Happy Bedouin House - Petra, Jordan
Working with host Khaled his family, artist Estelle, and many local children we worked on front entrance and courtyard.
For traditional Bedouin people the priority with any vegetation is feeding their goats and donkeys. This makes gardens difficult to sustain as animals easily enter the property. For this reason, and a lack of access to materials, the main focus was on constructing a safety barrier for children from terrace higher level, and on painting a mural to soften the hard surfaces..
This extremely challenging environment has almost no topsoil, minimal annual rainfall. To establish and maintain a garden would take longer term planning, including irrigation and or wicking beds, a food composting system (likely best would be to bury food in the the ground to improve local soil) and most essentially techniques to maintain the garden. Building materials were difficult to come by as Petra is isolated in high mountainous. Here recycling is essential and everything is used and reused until it’s end. For vegetation we planted Succulents and hardy plants found in the desert.
