Opportunity

Preserving the Past

As a child, Saul Sernoff was fascinated by the Druze, a middle-eastern minority with roots more than ten centuries deep. “I would see them gathering plants and try to talk to them in Hebrew and they would reply in Arabic,” he remembers. Sernoff was born in the United States, but grew up in Israel. As part of his UO graduate work in landscape architecture, Sernoff is working to preserve the cultural heritage of the Druze by recording their knowledge of indigenous edible plants. “A heritage that’s thousands of years old is disappearing within my lifetime,” he says. Thanks to the Betty Marie Laudahl Johnson Scholarship in Landscape Architecture, Sernoff traveled to Israel’s Carmel Mountain region to photograph and document the plants. Sernoff hopes to publish the information and return to Israel to promote use of these plants—and help preserve a disappearing culture.