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For visitors, garden brings biblical world to life
Deborah Deasy can be reached via e-mail or at 412-320-7989.
Each year, people from many states discover this cultivated gem. Their names and comments fill the garden's guest book.
"I didn't even know it existed," says Gloria Cerasoli of West Mifflin, a summer visitor with childhood friends Gloria Taddeo of Whitehall and Sister Della Massaro of San Antonio, Texas. "We all enjoyed it," she adds.
Throughout the garden, small signs identify plants mentioned in the Bible — with Old Testament references — and plants named after biblical characters, such as "Job's tears," "Adam's needle," "angel wings" and "wandering Jew."
The Rodef Shalom garden is "lovely" and "really educational," Taddeo says. "I couldn't believe I was seeing some of the things I had (only) read about."
Different parts of the garden loosely mirror specific areas of Israel. A lily-filled pond and miniature waterway, for example, replicate the Sea of Galilee, Jordan River and the Dead Sea. Thick patches of reeds — and papyrus — thrive beside the waterway, as in the days of Moses.
"We don't really know if Moses was found in reeds," says Irene Jacob of Point Breeze, the garden's founder and director.
And she says she seriously doubts that Adam and Eve ever shared an apple in the Garden of Eden because "apples are not native (to) Israel. Biblical scholars believe it was a quince."
Jacob planted the sapling cedars of Lebanon that now tower above garden visitors. Also original are the garden's 16-year-old olive, fig and laurel trees, plus a date palm tree "imported" from California.
"I love them all," Jacob says. "They're like children."
A Jew born in Germany, Jacob worked as an X-ray technician before she switched to displaying botanical wonders. "I'm a gardener," says this spry grandmother with soft curls and hands that show hard work.
Dressed in a pink skirt and white flats on a hot Tuesday morning, Jacob stoops low, then disappears into a corner thicket of the garden. "I know the garden inside out," she says, her path leading to a pond of colorful waterlilies. "All those lilies have biblical names," she says. "They open about 10 o'clock and close about 4."
Each fall, many of the garden's plants depart Oakland for a West View greenhouse as Jacob begins planning the garden's next special exhibit. "Two-thirds of our plants are tropical and have to be taken in," Jacob says. "They're all in containers."
People who work at nearby WQED Pittsburgh occasionally drop by the garden to eat their lunches, says Dorothy Grinberg, one of the garden's volunteer hostesses. The garden "makes you want to sit down and relax and read," she adds.
Jacob says she believes the Rodef Shalom Biblical Botanical Garden is the only garden of its kind in the United States.
"It's a labor of love with great significance for all of us. … I send people there all the time," says Karen Bowden Cooper, curator of the nearby James Kelso Bible Lands Museum at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in East Liberty.
"Anything that brings the Bible world to life and helps us think about it in a concrete way is an important resource," Cooper says. "I think they've done a good job, each year, of looking at another dimension that plants bring to life."
