RIYADH, 17 August 2007 — A botanical garden depicting the evolution of plant life will come up on a 1.5 million square meter site off the first checkpoint on the Riyadh-Makkah highway near the capital.

Described as a unique ecological project in the Kingdom, the SR100 million King Abdullah International Gardens will tower 40 meters above the surrounding desert.

Belonging to the Riyadh Municipality, it will feature the evolutionary changes and adaptations that have spanned the entire history of botanical life — from the distant past to the present, from plants that thrive in the cold climate to those that adapt themselves to the harsh desert environment.

Periods depicted include the Jurassic (142 million to 206 million years ago) and Cretaceous (65 million to 142 million years ago) — when dinosaurs roamed the earth — as well as the Cenozoic (65 million years to the present) and the Pliocene (3.5 million to 1.2 million years ago).

Another garden, known as the Garden of Choices, will explain what could happen to the Earth in the future as a result of different scenarios resulting from human activity.

Speaking to Arab News, Garett Nugent, associate director of projects, Buro Happold Consulting Engineers Ltd., said a novel feature of the ecological project is that it will create a microclimate under controlled environments. The idea is to recreate the different types of gardens in the world.

“They will try to portray the different seasons,” said Nugent. “There will be large parking and picnic areas, besides landscaped areas featuring palm trees and different types of shrubs and bushes.”

Barton Willmore of Britain, with Buro Happold of Ireland involved on the engineering side, has designed the project. When completed, it will serve as a major picnic resort for the citizens and residents of Riyadh.

Nugent said sewage water from an adjacent site would be treated and reused for irrigating part of the project. In addition, evaporation from the site will be minimized as far as possible so that the water demands of the giant greenhouses will be reduced substantially. There will be steel structures within the covering under which different types of gardens will be laid out under a controlled environment. A microclimate will be recreated to suit the different types of gardens envisaged under the project.

Nick Sweet, project director at Barton Willmore, said the botanical gardens would include a feature depicting the story of the arid land of Saudi Arabia.

“It might be a desert now, but there was a time when rivers flowed here and forests grew,” he said.

Sweet said each of the five indoor gardens would represent a particular epoch in botanical time. It will start with the Devonian period, when some of the first plants evolved 400 million years ago, such as the mosses, ferns and liverworts. Next comes the Carboniferous garden, a tropical wetland swamp forest of about 300 million years ago.

Models painted a ghostly gray will represent any known species that have since become extinct.