Jordan Environment Watch : Jurassic Park of Plants to be established in Saudi Arabia

A good comination of innovative ideas and financial resources can yield some extraordinary results. This will be demonstrated yet again in Saudi Arabia where the barren dry country will host the world's biggest stystem of botanical gardens and landscsapes.

Spreading over an area of 160 hectares (395 acres) the gardens aim to re-create the 400 million-year-old history of the Earth's plants, trees and flowers.

This is globally useful scientific and educational project, to be established in one of the world's least "green-covered" countries but with an ambition to make a difference, and this difference will cost US $ 100.0 million to be completed by 2010. The complex of gardens - to be called the King Abdullah International Gardens - is a gift from the city of Riyadh to the Saudi monarch.

The garden will, surprisingly show a demonstration of the vegetation cover that used to be present in Saudi Arabia, millions of years ago.

The BBC has published a nice report about the project and the remaining text of this post is taken from that story.

Built just outside Riyadh, the gardens will include four types of gardens - scientific gardens; water gardens; international gardens, sponsored by individuals and foreign embassies; and paleo-botanic gardens, which recreate the history of plants.

Nick Sweet of Barton Willmore, a British company designing the project, says it will be like "Jurassic Park without the dinosaurs". "There was a danger of the project being pompous about the scientific aspect", he told the BBC.

"People should respond like they would for example in London, taking their family to the Kew Botanical Gardens, throwing a Frisbee around."

The project is taking shape in the middle of an arid landscape, but three million years ago the same place was totally different. The land which is known as Saudi Arabia today was back then covered with forests. "It contrasts the desert environment of today with the green, verdant and lush place of three million years ago," Paul Kenrick, paleo-botanist at the Natural History Museum and scientific advisor to the project told the BBC. "It illustrates how climate change can affect plant development."

The final garden of this section, called The Garden of Choices, will attempt to warn of what may happen to the Earth in the future as a result of different possible scenarios resulting from human activity. Environmental concerns have not been overlooked. Sources of renewable energy will keep the gardens cool in the 45 - 50C temperatures of the desert.

Evaporation from the site will be kept to a minimum, with water being recycled wherever possible, designers said.

Good luck, folks!