Tu Bishvat in the Bosque: A Jewish and Muslim Planting Day

The early morning sun warmed the cottonwood saplings as volunteers from the Jewish and Muslim communities of New Mexico gathered along the Rio Grande. They came with shovels, buckets, and a shared belief that looking after the land is a sacred duty. The event, organised around the Jewish festival of Tu Bishvat, marked one of the latest in a growing series of interfaith environmental gatherings in the Albuquerque region. Local families, university students, and retirees stood together, swapping names and stories before the work began.

For Australian readers, the scene carries a familiar ring. Australian communities have long recognised the value of riverside restoration, from the Murray-Darling basin's many Landcare projects to volunteer efforts along the Yarra in Melbourne, the Brisbane River, and the Torrens in Adelaide. The impulse to repair a waterway through collective labour translates across hemispheres, even when the flora and the climate are quite different. Watching the New Mexico volunteers at work, an observer from Sydney or Perth might note the same patience and the same cheerful stubbornness that characterises bush regeneration weekends back home.

Jewish tradition	Muslim tradition	Shared practice
Tu Bishvat marks the New Year for Trees and a time to plant in the land of Israel	The Prophet Muhammad reportedly said that any Muslim who plants a tree or sows a field will have it counted as an ongoing charity	Cooperative planting days in shared landscapes
The Tu Bishvat Seder includes fruits, wine, and reflection on creation	The Quran names humans as stewards (khalifa) of the earth, charged with care rather than domination	Caring for waterways and native vegetation
Tikkun olam urges repair of the world, including damaged ecosystems	The concept of mizan (balance) calls for environmental restraint and accountability	Working together across faith lines on practical projects

The Bosque and the River That Holds It

The Bosque is the ribbon of cottonwood and willow forest that threads through the middle Rio Grande valley. It filters water, shelters migrating birds such as sandhill cranes and great blue herons, and gives Albuquerque its distinctive green spine. Over decades, fire suppression, the spread of invasive saltcedar and Russian olive, and prolonged drought have thinned the canopy and left the riverbank vulnerable to erosion. Strong spring winds can lift exposed sand into the air, degrading air quality for nearby neighbourhoods.

Australian readers will recognise a parallel in the struggles along the Murray, where red gum forests have suffered from altered flow regimes, salinity, and the pressures of irrigated agriculture. In both countries, riparian regeneration has become a quiet civic project, drawing retirees, school groups, and people of faith into a common cause. The Bosque, much like the Barmah-Millewa forest where the Murray brushes against the Victorian border, depends on this kind of patient, repeated effort. A single planting day makes a small mark; a decade of them can change a riverbank.

Tu Bishvat and the Jewish Call to Plant

Tu Bishvat, the fifteenth day of the Hebrew month of Shvat, falls in late January or early February. In Talmudic tradition it marks the moment when, according to the Mishnah, the sap begins to rise in the trees of the Land of Israel. By the sixteenth century, mystics in the Galilean town of Safed had turned the day into a Seder involving wine, fruit, and meditations on the four worlds of creation. White wine mixed with a drop of red, then half-and-half, then mostly red, became a teaching tool for the hiddenness and revelation of the divine.

Modern communities, particularly in Israel through the Jewish National Fund's planting drives, treat Tu Bishvat as a hands-on occasion. Trees are symbols of rootedness, continuity, and the long view. In New Mexico, the day has gained traction among families who want their children to mark a Jewish festival with dirt under their fingernails rather than only candles and challah. A synagogue community in Santa Fe, working with the Federation, helped coordinate this year's gathering, framing the planting as a way of honouring the festival's agricultural roots far from the Mediterranean climate in which the tradition was first recorded.

The Muslim Practice of Sowing and Sustaining

Islamic tradition carries its own strong endorsement of planting and land care. A well-known hadith records the Prophet encouraging his followers that if the Day of Judgment arrives and a person still holds a seedling, they should plant it. The teaching has inspired long-running afforestation campaigns in countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, and Jordan, where faith-based groups coordinate with government forestry departments to rehabilitate damaged land. The Prophet is also reported to have encouraged the wise use of water and the protection of trees even in times of conflict.

In Australia, organisations like Affinity Intercultural Foundation, the Islamic Sciences and Research Academy, and various local mosques have linked this teaching to bushfire recovery and urban greening projects. Sydney's western suburbs and parts of Melbourne have seen Muslim volunteers working alongside environmental groups to plant native species after dry summers, often in partnership with Jewish, Christian, and Hindu neighbours. The instinct to plant in faith runs deep in many traditions, and the New Mexico gathering drew on that same current. A volunteer from Albuquerque, asked why he had come, simply said he wanted his children to see that caring for the earth is part of being a good Muslim, full stop.

A Day of Shovels, Songs, and Shared Lunch

The volunteers arrived at a stretch of riverbank south of Albuquerque just after nine in the morning. Organisers from the Jewish Federation of New Mexico, the local chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District handed out gloves, saplings, and brief instructions. The cottonwoods went into pre-dug holes, then were watered from tanks trucked in for the occasion. A small team marked out the planting grid with bright pink tape, a method that made the work orderly without feeling clinical.

A Muslim volunteer recited a short du'a before the planting began, asking for barakah in the work. A Jewish participant offered a brachah over the gathering, using a version of the blessing traditionally said when seeing a tree in bloom for the first time in the year. Children from a local Hebrew school and a Muslim youth group worked side by side, swapping stories about their respective religious schools and comparing the size of their homework loads, an exchange that amused the adults and made the day feel ordinary in the best possible way. One teenager, asked what she would tell her friends back at school, said she would tell them the food was great, a sentiment that travels well from Albuquerque to Adelaide.

The afternoon wrapped up with a shared lunch of falafel, hummus, and New Mexican biscochitos. There were no formal speeches, only a sense of work completed and friendships quietly extended. A few of the volunteers exchanged numbers and promised to show up at each other's coming festivals, from Ramadan iftar tables to Purim seudah dinners. By the time the last sapling went into the ground, around seventy-five trees had been planted along a two-hundred-metre stretch of bank.

What the Bosque Project Means for Australian Interfaith Life

For Australian readers, the New Mexico event offers a useful template. The country has its own long history of Jewish-Muslim cooperation, from the work of the National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies in Perth to the many community garden projects scattered through Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Local councils, particularly in areas with both Jewish and Muslim populations, often look for shared causes that bring people together without the political baggage that sometimes accompanies interfaith work in other parts of the world. Tree planting fits neatly into that gap.

The Bosque project reminds participants that environmental restoration is a language almost every community speaks. It is also a place where Australian English speakers might borrow a useful turn of phrase from American volunteers, who often describe such days as good for the soul. A morning spent pushing shovels into a sandy riverbank, followed by a long lunch under the cottonwoods, has a way of dissolving differences that seem weighty on a newsfeed. Several of the New Mexico volunteers said the day had left them feeling more connected to their own traditions, not less, an outcome that often surprises people new to interfaith work.

Back home, the same template fits easily. Jewish communities from Caulfield to Newtown, Muslim groups from Auburn to Bankstown, and Landcare volunteers in dozens of suburbs already share a willingness to put in a morning's work for a stretch of riverbank or a quiet street. A simple email, a borrowed wheelbarrow, and a few dozen seedlings are often enough to start something that, given time, will shade a footpath and quietly record the work of two communities planting side by side.