In ancient times the whole mountain was thickly wooded,[124] but at present, though it contains "rocky dells" where there are "thick jungles of copse,"[125] and is covered in places with olive groves and thickets of dwarf oak, yet its appearance is rather that of a park than of a forest, long stretches of grass alternating with patches of woodland and "shrubberies, thicker than any in Central Palestine," while the larger trees grow in clumps or singly, and there is nowhere, as in Lebanon, any dense growth, or even any considerable grove, of forest trees.

But the beauty of the tract is conspicuous; and if Carmel means, as some interpret, a "garden" rather than a "forest," it may be held to well justify its appellation.

"The whole mountain-side," says one traveller,[126] "was dressed with blossoms and flowering shrubs and fragrant herbs." "There is not a flower," says another,[127] "that I have seen in Galilee, or on the plains along the coast, that I do not find on Carmel, still the fragrant, lovely mountain that he was of old." The geological structure of Carmel is, in the main, what is called "the Jura formation," or "the upper oolite"-- a soft white limestone, with nodules and veins of flint.

At the western extremity, where it overhangs the Mediterranean, are found chalk, and tertiary breccia formed of fragments of chalk and flint.

On the north-east of the mountain, beyond the Nahr-el-Mukattah, plutonic rocks appear, breaking through the deposit strata, and forming the beginning of the basalt formation which runs through the plain of Esdraelon to Tabor and the Sea of Galilee.[128] Like most limestone formations, Carmel abounds in caves, which are said to be more than 2,000 in number,[129] and are often of great length and extremely tortuous.
Carmel, the great southern headland of Phoenicia, is balanced in a certain sense by the extreme northern headland of Casius.