The Perfect Timing—and Perfect Vision—of Meir Shalev’s “My Wild Garden”

The past few months have found most of us cut off from our modest sources of adventures and drama—trips to other cities, meetings with people from far away, airplanes. My reading response to the pandemic shutdown has been to look for escape to broad vistas and foreign locales, the more exotic the better. Why read about people shut in their houses? I want movement and exploration. Give me Lawrence of Arabia, Benjamin of Tudela, Neil Armstrong.

And yet there’s something perfect about the timing of Meir Shalev’s book My Wild Garden: Notes from a Writer’s Eden, in which the author explores nature, human nature, Israeli history, and the landscape of the Bible without ever leaving his yard. The book, with lovely illustrations by the author’s sister Refaella Shir, was a bestseller here in Israel when it was published in 2017, and now arrives in an English translation by Joanna Chen. Its characters include ants, a stubborn mole, a beloved and dying lemon tree, an uncooperative fig, a snake in the compost, and Kramer, a cat of blessed memory who is known to Israeli children (including mine) as a character in Shalev’s books for kids.

My Wild Garden has much to teach readers about the flora of the land of Israel, and about the way the local plants are woven into the history, language, and religion of the country. But more than anything, it has something to say about finding wonder at home, and about the countercultural benefits of commitment and immobility—about the layers of emotion and intellect that can reveal themselves if you stay put and tend to one thing for many years.