Tag Archives: turning the desert green

Gardener Scissorhands

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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.

Say no to Damas trees!

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.

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

When the gardeners go berserk

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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.

Oh well, I guess it'll grow back.

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

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Turning the desert green
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A Damas tree ate my house

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

“A Damas tree ate my house”

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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

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.