does the English Wikipedia article on the kibbutz. The database entry is supplied by the institution it describes, so the independent weight here rests on Arielli.

The species count is consistent and the round number is not. More than 900 is what Arielli reports from the 1985 cataloguing, what Botanic Gardens Conservation International records, and what both the Hebrew and English encyclopaedia entries give. The operator's own pages say only hundreds of species. Figures of about 1,000 appear on travel listings without a count behind them. The area is given as 110 dunams by Arielli and as 100 dunams by the English encyclopaedia entry, and the two have not been reconciled.

Two claims should be treated with more caution. Tourism listings state that the National Geographical Society recognises the garden as the eleventh wonder of the world; no publication by the National Geographic Society carrying that designation could be found, the kibbutz's own pages do not make the claim, and the society's name is misspelled in the listings that do. And the garden is often described as sitting 400 metres below sea level, which is roughly the level of the lake rather than of the kibbutz: three public elevation models queried at the garden's coordinates in 2026 returned 295, 307 and 310 metres below sea level. The plateau is high ground by Dead Sea standards, which is why it has a view.

The garden was made for the residents. It ended up carrying the kibbutz. Ein Gedi spent the 1970s and 1980s building an economy on the lake below: a petrol station, a campsite, a tavern, a bathing beach and, from 1984, a new spa building at the hot springs, marketed in Denmark, West Germany and Switzerland. By 1974 the kibbutz was already earning more than 65 per cent of its income from things that were not agriculture.

The lake then withdrew from all of it. By 2017 spa visitors who wanted to bathe had to be driven more than 1.3 kilometres to reach the water, over ground thought to be at risk from new sinkholes. The spa closed in the spring of 2020. The Israeli account of the kibbutz records a road diverted, a newly built bridge abandoned on safety grounds and the campsite shut, all for the same reason. What is left within walking distance of a visitor's car is the nature reserve, the antiquities and the garden.

Tom Geva, who manages the kibbutz hotel that grew out of the guesthouse of the 1960s, put the position to Haaretz in 2021: the sea is far less meaningful in the package Ein Gedi now offers, there is no access to the sea in the area because of the sinkholes and the retreating shoreline, and his job is to build a programme for an audience that will not find the sea. Read that way, the ₪20 ticket is not a garden entry fee so much as the current shape of a settlement economy.

The garden's own supply is not guaranteed either. It is watered from the springs of the oasis, and the kibbutz's use of that water has been contested. In 2001 the Haaretz journalist Neri Livneh contrasted the flourishing kibbutz with drying springs and a nature reserve in trouble, quoting the wildlife expert Uzi Paz against drawing water straight from the Ma'ayan Ein Gedi spring rather than downstream. In 2006 the Society for the Protection of Nature campaigned against the kibbutz's mineral water plant taking more from those springs. Both disputes concern the flow that keeps the lawns green.