Ginat Tamar Nursery: A tranquil Baka spot withstanding time, development

The Business

Ginat Tamar (Date Garden) isn’t a bad name for a plant nursery, even if the enterprise in question isn’t located in sandy environs and, for that matter, I didn’t espy too many palm trees around when I visited the eponymous venture on the corner of Bethlehem Road and Harakevet Street earlier this week. However, despite the salubrious appearance of the place, it seems there was something of an ulterior motive behind the choice of professional moniker. Gaby Zeiger, the proprietor of the polychromic floral business, got to that a little later in our conversation.

We chatted outside, betwixt thousands of plants of all sorts of shapes, sizes, hues, and textures, while the rain pitter-pattered on the sturdy nylon awnings way above our heads. Zeiger, a lanky, handsome, weathered-looking chap, regaled me with tales of his life over the past close to half a century, which has seen him shift and meander among very different fields of bread-winning intent while maintaining a steady course to wholesome living.

Who is Gaby Zeiger?

My late mother would have described Zeiger’s visage as “a lived-in face.” The man has clearly been there and done that, and anyone who has popped by Ginat Tamar over the past four or so decades will have seen him at it. Zeiger, who turns 70 in April, exudes a sense of physical and spiritual health as he dispenses advice about matching plants and trees to the customer’s personal environment and tastes, and how to keep the purchases as vibrant and aesthetically pleasing as possible for as long as they can.

Zeiger and Date Garden have been around for a while. “We started here in 1988,” he tells me. “Before that, we ran a place on Betar Street [near Kiryat Moriya] for three and a half years. Like here, that was also a garden area which belonged to a building.”

How Zeiger and the nursery got going

Judging by the popularity and longevity of the nursery, Zeiger clearly has a green thumb and a good head for business and provides service with an unpretentious and charming demeanor. But he didn’t exactly grow up tracking down and cultivating cuttings into alluring robust plants. 

“Before I got into this business, I spent three years in London in the late 1970s. I grew up in the Seventies,” he smiles with just a hint of a wink. 

“I worked in a really important nightclub as a barman,” he continues. “We had all the great rock and pop artists playing there, like Eric Clapton and Santana. Those were great times.” That vibe has stayed with him, and he plays guitar in his spare time.

On his return to Israel in 1979, he took off in a very different bread-winning direction. He got a job at the Swedish Village, working with children with cerebral palsy (CP) and communication disorders. Eleven months later, official financial shenanigans left him unemployed, and he quickly signed up for an 18-month Labor Ministry gardening training course. 

It was the ideal launching pad for what became a lifelong professional pursuit. 

“We had the best teachers, real experts who wrote books about it,” he says. “There were gardeners from [pioneering agricultural youth village] Mikveh Yisrael, landscape architects who worked on giant stadiums, and that sort of thing.”

Eighteen months on, Zeiger was good to go and embarked on the next adventure of his working life, at least in theoretical terms. I suggested – half-jokingly – that perhaps he’d had enough of working with people, at the London nightclub and at the Swedish Village, and at that stage preferred to deal with some of Mother Nature’s treasures. He took the bait. “I deal with people here all the time,” he shot back. “I have been stuck here ever since,” he chuckles. “If you’re going get ‘stuck’ anywhere, you could do a lot worse than end up in Ginat Tamar.”

The name

And there was the delicate bygone matter of business moniker. “We didn’t use the word ‘mishtala’ [plant nursery] in the name. We were told we might have problems getting a business license if we called ourselves something mishtala. So we went for gina. “‘Garden’ sounds nicer,” he laughs. 

Sounds spot-on. ■

• Name: Ginat Tamar Nursery
• Address: 34 Bethlehem Road
• Owner: Gabi Zeiger
• Facebook: Search Ginat Tamar in Hebrew or www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008666466730