Dubai Miracle Garden is the largest natural flower garden in the world. It features more than 50 million flowers and 250 million plants. If you have visited Dubai in the last 9 years, then you might be familiar with the astonishing beauties of this place. But what most of you did not know is that a Pakistani based Engineer in the UAE is behind the 72,000 square meters of floral art.
Farhan Shehzad is the General Manager Development at Cityland Group, the company that built the garden that now holds 3 Guinness World Records. Talking to Arab News, he said:
I still remember the day we first came to this place. It was all sandy and windy and I felt myself in the middle of a desert. But it’s all blooming today.
The 35-year-old also added that the journey to what the garden looks like today was not easy. In fact, he revealed that the Miracle Garden only represents 25% of their vision currently.
It was quite a challenge to convert this piece of desert into the floral show that it is today where the temperature and ambience makes you forget where you are.
People who visit the garden say that they can’t believe they are within the Arabian Desert. Luckily for Shehzad, he and his team had the skills and the knowledge to make this project successful.
This was only possible because we had the manpower, the expertise and the know-how. It’s been nine years now, but we are still learning and experiencing new things each day.
While initially, the floral structures were no more than 4 meters tall, they now hold the record for the tallest topiary-Â a Mickey Mouse structure that is 18 meters tall.
There are lots of challenges in making such tall structures including the design, putting in place the structural stability, the floral combinations and the hardest is the maintenance, which includes the irrigation component as well. What you see today is only 25 percent of what we have in mind because 75 percent of our ideas have not even materialized.
In addition to this, their latest addition, the Emirate Airbus A380 is the biggest flower structure in the world. So where do they get their plantation from in a desert? Well, Shehzad says that while the seeds are imported, everything else is done in-house.
We have in-house production of these flowers done at huge nurseries based in Al Ain city. We order seeds and cuttings from Europe and have the germination and on-site plantation all done in-house.
But importing seeds did not guarantee their success, they had to go through the process of trial and error to find what suits Dubai’s environment.
All these varieties are brought in from Europe where the temperature, ambience and environment are completely different from the Middle East, so the varieties that were doing well there did not respond well here and that’s how we knew what worked.
The team of 400 people (including 85% Pakistanis) works around the clock to ensure that the visitors see blooming flowers. There is no cultivation in the months of May and June.
In July we start planting seeds and cutting and when we bring them to the garden, they are in the blooming stage. It is important that when a visitor comes here, he sees blooming flowers.
After all the preparations and arrangements, the Dubai Miracle Garden is open to the public for 7 months before it is time for the team to change the display. But the 100-150 cubic meters of waste is also well taken care of.
We supply this waste to companies that turn it into fertilizer.
Watch Farhan Shehzad’s full interview here:
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Via Arab News
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Everybody like this location with Garden also.
I know Eng Farhan 12 yrs before we were working in one agricultural company in Al Ain he is very Hord worker and very polite man.Best of Luck.