Working with nature

You cannot put in a plant that has high maintenance. You need to put in plants that work together.

It's not just about bringing very beautiful plants.

There are many plants that [people] love in Europe and that look very nice, but when we use them here we have a bad result.

Attitudes towards plant selection are starting to change, with people now more keen to use local plants, she said.

"People come to us for advice," she said. "Before, many plants died. Now we give people lists and people more and more go for local plants in their projects."

Two of the best-known indigenous plants are the Date palm, known for its edible fruit, and the Ghaf tree.

Stephen Oehme, regional director at consultancy firm Hyder, agrees that there has been a shift in attitude.

"There has been this big thinking that you need to bring in plants from other places, but you can use a lot of native plants from here and they look fantastic," he says.

Nurturing the soil

Selecting native plants is only the start, however. Another aspect of eco landscaping is soil treatment.

This means not only adding composts and other things that will help to nourish the soil, but also not dumping a lot of chemicals and pesticides and fertilisers that are not natural into the soil.

"A lot of herbicides and some of the pesticides we put on the landscapes actually kill the good guys as well as the bad guys and so you have a dead soil, instead of a soil that is teeming with micro-organisms and bacteria and things like that," explains Sargent-O'Neill.

Ralf Stahl, managing partner of UAE company Zeoplant, says that interest in soil amendment products has shot up over the past few years.

The firm, which sells a water retaining soil amendment, claims that use of its product can reduce the amount of irrigation water required by as much as 50%, by reducing the percolation rate of the irrigation water in the soil.

"We mix the product into the soil, which is normally sand here and sand does not have any water holding capacity so once you irrigate, the water gets leached out very quickly. With our product we are increasing the soil quality and the soil structure," he says.

Treatment of soil is crucial to ecological landscaping, says the ELA's Sargent-O'Neill.

"If you don't have good soil, it's going to make it very difficult for a landscape to continue to be healthy. When it starts declining it gets into a vicious cycle because then you put more stuff on, you treat the symptoms, not the problems. Encouraging really healthy soil is key," she says.

Avoid water waste

Saving water is a crucial consideration for ecological landscapers in the Middle East region given the awkward coupling of scarce water supplies and clients' requests for lush greenery.

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