gardeners in Dubai Archives - Circles in the SandCircles in the Sand

If you’ve been following my blog, you might remember the day our gardeners, using only very rudimentary tools, managed to bludgeon a water pipe while toppling our Damas trees.

After four hours with no water, and maintenance refusing to come (because “it’s the gardeners’ fault”), the boss garden man announced with a megawatt grin: “It’s fixed!”

Funnily, his head scarf had disappeared.

A sad day for our garden at Layan Community

But actually I have a big soft spot for our gardeners. They might have very little English and even less gardening knowledge, but they’re nice to my children, and kept our garden not just alive but manicured in extreme temperatures for seven long summers.

During the hot months, they toil away with beads of sweat rolling down their foreheads, doing much of the work with their hands, literally scrabbling around in the dirt with their fingers to plant flowers.

As well as plying them with water and biscuits, I’ve run out to offer them a trowel before (you’d think their company would provide one!), and when we asked them to prune some tall trees, we discovered their employer doesn’t equip them with a ladder either.

Said gardeners now have their last job to do at our old house – tearing the garden down (why? Click here), and it was a sad day today when I saw all our plants and trees chopped up. The dying grass, killed by the sun and broken irrigation, was tinged with brown and looked like the burnt-out end of a cigarette.

Returned to sand as no-one wants to pay for watering

A lone palm tree stood sentinel against the clear blue sky, with a trough dug all around it, ready for the massive tree to be pulled up (the gardeners are trying to steal it to sell, but we’re turning a blind eye). We popped into the empty house, where the AC was still running, and our crew of men were all fast asleep on the hard floor. We pushed the door shut quietly – it’s inhumane to expect anyone to work outdoors in the stifling heat of the midday sun.

Tomorrow, they should (hopefully!) show up at our new house to start the whole process again; right now, the small yard is a sand pit, and the sand gets everywhere, so I’m really looking forward to this place greening up. Especially as the compound’s landscapers also appear to have chop-tastic tendencies and have pruned the bushy Desert Grass out the back to within two inches of its life.

Gotta love Dubai gardeners and their scissorhands – but such a pity we’ve been forced to destroy our much-loved gardens at Layan Community.

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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.

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.