Gregory Levin grew up in Leningrad – now St. Petersburg – and even as a small child, his love of plants and curiosity earned him the name “little botanist”. During the terrible siege of Leningrad from 1941-44, the Germans killed all of the adult males in Gregory’s family. The population was starving and ill. Gregory saved his mother from scurvy by boiling up pine twigs and adding crystals of lemon acid. He faced many adversities—poverty and quotas against Jews among them—to earn his doctoral degree and begin his life’s work as a roving plant explorer.
For more than forty years, Dr Levin trekked across Central Asia and the Trans Caucasus in search of wild and endangered pomegranates. At Garrigala, a remote agricultural station in Turkmenistan Dr. Levin developed and tended the world’s largest collection of pomegranate varieties, as well as persimmons, walnuts, figs, olives, apricots, almonds, quince, peaches, figs and jujubes. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, funding from Moscow evaporated and Dr Levin was exiled from his collection of 1117 pomegranates.
With no more than their modest belongings and scientific knowledge to begin a new life, the Levins moved from their home of forty years to Israel. The leadership of Garrigala fell to a Turkmen agricultural director with no budget who resorted to ripping out precious trees and replacing them with vegetable cash crops to sustain the compromised collections. Fortunately, having the end of the Soviet Union, Dr Levin sent 60 of Garrigala’s best pomegranate varieties to Israel, and to the United States
His memoir Pomegranate Roads: A Botanist’s Exile from Eden is a unique botanical, geographical, medical, even mythological history of Punica granatum—the original ‘apple’ in the Garden of Eden, according to Dr. Levin.
