Gardener Scissorhands

Posted on December 17, 2014 by Circles in the Sand

When we moved into our villa, the garden was literally a giant sandbox. We paid landscapers to turn it green, and unwittingly agreed to having Damas trees planted, which shot up to the sky in no time at all.

“We’ll plant ten trees,” the head gardener told us (omitting to mention that they’d position the saplings less than ten inches apart). “Very fast-growing trees. Very green,” he said, making bushy shapes with his hands.

Little did we know at the time that our leafy Damas trees would head upwards at an unstoppable rate, rather like Jack’s beanstalk or a hedge fund on speed. Whilst they certainly provided a lot of green foliage, and attracted some interesting birdlife, their rapid, out-of-control growth got me worried when I spotted Day of the Triffids-style stories online, such as A Damas tree ate my house.

Why, 10 of them, 10 inches apart, on steroids – what could go wrong!

The Damas root system, it turns out, is so aggressive in seeking out water and nutrients that it can strangle underground pipes, crack walls, choke drains and kill whole lawns.

We asked our gardeners, the very same people who introduced this species into our backyard in the first place. “Yes, very bad,” they nodded gravely – and it was agreed we’d pay them to topple the overgrown trees in stages.

Today, the remaining five were felled. I say felled, but really I mean pulled down. At least six gardeners arrived with no tools – not a chainsaw or ladder in sight, and proceeded to tear the huge trees down with their hands, an axe and some scissors (okay I made that last one up – they did have shears).

“We stand on the wall and cut as high as our hands can reach,” head gardener, who speaks the most English, has told me in the past, while nibbling on the biscuits I ply him with. And, somehow, this combination of rudimentary tools and manpower results in great big trees being shorn into lollipops.

This morning, when Gardener Scissorhands and his team set about scalping our backyard of its Damas trees, I perhaps shouldn’t have been surprised when, at some point, the water pipe to our house gets bludgeoned too.

After 4 hours with no water, and maintenance refusing to come (because it’s the gardeners’ fault), head honcho announces with a megawatt grin: “It’s fixed!”

Again, no tools! (Funnily, his head scarf has disappeared.)

Anyone who’s ever met a Dubai gardener-turned-tiler-turned-water pipe fixer will know exactly why I’m not expecting to be able to shower tomorrow.

When the gardeners go berserk

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Circles in the Sand

It’s no secret that in Dubai, most expat households enjoy perks in the form of housemaids and gardeners. It’s something that before you move to the UAE, you think you’d never partake in. Then, after a few months of living in our desert bubble, your long-held notions of self-sufficiency fly out the window.

We’ve had the same gardeners for four years now, which must be the equivalent of about a century in gardening years as most people change landscapers pretty frequently.

I’ve actually grown quite attached to our gardeners. They might have very little English and even less gardening knowledge, but they’re nice to my children, they’ve kept our garden not just alive but manicured in extreme temperatures for four summers, and, let’s not forget, they toil in the heat, with beads of sweat rolling down their foreheads.

They also have very few tools; I’ve watched them planting with their hands, literally scrabbling around in the dirt with their fingers, and have run out to offer them my trowel. When we asked them to prune some tall trees, we discovered their employer doesn’t equip them with a ladder either.

But it never ceases to amaze me what they can achieve with such rudimentary equipment. “We stand on the wall and cut as high as our hands can reach,” the head gardener from Pakistan, who speaks the most English, told me with a grin. And, somehow, this balancing act resulted in our trees being shorn into lollipops.

So, I should have known, when he mentioned to me yesterday that he was going to do some trimming on my favourite tree, that he’d get carried away. I turned my back for five minutes, while getting ready for Son2’s party, and, in that time, he must have grown scissorhands with a high-speed-bordering-on-massacre setting. Scalped is the only word for it.

The hack-job: Oh well, I guess it’ll grow back in a year or so

You might also like:

Circles wins the garden contest!
Turning the desert green
Dubai Miracle Garden
A Damas tree ate my house

“A Damas tree ate my house”

Posted on November 27, 2012 by Circles in the Sand

I’ve posted before about turning the desert green and, despite not having green fingers myself, it’s been a real joy watching our garden grow over the past three years.

One of my favourite plants: our eye-popping bougainvillea

And grow it did, from humble sandpit beginnings into a fully-hedged, little oasis of green – helped by an automatic irrigation system that turns sprinklers on twice a day (“rain”, as the children hopefully call it) and drips water onto the thirsty flower beds.

As well as a real grassy lawn and some hardy plants, the other thing that completed our sand lot’s transformation into a lush garden was a wall of trees along the back boundary.

“We’ll plant ten trees,” the landscapers told us (omitting to tell us that they’d position the saplings less than ten inches apart).

“Very fast-growing trees. Very green,” he said, making bushy shapes with his hands.

The tree he was referring to is native to the Arabian Peninsula, has been planted (inexpensively) in communities all over Dubai, and does indeed shoot up to the sky rather like Jack’s beanstalk.

Called Damas trees, they can grow up to 15 metres high and in our garden certainly provided a lot of green foliage, as well as attracting birds and salamanders.

Hedge fund: Our unstoppable, leafy Damas trees, heading upwards at a rapid rate

We weren’t aware of the huge problems these trees can cause until they hit the media a little while ago – and killed my friend’s lawn (right behind us) due to totally blocking out the sun.

The Damas root system, it turns out, is so aggressive in seeking out water and nutrients that it can strangle underground pipes, crack walls, choke drains and stop other plants from growing.

You only have to do a quick search on Google to read headlines such as “A Damas tree ate my house” and to find out that a “Protect your home from Damas tree disaster campaign” was launched recently by a community management company.

Worried, I dug deeper online and on an expat forum read about a villa with 60 Damas trees that had “grown under the ground, around the pool, under our house foundations and are trying to come up in our central hallway,” cracking tiles.

Another post described how Damas roots had infiltrated their downstairs bathroom: “One day, I opened the cupboard under the sink to get some new toothbrushes out for the kids and found a lovely tree inside. The roots were also growing under the bath and had completely cracked the tub,” the post read.

Is it just me, or does this all sound like The Day of the Triffids to you?

I asked our gardeners, the very same people who landscaped our garden with the trees in the first place. “Yes, very bad,” they nodded – and it was agreed they’d topple half of them and prune the rest.

I’m pleased to say, the job is now done. Our Damas trees have been thwarted (for the time being), our neighbour’s lawn can see the light of day, and – after the gardeners went completely nuts with the saw – we’re left with…

Five lollipops!

Rasputin trees: You can’t simply lop the tree off above the ground as it just grows back, leading people to take extreme measures. One person I heard about chopped a Damas tree down, drilled a big hole in the middle of the trunk, poured petrol down and burnt the stump!

On a prettier note, you’d be amazed at the flora and fauna that grows in Dubai, creating explosions of colour in our desert garden

Circles wins the garden contest!

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Circles in the Sand

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!