It takes only a few minutes of conversation with Laura Allais-Maré (pictured) to sense the love of nature that inspires and informs her approach to gardening. For the passionate South African gardener and Slow Food activist, growing things is first and foremost about plugging ourselves back into nature and all the harmony, balance and wisdom that one can find in it.
“I practise permaculture,” she tells me when we meet in her Dubai Marina apartment. Permaculture is a philosophy and system of gardening that mimics growth and propagation found in natural ecosystems.
“I don’t prune the trees, I don’t brush the leaves away from the ground,” she says. “Whatever falls in my garden stays.” She believes we should learn from nature, instead of trying to change the way it does things. “So if my basil seeds itself around the garden, I just let it grow.”
Indeed, outside in the small garden, there are no neat rows or patches of herbs and vegetables. Things grow in a charmingly random way, with many varieties of heavily fragrant basil and other herbs growing lush and healthy everywhere I look.
A chilli plant at the back has little red fruit so perfect and bright I want to bite one off the delicate branches (probably also a dream of Allais-Maré’s African grey parrot Coco, who punctuates our conversation with hoots every few minutes). Here and there are beautiful small trees that Allais-Maré grew in pots in her previous balcony garden then transplanted into the ground when she moved into this ground-floor apartment. There’s mango, banana, moringa and lime, laden with fruit.
During the UAE summer, Allais-Maré says, plants should be allowed to rest. “People ask me what vegetables they should plant in the summer. Actually, the stress of growing in this excessive heat is just too much. Instead, come April and May, feed your plants very well, keep them watered and shaded over the summer, and just let them be.”
When she and her husband Freddie moved into their apartment a year ago, they inherited a garden with white sandy soil, a row of damas trees and some spindly bougainvillaea bushes. Freddie cut back the trees to make the foliage thicker near the ground. The damas now provide dappled and much-needed shade to the plants in the garden. “There’s also the abandoned blue umbrella we inherited from the previous owners,” she laughs. “I move it around the garden every two days to provide respite to different spots in the garden. Ideally, I would have a few date palms. They provide the perfect food forest cover in this region.”
To prepare the garden for transplanting the plants, the couple covered the ground in normal compost, as well as vermicompost. For plants in containers, Allais-Maré uses a 50/50 mixture of red sweet soil and organic compost. “With pots you have to be careful here in the heat. In my experience, if you use only compost, although all that coco peat and humus is good for water retention, it also means that the plant roots might literally cook and steam in the water. Sweet soil, on the other hand, acts like terracotta, staying moist, but more importantly keeping temperatures down inside the pot.”
Through BUGGS, the Balcony and Urban Gardening Group Allais-Maré started on Facebook, members have experienced significant growth in yields by following her advice.
Back inside, we go through Allais-Maré’s seed collection. “This is my treasure,” she says, revealing packets of heirloom organic varieties of vegetables and herbs, some saved by friends from their own plants. Heirloom seeds, as opposed to hybrids (used in commercial farming), produce plants true to the characteristics of the parent plant. From African horned cucumber to Mrs Burns’ lemon basil, Allais-Maré’s collection reflects the guardianship of nature she applies to her gardening. “We have to protect what nature has given us.”
Shumaila Ahmed is a Dubai-based gardener, teacher, researcher and writer.
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