Green Club Magazine n.4

Popular imagination pictures gardens as places with perfectly manicured green lawns bordered by splendid, well-trimmed bushes and an array of brightly coloured flowers. Glossy magazines and gardening books picture idyllic bucolic scenes with roses and clematis vying each other in splendour. The mere thought of a garden in the midst of an arid desert, where water is a matter of wishful thinking, seems incredibly bizarre, almost totally absurd. Yet gardens can grow under a blazing sun, in rocky, parched terrain, where rainfall is rare, or even non-existent. Indeed, many of the plants that grow naturally in very dry conditions are actually easier to cultivate, as long as the gardener respects their origins, which means not watering them during the summer. The Ceanothus from the Californian hills, or Sicilian capers, or again Lithodora fruticosa, can’t take the heat combined with moisture: if you water them during the summer months, they die. Instinctively we tend to think that water automatically brings luxuriant plants and flowers in its wake, while arid dryness inevitably means dust, thorn and scrub. But this conventional view is not always true. The flora in Mediterranean climates is much more luxuriant than it is in temperate zones. Estimates calculate that plants from the Mediterranean area account for roughly 10% of the world’s total flora. Plants that live in arid climes have developed important adaption strategies as they evolved. An awareness of these strategies is an essential part of creating a successful garden in arid zones. One example of a successful evolution strategy is to retreat when conditions get just too tough. In some desert regions plants have a very short life cycle. Because rainfall is so rare, plants flower rapidly, on the same day of the rain, and after a very few days they die, but not before releasing an abundant quantity of seed that will lie hidden in the desert for the rest of the year. Despite their brief life cycle, when they do flower it is a unique sight: huge swathes of land carpeted with brightly-coloured flowers. These are the so-called flowering deserts, like the Atacama in Chile, the Mojave in California and the Sonora, on the border between the USA and Mexico.

Coaxing flowers to grow in the desert and to create the largest oasis in the world, these are the new challenges the Paghera Group face in the immediate future.

As well as working on splendid gardens dotted around the Mediterranean, in Turkey and in France, where Mediterranean flora plays the role of the protagonist in a riot of flowers, colours and scents. Plants used to living in dry climates, which have adapted to various conditions of soil, climate, exposure and latitude over time. Gardens governed by nature alone, free to live a natural, untrammelled life. Gardens which may sometimes lose an individual plant which has struggled to become acclimatised, but safe in the knowledge that another, hardier example will soon replace it.