We are standing next to two tall columns of old wooden drawers. The dried plant collection of Beit Hankin, which was started in the forties, is kept inside them. The plants are organized in drawers according to family, and a page is attached to each plant that lists its Latin and Hebrew names, written in ink with a pen nib. Giving Hebrew names to the country’s plants was a significant part of Zionist education in the early days of the state.

The method of preserving plants by drying them between the pages of a book was used in the past as a hobby as well, and many children also did it. Two of the drawers are open as examples, and you can see how the plants have survived for about seventy years already.

Zevik Givoli remembers what science class was like with the teacher Menachem Zaharoni:

You need to recognize all of the plants. To go, to get excited about everything. Suddenly, we stop: look, look, look! This one, and this one, and this one… the entire idea of identifying the plants. In the science room, he would organize exhibitions of plants in jars, and every so often,  on Friday, we had a test and we had to go and write down what each plant was. The names were not included. You had to remember.

At the bottom of the display window entitled “Environment” is a wide drawer that demonstrates some of the patents created by nature to spread seeds, such as the spring, parachute, sticker, and more. Some of these distribution methods were copied by humans to develop various tools. When nature is studied for the purpose of copying it to solve a human problem, it is called biomimicry.