Secret Dubai diary Intrigue and adventure in the United Arab Emirates





iPhone RPGs

Dubai Info

Best role-playing games
Spiderweb Software
for Mac & PC





26 March, 2006

A murder of trees

How green is my desert? Growing less green by the day, after untrained gardening labourers hacked dozens and dozens of young trees to death in what was presumably an ill-advised, ill-explained "go forth and prune!" command from their dimwit supervisors.

The boughs were hacked through, the once-healthy, glitteringly green trees reduced to a few leaves on the few scant twigs that remain. Several trees have already died, their last leaves shrivelled up and brown. Others are dying, unable to breathe since the decimation of their chlorophyllous lungs.

From oasis back to desert, with just a few hacks of the scythe.

Labels: ,

14 Comments:

Blogger muks said...

where are the scandalous blog posts that kept me oh so happy to return home while working for 6 months in kuwait!...bring back balushi and his witty comments...tree murders..lol. give me the posts that made etisalat block your blog back in june of last year, and miraculously unblock it...I have a suggestion mention the gambling that I saw blatantly happening at the corporate hospitality area of the stadium at the horse races last night, and how CID was driving around the international village in golf carts, with "CID" written on a piece of paper stuck to the carts, keeping the peace...

26 March, 2006 19:49  
Blogger Shaper85 said...

I prefer bloggers who are uninhibited by what people think of them and, if necessary, will express and defend their views passionately.

If people have to go on the defensive, it shows that their argument has been questioned and they typically should elaborate or rephrase what they are trying to express.
When you see bloggers resorting to sarcasm and petty insults, you know that their position is weak and they are trying to diverge attention away from their argument.

I think people should just think deeply to see how and why they support a certain side and then tell it like it is! Don't hide behind some politically correct barrier and try to present your argument in a way that is "acceptable" to the masses.

However, back to the topic at hand: poor tree :(

Actually, I thought the "science" behind such radical pruning was that the tree would grow back bushier and fuller than before... although judging by the pics this one seems to have been completely sheared to death.

26 March, 2006 20:31  
Blogger Keef said...

Pollarding innit! Nearly killing the buggers apparently makes them grow better. Damn shame they had to do them all at once though - our car park is now completely bereft of shade.

26 March, 2006 21:33  
Blogger secretdubai said...

Nearly killing the buggers apparently makes them grow better.

So we can expect even the ones with brown, shrivelled leaves to do a Lazarus on us?

Here's hoping.

26 March, 2006 21:49  
Blogger Amna_a said...

Poor trees, what a slaughter. :(

26 March, 2006 22:16  
Blogger nzm said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

27 March, 2006 09:15  
Blogger nzm said...

They like killing off the Palms too - plant them, leave them with the sacking over the fronds while they take root, and then forget to take the sacking off. The trees then die.

We've seen at least 10 around our area suffer this fate, and there are 3 more that I can see which will also die this way.

27 March, 2006 09:16  
Blogger Harsha said...

Coincidently, yesterday, on my way to Uni, I was gazing at the side of sh. Zayed Road, It was a picture perfect scene of green irony of Dubai - you would notice - there are trees, jus like the pictures in the original post, and just below the trees, there are huge green patches of luscious grass and bushes. with sunset in the background. anyone noticed those trees?

27 March, 2006 09:41  
Blogger secretdubai said...

I know with palms they are supposed to leave the sacking on for a while (though not forever) until the roots have had time to grow in. Otherwise the force of the wind against the open leaves can blow the palm over.

27 March, 2006 11:43  
Blogger secretdubai said...

Oh - thanks for that tip, print exec!

I bought my camera over the internet directly from Hong Kong, as it hadn't been released here yet. I haven't so far registered it - now I definitely won't ;)

27 March, 2006 13:18  
Blogger samuraisam said...

Yeah... right.
I think SD is probably anonymising with respect to the UAE gov't, not the NSA/CIA/FBI/KGB/whatever.

If you have to worry about the pixels of your camera being enough to track you down, chances are you're already screwed; also chances are that you wouldn't be providing photographs so publicly.

SD has probably also reduced the size of the images provided, which would mean another layer of JPG compression and probably not a 1:1 ratio of what the original camera provided, which would greatly interfere with tracking down the camera that produced the shots.

27 March, 2006 13:52  
Blogger nzm said...

I know that Kodak was going to do this with some of their paper for their inkjet/dyesub printers.

It was supposed to stop the prints from being copied/scanned.

Trouble was, it could only stop them from being copied if you tried to copy them on another Kodak-brand scanner/printer.

I think that they abandoned the idea.

27 March, 2006 14:23  
Blogger secretdubai said...

Yes - I created and deleted a test entry. It was to try and test the Bloglet, which doesn't seem to be working (yet).

27 March, 2006 18:30  
Blogger Keef said...

SD: Give the shrivelled-up leaves a week. Well, no don't. The shrivelled-up ones will fall off, but new ones will grow in their place. Truss me, I'm a tree sturgeon.

Cokey: simplistic HTML lesson. If you are trying to put HTML tags into the comment window, it will only accept B, I and A. All of these tags have to be closed. So if you want to make something bold, you would type <b>the bold thing</b> note the slash before the last b. Confused? Thought so.

Everbody else: Toot!

27 March, 2006 23:53  

Post a Comment

<< Home



next issue is no. 12




Google Secret Dubai
iopBlogs.com, The World's Blog Aggregator
 Blog Top Sites

Powered by Blogger




StatCounter stats