Miracle Garden: A sea of orange, yellow and purple

At the entrance of the tree-less expanse known as the Dubai Miracle Garden, a sign reduces the name to DMG. DMG is an 80,000-sq ft large garden inaugurated earlier this year, on Valentine’s Day to be precise.

DMG may have taken 60 days and a work force of 400 to create a floral spectacle that costs $11 million.

The garden which had shut down during summer, re-opened on Thursday, in time for the National Day weekend. Of late, flowers have been in the news in Dubai. A fortnight before Dubai won the 2020 bid, 26.6 million seedlings of mostly marigolds and petunias were planted across the city, at roundabouts and road dividers, under flyovers and other public places.

Now on the cusp of National Day, it seems like the rest of the marigolds and petunias are at DMG. Everywhere you look there are marigolds — orange and yellow. And then come the little petunias, in multiple colours.

Families are aplenty, but the real sights were the woodpeckers nibbling on the grass. A kilometre or two within the range of the park, the drive has been lined with hedges that weren’t there in February. Commendable, indeed, as are the roundabouts, aesthetically sound with the rocks and long desert grasses.

Effort has gone into the landscape and the novelty factors on it. Crowds seem drawn to an area in the garden where old abandoned cars painted bright are parked, engines pointing skyward, positioned at near perpendicular inclines. Photos are taken next to figures of sailboats with the mast of the boat done up in black and red and green. It’s all in the spirit of the UAE.

Hearts still dominate the landscape, possibly in anticipation of the next Valentine’s Day

As a tip to the management that charges Dh20 per head for entry, they might want to sow seeds of some fast growing trees – papaya if it has to be but also frangipanis and acacias and desert willows and ghaf trees. So when the world comes to Dubai for Expo 2020 it can enjoy the flowers under some shade and the Dubai Miracle Garden will truly be a spectacle.

nivriti@khaleejtimes.com