“Everybody was talking about how they gave birth to their kids in the watermelon fields, how in the war they used to hide in the watermelon fields, [how] they exported Jadu’I on trucks when the borders were open before ’48 to Turkey, to Syria, everywhere,” she tells Broadly. “[But] whenever I asked about it, they would say, ‘Oh, you're asking about the dinosaur.’”

Vivien Sansour was working as a writer and photographer in the northern West Bank when she began to hear stories about Jadu’I , a succulent watermelon once abundant in Jenin, Palestine, from the farmers and families she was documenting.

For years, Jadu’I was considered among the occupation’s agricultural casualties—but this narrative of Jenin’s beloved watermelon didn’t sit well with Sansour. “I couldn't accept that it was lost,” she says. “I fell in love with the story of this watermelon.” Convinced that the seeds of the fruit had to still exist somewhere, Sansour went looking for them, mostly among farmers in Jenin.

Under Israeli occupation, Palestinian farming has suffered greatly. A 2015 study by the United Nations documented the devastating effects of the occupation on Palestinian agriculture due to “restrictions on access to land, water and markets; loss of land to settlements and the separation barrier; demolition of structures and infrastructure and the uprooting of trees; restrictions on access to essential agricultural inputs; dearth of credit for agricultural production; flooding of Palestinian markets with agricultural imports from Israel and settlements; and environmental damage .”

The other side of the library is a physical space called Art and Seeds, which Sansour is moving from Beit Sahour back to its original location in Battir this week. There, seeds are preserved in jars surrounded by agricultural and cultural art, and doors are open to members of the public looking to learn more about traditional Palestinian farming and indigenous varieties.

We reach out to farmers, we don't wait for farmers to come to us. I go to farmers that I hear about, or that I meet while I am in a village; I have a huge network of farmers that we go to and say, “Would you like to try to grow this?” Or, they tell us about how they used to grow something but it has disappeared, and we say, “OK, we can bring that back.”

In 2014, amidst her search, Sansour founded The Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library , which serves to “find and preserve ancient seed varieties and traditional farming practices.” With the library, Sansour’s goal was to essentially recreate her hunt for the Jadu’I seed with other varieties, then find farmers across Palestine willing to bring the seeds to life. “The main function of the library isn’t for the seeds to stay in one place,” she says. “The main function of the library is for the seeds to stay alive in the fields of farmers.”

In 2016, six years after she learned of the elusive Jadu’I watermelon, Sansour finally found its seeds in a farmer’s drawer among his screwdrivers and hammers. The man told Sansour that he’d had the seeds for seven years, but that no one seemed to want them. “It was a bittersweet moment, because of course I was happy I found them, but I also was so sad that that is where we've reached in terms of rejecting who we are,” Sansour remembers.