Botanical Gardens

Under this heading is gathered the small cluster of references in which a king cultivates trees and water-features as a deliberate enterprise — what an older English idiom calls a park. The material is concentrated in Solomon's reign: the gardens and pools he made for himself, and his catalogued knowledge of the plant world from the great tree to the smallest wall-growing herb.

Gardens, Parks, and Pools

In Ecclesiastes the king recounts the works he undertook for himself, and among them the cultivated landscape figures prominently. He made himself "gardens and parks," and into them "planted trees ... of all kinds of fruit" (Eccl 2:5). The next line attaches the irrigation infrastructure required to sustain such plantings: "I made myself pools of water, to water therefrom the forest where trees were reared" (Eccl 2:6). The pairing is practical — the pools exist to water the trees — and together the two verses describe a single project: a cultivated forest of fruit-bearing trees fed by constructed pools.

Solomon's Knowledge of Plants

Alongside the gardens themselves stands the king's botanical knowledge. Solomon "spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon even to the hyssop that springs out of the wall" (1 Ki 4:33), a span that runs from the largest tree of the region to a herb growing in masonry. The same verse extends his descriptive range to "beasts, and ... birds, and ... creeping things, and ... fish," but the leading clause sets the botanical breadth that frames the gardens of Eccl 2 as the work of a king whose interest in the plant world was wide enough to reach from the cedars of Lebanon down to wall-grown hyssop.