Flowers in Israel – ישראל פרחים תמונות

Acanthus (the Greek and Latin name for the plant is connected with “ake,” a sharp point), a genus of plants belonging to the natural order Acanthaceae. The species are natives of the southern parts of Europe and the warmer parts of Asia and Africa. The best-known is Acanthus mollis, a common species throughout the Mediterranean region, having large, deeply cut, hairy, shining leaves. In Israel we have the the Syrian acanthus and has rosette of large spiny lobed leaves. It can also be considered as one of the thistles in the Bible. H.B.Tristram (1865) thinks that the acanthus is referred to as a “nettle”: Job 30:7, Among the bushes they brayed; under the nettles they were gathered together: Zephaniah 2:9: “… even the breeding of nettles, and saltpits, and a perpetual desolation: the residue of my people shall spoil them, and the remnant of my people shall possess them.”

Virgil, Publius Vergilius Maro (70 BCE – 19 BCE), a Latin poet, the author of the Eclogues, calls it mollis acanthus, Eclogue III.45: “A pair of cups, and round the handles wreathed Pliant acanthus.” So does Pliny the Younger, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (63-ca. 113), Roman writer and nephew of Pliny the Elder. He writes in “Letters on the Tuscan Villa” (1st century): “You descend, from the terrace, by an easy slope adorned with the figures of animals in box, facing each other, to a lawn overspread with the soft, I had almost said the liquid, Acanthus: this is surrounded by a walk enclosed with evergreens, shaped into a variety of forms”.Pliny the Elder, in his Nat. Hist. xxii. 22, p. 277, says that it is laevis, smooth; and that it is one of those plants that are cultivated in gardens.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), a famous American writer, mentions Pliny’s acanthus in the Assignation: “tears are gathering in her eyes – those eyes which, like Pliny’s acanthus, are “soft and almost liquid.”

The leaves of this plant are generally considered by historians to have been the design inspiration for the Corinthian column capitals of Greek architecture. The originator of the Corinthian Capitals is said to be Callimachus (Kallimachos), an architect and sculptor working in the second half of the 5th century BCE.

The attribution comes from Vitruvius’s On Architecture (book IV) (here in Morris Hicky Morgan’s translation):”It is related that the original discovery of this form of capital was as follows. A freeborn maiden of Corinth, just of marriageable age, was attacked by an illness and passed away. After her burial, her nurse, collecting a few little things which used to give the girl pleasure while she was alive, put them in a basket, carried it to the tomb, and laid it on top thereof, covering it with a roof-tile so that the things might last longer in the open air. This basket happened to be placed just above the root of an acanthus. The acanthus root, pressed down meanwhile though it was by the weight, when springtime came round put forth leaves and stalks in the middle, and the stalks, growing up along the sides of the basket, and pressed out by the corners of the tile through the compulsion of its weight, were forced to bend into volutes at the outer edges.Just then Callimachus, whom the Athenians called katatêxitechnos for the refinement and delicacy of his artistic work, passed by this tomb and observed the basket with the tender young leaves growing round it. Delighted with the novel style and form, he built some columns after that pattern for the Corinthians, determined their symmetrical proportions, and established from that time forth the rules to be followed in finished works of the Corinthian order”.