photos

Joao Silva for The New York Times

Muhi Mohammed Hussein trimmed an eagle-shaped topiary sculpture at the entrance to his home in Baghdad on Friday.

Khalil Abbas says people come to his nursery from all over Baghdad and the rest of Iraq now that security has improved.

Top of FormNew York Times      November 1, 2009

By JOHN LELAND

BAGHDAD — Khalil Abbas has worked with plants since he was 7 years old, and his tree nursery could be a barometer of Iraq’s changing fortunes. During the 1970s, when Iraqis enjoyed a flood of oil money, customers flocked to him to supply elaborate gardens, buying plants imported from Jordan and Syria, Mr. Abbas said. Then after the American invasion of 2003, business came to a halt.

“When the situation was dangerous, people from other neighborhoods were unable to come here, and we couldn’t go there,” he said.

On a recent morning Mr. Abbas, 58, sat in an office that was surrounded by sicus palms, ficus trees, gardenias, fruit trees and other plants. As security has improved, he said, people have been buying plants again, coming to the nursery in the Jadriya neighborhood not only from other parts of Baghdad but also from around the country. Business has multiplied eightfold since 2005, including brisk sales in small sicus palms, which cost about $350.

“A lot of people are getting money from the government,” he said, “so it’s not just embassies buying. Now regular people buy as well.”

Gardens remain one of the few flourishes of public ornament on Baghdad’s otherwise brown streets, defiant displays of foliage amid concrete blast walls and security checkpoints. And in its middle-class neighborhoods, Baghdad is a city of surprising topiary sculptures: leafy ficus trees are carved in geometric spirals, balls, arches and squares, as if to impose order on a chaotic sprawl. The trees provide a startling counterpoint of color and contour to the uniformly tan and rectilinear houses and walls surrounding them.

“This is our kingdom, our home,” said Mohammed al-Khalidy, an electrical engineer, standing in his garden, where ficus trees carved like deconstructed snowmen flank the street.

Mr. Khalidy has worked for American agencies, and he said that as a result he had received death threats and that three cars had been destroyed at his home. His windows still bear masking tape X’s, to prevent them from shattering easily.

“This is where we have our relaxation,” he said, speaking English. “There is no safe location where we can go.”

Even during the high periods of sectarian violence, he said, he and his family entertained guests in the garden. “Of course,” he said. “What can we do?”

During the worst years, he said, it was difficult to buy plants, so the family used clippings to fill out the garden. Even when car bombs were exploding in the neighborhood, his mother insisted on watering the garden daily. “We didn’t change,” he said.

For Falah Mohammed, standing beneath a massive topiary arch by his driveway, the improved security in Baghdad has brought its own problem: he cannot find a gardener with enough time to take care of his trees. His quiet street is lined with neat gardens.

“The gardener used to come every day,” said Mr. Mohammed, who runs a flour factory. “Now he only comes two times a month because he has too much work.”

Mr. Mohammed said he never had trouble getting plants, because he lived near enough to Mr. Abbas’s nursery. But the costs of maintaining his garden have risen.

“Before, it was very cheap, $10 a visit,” he said. “Now he’s asking $100 to come two times a month.”

Topiaries are not traditional in Iraq, said Salwa Nori, an agricultural engineer and garden designer. She said that she closed her business for two years during the violent times, but that since late 2006 it has been growing.

“It comes from Europe or wherever people travel, and they bring it back,” she said. “And now it comes from the Internet and satellite channels.”

Though Iraqis began experimenting with topiary gardens in the 1990s, they have become popular only in recent years, and only in wealthy neighborhoods.

“Right now, the provinces are getting interested, it’s not just the capital,” Ms. Nori said. Still, she said, even in Baghdad, “There are a lot of beautiful gardens but the people are out of the country” because of the violence.

On a battered street in the middle-class neighborhood of Zayouna, Muhi Mohammed Hussein trimmed an elaborate plant sculpture in the shape of an eagle in front of his home. Flanking it were bushes shaped like corkscrews, flowers and straw baskets, which he said took him four or five months to create using wire frames to form the shapes.

When sectarian violence was at its peak, he said, people in Baghdad were not interested in his work, so he left for Dubai and the northern city of Erbil. But now there is a place in Baghdad for his creations, he said.

“Iraq has suffered for a long time, so now I’m trying to give a smile back to Iraq with beautiful plants,” he said.

For Mazen Hammad, who works for the Ministry of Health, his garden was a refuge from the violence. Mr. Hammad talked among hedges carved like the battlements of a castle.

“When the situation was bad, I took care of the garden more than when it’s good,” he said. “When you take care of the garden, you forget the war. But when the situation is good, you’re too busy with work.”

Mr. Abbas, who runs the nursery, said a recent trend was for people to buy seedlings, intending to carve their names into the leaves when the trees grow up. Iraq’s topiary gardens, he said, are just beginning.

Not far from his nursery, the wrecked frame of a building testified to the effects of a car bomb, but amid his trees Mr. Abbas was serene. Still, he said, he does not like to see a beautiful tree overshadowed by an ugly concrete blast wall. “It’s a big disaster,” he said.

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Defiant Gardens: Connecting Families and Communities
The deployment of soldiers overseas places stress on children, spouses and the community at large.  But there are some promising approaches to fostering resilience among military families and communities, including nature-based activities and Civic Ecology Education, where youth and adults partner to enhance the local environment, form long-term relationships, learn about natural science and get exercise.
Defiant Gardens is a program of the Military Families Project, a partnership between Cornell Cooperative Extension Association of Jefferson County, Cornell University Department of Natural Resources and The Growing Connection (TGC), a grassroots project developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (http://www.thegrowingconnection.org). The Military Families Project will investigate the ability of a multi-generational Civic Ecology Education program to help communities deal with the stress of the military deployment cycle. The Military Families Project is funded by monies from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) under the Hatch Act. Implementation of the Defiant Gardens program was made possible by a grant from the Jefferson County Department of Social Services.
Robert Patterson, Senior Liaison Officer, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, will be presenting Fort Drum’s Hearts Apart Community and Container Gardening Club with 12 EarthBox container garden kits for use in the Defiant Gardens program, purchased by Cornell University’s Initiative for Civic Ecology. Patterson will be teaching Hearts Apart members about the EarthBox system at 12:00 p.m. Thursday, May 14, 2009 at Army Community Service (ACS), P-4330 Conway Road. Members of Hearts Apart will then plant vegetables in the containers the group will tend throughout the summer. The planting is expected to end by 2:00 p.m.
Joining Patterson will be Keith G. Tidball, Associate Director of Cornell University’s Initiative for Civic Ecology (http://krasny.dnr.cornell.edu/pages/ce.php) and Stephanie Graf, Youth and Family Development Program Leader, Cornell Cooperative Extension Association of Jefferson County.
The ACS container garden is one of eight Defiant Gardens the Military Families Project will plant in Jefferson County. These gardens are sites where children and families, both military and civilian, can share their experiences and bond as community members during the school year and throughout the summer. Four additional gardens will be planted in deployment-affected communities across New York State such as Buffalo and Utica.
Kenneth Helphand, author of the book Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime, defines defiant gardens as “gardens created in extreme or difficult environmental, social, political, economic, or cultural conditions. These gardens represent adaptation to challenging circumstances, but they can also be viewed . . . as sites of assertion and affirmation.”
Youth from military families and their parents, retired soldiers, neighbors, and friends will plant Defiant Gardens at sites donated by American Legions, VFW Posts, schools, and other civic organizations. The partnerships formed by children, veterans, and other community members will assist families in navigating the deployment cycle.  These children will also connect with their parents overseas by sharing their gardening successes through regular emails, weekly phone calls, social networking websites such as Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) and MySpace (http://www.myspace.com), and our Defiant Gardens blog (http://defiantgardens.blogspot.com -or- http://defiantgardens-jefferson.blogspot.com/ ).
Ideal participants in the program will be military families with middle-school aged students with one or more parent in the deployment cycle (deploying, deployed, or recently returned from deployment), spouses of soldiers in the cycle, veterans, community members and non-military families, civic leaders, teachers, and members of school administrations. Participants will benefit from the project by creating community support networks for military families, allowing military families to educate the community on deployment issues, creating a communication connection between the children and their deployed soldier, increasing military families’ resiliency as they navigate the deployment cycle, and assisting the families with the reunion and reintegration process.
For more information regarding the Defiant Gardens program, please call Keith G. Tidball at Cornell University at 607-254-5479, or 315/788.8450 and speak with Jeremiah Maxon at x 260 or Holly Sakowich at x 229 of Cornell Cooperative Extension of Jefferson County.

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This note was in answer  to my e-mail regarding their garden:

.. the garden idea was just something we thought we’d try, the Iraqi people grow a very big variety of produce. Our garden was grown right out in front of our house. Permission was not needed. The soil is not sand as everybody seems to think, it is more of a brown dirt, and when watered it gets very hard, almost like clay. When it is driven on over and over, it turns to a fine powder, about like flower, and when you drive on it it flows from the tires like water. We didn’t have a very good crop, our sunflowers and cucs did very well but couldn’t get onions to do much, and the corn got really big but evidentally it didn’t pollinate. . .

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This note was in answer  to my e-mail regarding their garden:

I came up with the idea, along with Sgt Wanzek, because we were missing home, farming, and the joy of growing something. We had a spell when supply lines were all but cut by the insurgents, and I said we might be able to grow our own vegetables, since the MREs dont have them and the supply trucks werent making it to our FOB. Friends of myself and SGT Wanzek, named Nathan and Stacy Hoehn in Valley City, ND, had the seeds donated by the Valley City Nursery. The Hoehns also sent over some garden hose and a sprinkler, the sprinker we didn’t use. We learned from the locals to irrigate with deep trenches and let the water soak into the dirt in between. At 140 degrees air temperature, I suspect the water would have evaporated before it hit the ground. Sgt Wanzek has garden experience and my wife, children and I put one in every year. It is good family time and maybe in a way, the garden helped me kind of cope with missing them. I caught myself drifting back to home with the 4 of us all spending quality family time in our garden. We are both very proud of what we accomplished, as Sgt Dobler’s article said, we had enough corn, beans and carrots than we could eat and started giving them away. We got a lot of looks from people and they thought it was quite an idea. I do have to add that this was done in our spare time. At the time of garden prep, planting, weeding and watering, Sgt Wanzek and myself, along with the rest of our crew, were running 4-6 combat patrols a week, in 100-140 degree weather. When we came back to our area, we had a hard time getting motivated to work and weed, but we did. Like I said, it was good therapy to relax after a day of dodging roadside bombs, RPGs and escorting semi trucks full of unexploded ordinance over the worst stretch of road in northern Iraq. The best pictures are the ones Sgt Dobler took, but both Sgt Wanzek and I would be more than proud if you use them. We are currently in Kuwait, now, waiting for a flight home. WE MADE IT!!!!!!! That is all that matters to us anymore. Out of Iraq and out of danger. . .

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By Hannah Allam, McClatchy Newspapers
Dec. 26, 2006

Jaafar Hamid al Ali, supervisor of Baghdad Parks, in Zawraa Park, the only operating park in the Iraqi capital.BAGHDAD — The flowers appear overnight, and in the unlikeliest of places: carnations near a checkpoint, roses behind razor wire, and gardenias in a square known for suicide bombings.

Sometimes, U.S. armored vehicles hop a median and mow down the myrtle, leaving Baghdad parks workers to fume and reach for their trowels. When insurgents poured kerosene over freshly planted seedlings, landscapers swore a revenge of ficus trees and olive groves.

It’s all part of a stealthy campaign to turn the entire capital into a green zone.

Jaafar Hamid al Ali, the Baghdad parks supervisor, leads the offensive. He’s got a multi-million-dollar budget, along with 1,500 intrepid employees and a host of formidable enemies. There’s the fussy climate, salty soil, and nonstop violence that killed 30 of his workers in 2006. Every fallen gardener, Ali said, is a martyr in the struggle to beautify Baghdad.

“My principle is, for every drop of Iraqi blood, we must plant something green,” he said. “One gives disappointment, the other gives hope.”

Ali, 62, cuts a dapper figure among Iraqi bureaucrats. One recent chilly afternoon at his headquarters at Zawraa Park, the only operating park in Baghdad, he wore a knee-length hounds-tooth overcoat, a navy Yves St. Laurent jacket, and spit-shined shoes. Someone had scribbled a flower on the nameplate that hangs on his office door.

He’s a French-educated former professor who can recount by memory the history of flora in Iraq. The supposed site of the fabled hanging gardens of Babylon lies just 50 miles south of where he works.

Ottoman rulers established the first official public parks, some of which remained open well into the 1920s, Ali said. In the 1930s, the Baghdad city council built a few more parks and for the next four decades worked toward a goal of allotting 160 square feet of green space for each resident. By the 1970s, they’d reached 85 square feet per person.

“Our ambition was to hit the international standard by the 1980s,” al-Ali said. “But then came the Iraq-Iran war.”

Frequent power interruptions during the eight-year war left Baghdad residents with no way to heat their homes in the winter. Ali, by that time a high-ranking parks employee, had overseen the planting of a large forest in the Furat neighborhood. It took 12 years for the acacia, casuarina and eucalyptus to mature, he said, and just one night for locals to chop down half the forest for firewood.

“I found them still dragging the wood away,” he recalled. “I had a stroke. I had to go straight to the hospital.”

He recovered, but Baghdad parks did not. The Gulf War in 1991 dealt a fresh blow. Ali watched with fury as Saddam Hussein rewarded his generals by issuing presidential orders that turned the people’s parks into his cronies’ private gardens.

By the time U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam in 2003, there were just 5 square feet of park space for each Baghdad resident. Acacias and tall date palms still lined many avenues in the capital — until insurgents began firing on U.S. troops from the brush.

Coalition forces razed acres of palm groves, Ali said, partly for security and partly to widen the passageways for their hulking armored personnel carriers. Airport Road, once one of the loveliest of thoroughfares, remains a barren ribbon of knee-high palm stumps.

“We had big hopes of restoring greenery to Baghdad right after the fall of the regime,” Ali said. “Unfortunately, the friendly forces contributed to destroying what very little was left.”

Ali had written off parks work as futile and had become a successful businessmen and a member of the Mansour neighborhood council. Yet he couldn’t shake thoughts of his boyhood home, with a courtyard in the middle. His father tended the family’s grapevines, flowers and fruit trees. The fragrance still wafts through Ali’s memory.

In 2004, he succumbed to his passion, took a pay cut and signed a contract to become supervisor of Baghdad parks. The task seemed ludicrous to many Iraqis living in the throes of war, but he couldn’t bear to see his city hidden behind blast walls and coils of concertina wire. The gray, bullet-scarred tableau gnaws at the soul, he said, and makes war seem permanent.

“This,” he declared, “is the right time for flowers.”

Ali spent most of that first year simply refurbishing the city’s nurseries, which had been destroyed by looters in the days after Saddam’s ouster. He ordered seeds from Syria, and his staff performed tests to find the hardiest plants to withstand the rigors of war.

The parks’ shoestring budget didn’t allow for much visible improvement. But 2005 brought the serendipitous appointment of a new Baghdad City Council chairman, who happened to be an agricultural engineer. Ali had found a kindred spirit.

The budget allotment for parks was increased, and Ali immediately set his sights on Baghdad’s abandoned, litter-strewn traffic squares and medians. Workers planted two million flowers, shrubs and trees in the past year, he said, exposing themselves to gunfire and car bombs in the process. Insurgents intimidated many gardeners into leaving their work; others were killed.

“The so-called resistance doesn’t want cleanliness or gardens. They want Baghdad to stay like this, neglected,” Ali said. “It just makes us more defiant.”

Still, the obstacles are myriad. At the Zawraa Park nursery, just opposite from a military recruiting center that’s a favored target for bombers, workers said they frequently pick bullets and shrapnel from their fragile cuttings. Explosions have shattered the office windows three times in recent months.

Outside the compound, Ali spent a fortune on the latest in sprinkler systems only to see them go dry because the lack of electricity severs the water supply. Within a week, he said, the plants wither up and must be replaced. To keep them alive, workers have to call in water tankers and spray the flowers the old-fashioned way.

None of this appears to daunt Ali. Even as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis flee the war, he talks of flowering trees, picnic areas and playgrounds. While corpses float on top of the Tigris River, he’s more concerned with the rich soil underneath. He’s putting the final touches on a long-term plan to build 15 new parks in some of the most violent neighborhoods of Baghdad. Another proposal calls for the construction of a “green belt” that will surround the capital with trees, six rows deep.

For now, the fruits of the parks department’s labor are visible mostly in relatively safe Shiite Muslim neighborhoods such as Karrada and Shoala. That’s changing, Ali promised, with a new campaign that targets the predominantly Sunni western side of the capital known as Karkh.

Karkh Park currently exists only in a blueprint that shows a verdant plot with a shopping mall in the middle, but Ali already offers cash bonuses for field managers who show him progress in the insurgent-ridden area.

Ali beamed as he recounted how parks employees have slipped into the dangerous Doura and Mansour districts armed with seeds that one day will blossom into vibrant gerbera.

“It’s like stealing,” he said. “When we see nobody is around, we run in, plant and escape. You see, when you have the will, anything is possible.”

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