Gardening In Dubai

Plant Souk, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
April, 2010

As you probably already know, souks, like markets and bazaar, are prevalent throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa, and here in Dubai the most popular ones for those visiting this city are for gold, diamonds, spices, and textiles. Located within the most picturesque confines of the old city, when you think of these places one conjures up the typical images - bustling alleyways, vociferous stall owners anxious to make a deal, the evening air heady with the various smells of incense and spices. At the complete opposite end of the spectrum, Dubai’s plant souk is located some 35 km outside of the city between desert, a sewage treatment plant, power lines, and not surprisingly, even more desert. Though not the easiest place to get to, it is a drive I must make if I am to have any chance at transforming this patch of sand that Allah, if even only temporarily, has allocated to me. Comprised of over some 30 odd individually owned nurseries, the plant souk awaits as a welcoming patch of green in an other wise sandy and dusty landscape, and it is to this location that I make frequent pilgrimages, even if it means contending with the frenetic traffic of a twelve lane free-way and the odd vagabond camel. This is definitely not North Saanich anymore.

While it is certainly true that the ‘big box’ stores similar to home can be found here, if the line-up of late model Land Rovers outside and the subsequent queue of the typical ex-pat inside are to serve as any indication, these stores are convenient in an otherwise inconvenient place, and are, as a result, expensive. More importantly, prices are fixed and bargaining is definitely not an option.

No, instead, budget conscious plant-lovers must be desert bound to the Plant Souk, where the trick to shopping there, as I have come to discover, is to try and remain as under whelmed as possible. Not an easy feat indeed, especially when there are just so many places to shop……….the long driveway in winds past all the various stalls where the ‘eye candy’ of the moment - anything from Saudi petunias, fruiting orange trees to red hibiscus - is lined up neatly and where shop owners give a friendly wave in a bid to make you stop and come in. With diesel engines rattling away, delivery trucks are always on the go, unloading plants from as far away as Holland and Thailand, and from as locally as Saudi Arabia , Oman and other parts of the United Arab Emirates.

Acres of shade cloth protect the vested interests below - palms, cycads, ficus, ixoras, frangipani, banana trees, mangos, olives, all varieties of jasmine - even roses and hydrangeas - the list is endless. Here, even the ex-patriot community does not remain human specific - jacarandas and agapanthus from South Africa are welcome neighbours to the indigenous Azederacha indica (Neem Tree); the desert rose (Adenium) plays happy host to such southern American transplants as liriope and members of the tecoma family. And it is here, under the relative coolness of the shade cloth, that you suddenly develop a shadow of the human kind.

I am not sure if it is as a result of the far reaching effects of the recent global economic downturn, or if, quite simply, it has always been this way, but upon entering an individual nursery at the plant souk, you automatically acquire your own personal customer sales ‘companion‘. Always helpful, but not necessarily available for advice (language more often that not being the barrier), a wheelbarrow is provided and not so much as a 4” container may be reached for without some form of protest. In fact, one wonders if Friday, the Holy Day, would not be a better day to visit with the various stalls left unattended and free for investigation as the nurserymen head to the local mosque for prayer time . Nevertheless, plant material compiled, sorted and loaded into the back of the SUV, this is where the fun begins……..while prices aren’t quite ‘fixed’ per se, the bargaining that one would expect at such a souk not does quite exist. There are no membership cards here, but as in typical fashion on this side of the globe, the more you frequent the store, the more you save. What would originally cost dhs. 20 for a 1 gallon pot size on the first visit now drops to dhs. 15 ($1.00 CAN is approximately worth AED 3.70) on the second. The third and fourth visits not only bring further discounts but free plants as well - suddenly an immediate home for all of those purple petunias becomes the day’s planting priority.

In an attempt to simplify things somewhat, I have had to limit my visitations to just 3 or 4 of all of the available nurseries. As in the case of most retail situations, this is largely due to assistance provided as opposed to selection available as much of the nursery stock is the same throughout the plant souk. In my particular case, the Middle-Eastern climate is not anything I have ever had experience with before - the extreme heat, incessant sunshine, wind, unknown plant varieties and how to deal with them all together have provided me with an extremely steep learning curve - I need all the help I can get. Fortunately, help is also readily available at the plant souk.

My ‘go-to guy’ these past 6 months since I have been able to start my garden in Dubai is Salahuddin of Oakland Agriculture. Always patient, he fields my multitude of questions with helpful suggestions, but this is where the local horticultural vernacular can make things confusing. Fertilizer as we know it in the Western world is referred to here as ‘NPK’, with ‘fertilizer’ itself being something else quite different, generally something manure-related……….’sweet soil’ is actually a different type of sand and ‘compost’ is actually potting soil. As far as I know, ‘water’ is still water, but even of that I am not 100% certain - Dibba, an area on the coast where a lot of the nurseries grow their products, is well known for its ‘sweet water‘, so I can only imagine that the water there contains many more nutrients than the de-salinated water used within Dubai. I haven’t had to resort to using any ‘medicine’ yet, but if that bug the size of a small dog ever comes back to strip the leaves off my lime tree again, I may well have to. That having been said, most visits to Salahuddin’s shop of late have been in an attempt to do some problem solving, and it is at this point that visiting the plant souk starts to resemble past nursery experiences at home. I am fortunate enough to have several delonix regia (The Royal Flame Tree) in my yard, which some consider to be amongst the most beautiful flowering trees in the world. It has been a cause for great consternation these past few months that 4 of my 7 delonix have done absolutely nothing………in fact, while the other 3 have grown considerably and become veritable trees, these 4 have dropped all of their leaves as if to protest having been moved from the lush, cool confines of the shaded plant souk in the first place. Nonetheless, a ‘Salam-Al-la-koom’ later and Salahuddin is ready to help………We run through the gambit of questions I would be asking my customer were I in his shoes (NPK? Water? Too much water? Too much sun? Not enough sun?) and finally, a scratch of the head later……‘Well then, Miss Leah, Allah must make it so, probably around the 1st of March’. As it happens, Allah prevailed, but it was actually closer to the 4th of March when I was finally able to spot the new buds breaking…..with daytime highs of only 27C, this was winter here, and mostly nothing grows - who knew?

The trunk full and the wallet empty yet again of dirhams, it’s been yet another successful visit to the plant souk, and as the sand swirls around and the Emirates’ wide-body jets roar overhead as a constant reminder as how I have come to find myself transplanted here, the plant souk itself awaits, a symbol of familiarity in a very different land. Must keep an eye out for that vagabond camel.

Leah Croft, 18 April, 2010