Tag Archives: gardening in the desert

Flowers, cameras and whistles

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Last weekend my parents were with us, and as part of our entertainment schedule, I took them to Dubai’s Miracle Garden – a 72,000-square-metre riot of colour, growing on what was previously parched desert.

Sprouting just minutes from where we live, the Miracle Garden opened back in February, with 45 million flowers and topiary-style displays fashioned into hearts, pyramids, maypoles, igloos, birds and stars. It occurred to me when we first visited in March that the garden was really quite barmy – rather like walking round a giant hanging basket, or a set from Alice in Wonderland.

On our first visit, we found out what a giant breast implant made of petunias would look like; strolled under pergolas decorated with colourful garlands; and marvelled at the number of things they’d thought to do with the same flower.

"Mum, why has the car got grass growing out of it?"

“Mum, why has the car got grass growing out of it?”

But we’d had an enjoyable visit, so back we went last week, to see what they’d unveiled for the new season.

Well, what can I say? There’s a floral clock, an edible garden, displays made from Hannah Montana umbrellas, giant peacocks, vertical cars buried in flower beds (curiouser and curiouser) and houses covered in blooms.

A couple of different varieties of flower have even been added to the kaleidoscope of colour, as well as refreshment outlets serving ice cream, coffee, juices and the like.

Having paid the entry fee (Dhs 20 for everyone over the age of three), we stepped inside and realised immediately we’d chosen a busy day – the number of people, and cameras, meant the garden was quite literally crawling with life. But not only that, you quickly become aware that you’re being followed.

Your suspicions are confirmed when you step too close to the flowers, and the whistle-blowing starts. Woe-betide if you’ve come with a youngster who stops to smell the flowers. There’s a small army of over-enthusiastic, menacing guards, prowling round the garden, whistles at the ready, waiting to pounce on anyone who thinks this is just a park.

It’s not a park, they want us to know. It’s a work of art and while you’re free to enjoy the prettiness – and madness – of it all, you must.not.touch.

Looking around, I see a pregnant lady sitting on the grass, resting her weary feet, only to have a whistle blown at her by a guard clearly corrupted by all that power. Less than a minute later, I see another member of the visitor resistance jump out from behind the petunias to scare off a group of people looking too closely at the flowers.

A children’s play area and butterfly garden are promised, but we didn’t actually find them and ended up distracting our kids from the flowers by showing them the model elephants and giraffes over the fence, at the Dubai Properties office. The ice cream helped too.

If you go (joining the million people expected to visit this season), I have a few words of advice: pick a quiet day when the photo-taking petunia paparazzi aren’t out in force, and, above all, stick to the rules.

More information at: Miracle Garden Dubai

Our first visit: Dubai Miracle Garden

Dubai Miracle Garden

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I’d seen the sign in the corner of my eye while driving home from work last week: Dubai Miracle Garden. Hmm, I’d thought, I wonder what on earth THAT is?

You spot signposts laden with superlatives all the time in Dubai. On the last stretch of main road on my way home, you’re directed to an incongruous-sounding place known as Endurance City, and as you wind through the desert to our compound there’s a mysterious sign for somewhere called Lifestyle City – pointing, quite literally, to the barren middle of nowhere.

Judging by all the construction activity, I presume this ‘city’ of gym-loving, organically self-sufficient lifestyle disciples will soon rise from the sand, like the rest of Dubai.

The promise of a ‘miracle garden’, however, conjured up fleeting images of a children’s crystal garden chemistry experiment that were promptly erased from my mind in my rush to get home.

Puts my row of bougainvillea to shame

Puts my row of bougainvillea to shame

Then, the garden, which has sprouted just five minutes from our house, was featured on one of my favourite blogs. “By amazing garden, I don’t mean that Fatima round the corner has planted some new geraniums,” the author promised. She was talking about a site that claims to be “the most beautiful and biggest natural flower garden in the world.”

We were intrigued enough to pay the garden a visit this morning. My parents are staying and long-time readers will know my mum’s a gardener – I’d go so far as to say she’s a horticulturalist. “It won’t be like England, Mum,” I warned. “But this could be interesting.” And who wants to see the Burj when you’ve seen it hundreds of times already.

Opened on Valentine’s Day, Dubai Miracle Garden contains an incredible 45 million flowers, growing on land that was previously parched desert. The 72,000-square-metre site is a mass of colour, with traditional flowerbeds and topiary-style displays fashioned into hearts, pyramids, maypoles, igloos, birds and stars. In true UAE-style, there are cars with petunias and marigolds growing out of them, as well as a huge falcon covered in red and white blooms.

I’ve quite honestly never witnessed anything quite like it. If you’ve been to the UAE, you’ll have seen the pretty roadside displays of flowers that adorn the city’s junctions and roundabouts – the Miracle Garden takes these to a new and grandiose level, with an amusing twist.

Female Emirati students on a field trip

Female Emirati students on a field trip

Against a backdrop of arid desert, cranes and the replica space shuttle and rollercoaster that tower over Motor City, it’s a brilliant and expansive kaleidoscope of colour that brightens up the dusty, half-developed, suburban landscape no end.

So what did my green-fingered mother make of this explosion of flowers in the desert?

“Unique,” my mum ventured, “but not exactly natural,” she added, referring to the fact that not one flower is native to the region.

It takes a mind-boggling amount of water to establish a desert oasis like this – and keeping it alive in hostile conditions requires huge quantities every day. It’s made possible, the developer says, “through judicious re-use of waste water, through drip irrigation.”

But despite the lack of native plants more suited to the climate, we thoroughly enjoyed strolling around the Miracle Garden and walking under pergolas decorated with garlands of flowers. With plans to add retail outlets, restaurants and shops, and to change the floral displays each season, I’ve a feeling we’ll be back the next time my parents stay.

For further information, please visit the garden’s website.

Whatever you do, don't pick the flowers - there are security guards who appear to jump out from behind the petunias with whistles

Whatever you do, don’t pick the flowers – there are security guards who appear to jump out from behind the petunias with whistles

While the word 'natural' raised an eyebrow, it was certainly real enough to give me hay fever

While the word ‘natural’ raised an eyebrow, it was real enough to give me hay fever

Circles wins the garden contest!

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My 24-year-old self thought that entering neighbourhood garden contests was the preserve of bored, frustrated, curtain-twitching housewives with competitive tendencies.

It never crossed my mind that, 15 years later – in the desert of all places – I’d pick up a leaflet advertising a community garden competition that had been pushed under the door and put it in a safe place. That, a week later, I’d spend 20 minutes looking for the by-now-lost leaflet, and then, late one night, email a photo of our garden, taken when it was in bloom, to the organisers.

I didn’t even tell DH. I might have told my mum, who has such green fingers she could probably grow roses on the moon, and I mentioned it to Catherine the Great, who laughed. But I didn’t think anymore of it.

I blogged about our garden before. Previously just a giant sandpit, it now has real grass, brightly coloured bougainvillea and a selection of exceedingly hardy, heat-resistant desert plants. Like most families in Dubai, we have gardeners who come by twice a week, but compared to the lush oases that more horticulturally minded neighbours have created, our patch of desert is more Jungle Book than Kew Gardens. If I’m honest, I really don’t know one end of the garden shears from the other.

Inspired, I’ll be out there with the shears to do some pruning as soon as it’s cool enough

So I forgot all about it, until the email arrived to say we’d won. I’ve no idea how, but we’d won! My fate as a reluctant housewife with a garden to manicure was sealed.

And they wanted to come round with a prize!

Twenty minutes before their visit, I was rueing the fact I hadn’t high tailed it to the plant souk to do some repair work. I took the picture shortly after my mum had worked her magic on a visit. Since then, the plants in the photo had either grown to Jack-And-The-Beanstalk proportions, or died in the scorching sun.

At 4pm on the dot, three people arrived from Dubai Properties, one of them a photographer with a long-lens camera, the other two from marketing. Oh no, I cringed, they want photos for their brochure and they’re going to be horribly disappointed!

I didn’t let DH leave. I accepted the prize (a solar-powered lamp) apologetically and we all walked around the garden while the photographer took hundreds of pictures, and I made excuses for the fact that a) it didn’t look nearly as clipped and alive as in the photo (but, look, the grass is still green!) and b) I didn’t know the names of any of the plants.

I have to admit, I did rather enjoy feeling like we were on a shoot for House & Garden magazine, but when their marketing brochure is printed, I won’t be holding my breath.

I can’t show you the photo I entered, unfortunately, as it gives away where we live, but I can leave you with a feast for sore eyes – before and after shots of my mum’s English garden in Surrey. As you can see, I’ve got a lot to live up to!

What my mum and dad’s English garden looks like now

And how it looked before my Mum got her green fingers on it

Turning the desert green

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“Have you been inside?” It was the question on all my neighbours’ lips last week.

“Yes, twice today,” I heard mums reply. “There’s even a pork section,” – met with an intake of breath, a smile and a wide-eyed “Really?”

We were excited, you see, because we’ve waited three years for a grocery store to open in our compound here in Dubai.

Not only does it mean we don’t have to do a 10km loop anymore just to get milk, it also puts our community firmly on the map – quite something when you consider that in 2009, there was very little here.

Located outside the city in the desert, our newly built villas had sand lots for gardens when we moved in. The front- and backyards were, to the boys’ delight, literally giant sandpits.

The houses are painted a lemon colour – and with rolling desert for as far as the eye could see beyond our compound, the first impression was of acres of yellow, set against the brilliant blue of the cloudless sky.


For a long time, the only way in was via a bumpy, pot-holed track that 4by4s could just about handle without falling apart, but meant cars had to pick their way along, dodging craters, at a snail’s pace.

The roads around the compound were still under construction and I remember well the traffic layout changing overnight – a whole roundabout (a huge one!) vanished and everyone driving home the next day got completely and utterly lost.

Our compound wasn’t (and still isn’t) connected to a sewerage system or a mains water supply – poo trucks take sewage away and water trucks deliver desalinated water to a storage tank.

While everyone loved their brand-new villas, it did feel rather far and sparse, and calling a taxi in those days was like directing someone who doesn’t speak English, and is really only pretending they understand you, to a needle in a haystack.

The vast expanse of undeveloped desert where the boys play - perfect really!


From humble beginnings, our compound has slowly been added to – the swimming pool finally finished (once they worked out how to fill it with no mains water supply), a playarea, gym and dry cleaners opened, as well as a spa offering manis/pedis, massages and hair appointments. The shop took three years because of an electricity supply problem.

Planning is not always Dubai’s strong point.

How does your garden grow? Waiting for the newly planted clumps of grass to merge. In case you're wondering, an irrigation system automatically waters the whole garden twice a day (and yes, we did leave a sizeable sandpit for the boys round the back)!

““Get those villas up as fast as possible, fill ‘em with expats and we’ll worry about the utilities later,” must have been the developer’s mantra.

Today, our compound is even looking green as most people have landscaped their gardens, either planting clusters of grass that slowly merged to form a lawn, or rolling out instant-gratification ‘carpet grass’.

When our own grass was planted, in clumps, LB’s hair was just sprouting too and the race was on to see if our lawn or his locks would grow first.

The boys’ disappointment that I longed for grass and flowerbeds was quickly forgotten when they discovered the enormous patch of undeveloped desert just outside our compound, which we often zoom across in the SUV for fun. Perfect for kite-flying, excavating and quad-biking, there’s even a ravine with steep sides that the kids (and DH) slide down, nicknamed the Cliffs of Despair.

So that’s the story of our house built on sand. With the pioneering early days now passed, it feels like this corner of the desert has been well and truly conquered – and with the help of an awful lot of water, the desert has even been turned green.