Karkash nursery

Plant Catalogue    Selected Gardens

In the summer of 1998, while writing my M.Sc. Thesis in Ecology at the Institute for Desert Research, University of Ben-Gurion, I started landscaping in private gardens in the newly established Desert style neighbourhood in Sde Boqer. I enjoyed the work so much that, in 1999, I decided to learn more about desert landscaping, so I flew to Arizona to do an internship at the Desert Botanical in Phoenix and at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tuscon. 

In 2000 I returned to Israel and opened a desert landscaping company called "Xerophyte". My idea was to use local desert plants from the Negev desert in landscaping. Unfortunately, I could not find any native desert plants at the nurseries and so I had to use exotic plants for the gardens.

So, in 2010 I decided to open a nursery that specializes in native desert plants. I named the nursery - "Karkash" - a native bush (Colutea istria). And so, I went out to the desert to collect seeds and started propagating native plants.

Since then, the nursery has grown and distributed tens of thousands of Negev plants to various private and public gardens from highway 6 in the northern Negev although down to Eilat in the south.

As of today, the nursery has an inventory of 30 species of trees, shrubs, perennial and annual native desert plants which no other nursery in the world possesses.

Gilead michaeli.

Contact me:
+972-50-698-8667