When it comes to holidays my wife is a long-suffering widow to the landscape. This is doubly unfortunate because (a) nothing excites her more than the prospect of foreign travel and (b) the landscape is rather ubiquitous. This is not helped by the fact that over the years she has become adept at identifying the triggers and cues that announce the onset of the next deeply fascinating landscape experience to impinge upon the increasingly fugitive holiday of her dreams.
I'm told that a reliable early sign of my impending tedium is the fact our fellow travellers mysteriously age by 30 years as we near our destination: public gardens tend to attract the over-60s. There is also my tendency to start measuring spaces - either by shuffling along heel-to-toe or goose-stepping across them like some horticultural Basil Fawlty in an effort to understand the exact proportions of the nearest lawn or town square.
Several years ago we shared a very special afternoon in a charming Greek provincial town full of enticing coffee shops and antiques, where the paving was so ingenious that it had me photographing the ground for several hours. I remember the drive home being uncharacteristically quiet. Given this state of affairs it's probably not surprising that my wife and I swapped roles in advance of our holiday this summer. With an itinerary that included Wiltshire, Dorset and Hampshire in England and the Lazio region of Italy, I was the one whistling with excitement as we boarded the plane. With the potential for such rich horticultural pickings, I hadn't even bothered with a "must do" list but thought, instead, that I'd allow myself to enjoy the wonders of garden history as they happened to fall across my path. As it turned out, I missed nearly all of the sites that I'd anticipated most and my abiding memories came not from the gardening glories of the English and Italian Baroque, but instead from a truly extraordinary local landscape.
Lago di Bracciano lies 30km north of Rome. Acting as a reservoir for the capital, it's a wide, deep crater lake formed thousands of years ago in the caldera of an extinct volcano. As you leave the Autostrada and descend towards Bracciano, it's impossible to take in the lake's 56 square kilometres in one go. While the dinghies, windsurfers, waves and whitecaps that raced across its huge surface almost succeeded in creating the illusion that we were nearing the sea, the surrounding landscape was equally beguiling.
With its volcanic peaks, villa-topped outcrops, crumbling towers and swathes of dark forest, the view from our accommodation was picturesque; however, like one of Zuber's great panoramic wallpapers, the composition also contained dissonant and unexpected elements. Jostling for space with groves of indigenous oak, pine, alder and willow were sub-tropical palms (Phoenix canariensis) and silk tassel trees (Albizia julibrissin) , while giant hedgerows of oleander (Nerium oleander) and hot cascades of bougainvillea vied for attention.
We had arrived expecting a Virgilian landscape but had walked, instead, straight into one from Jurassic Park. While oleander is a Mediterranean native, the others hail from the Canary Islands, Asia and South America respectively; all are now ubiquitous in the world's warmest zones. At first the presence of international species so familiar from the UAE offered a sense of horticultural reassurance. After a while, however, we looked past these foreign imports and began to seek all that was local, authentic and distinctive.
The situation reminded me of home as I was struck by the realisation that it was precisely this use of colourful, showy, non-native species that gives so many of the designed and manicured landscapes in the UAE the quality of theme parks. What were tourists' reactions, I wondered, to our parks, streets and floral displays that, although unusual for the levels of cash, and manpower lavished on them, could be anywhere in the world, given the design language and plant species they contain?
When I first arrived in Abu Dhabi I remember being struck by how strongly its green spaces and suburban streets reminded me of so many other places that I had visited. Over time, however, I've developed an appreciation for plants that are local and distinctive above all that is bland, international and familiar. As this has happened I've learnt to love this city and am now happy to call it home. It's the realisation that the UAE and its native flora have something rather special to offer gardeners and visitors alike that has caused this transformation in my affections, and I would urge you to join me in going native and in celebrating all that is truly Arabic, distinctive and local.
