The fence of the park was just another solid line drawn on the surface of a map, but the toxic matter of this landscape was not just solid, but liquid and gas, unseen and catalysed by the fluidity of the desert’s climate.
And so, one night, when the fence was left unmanned by the last solider, the Fayoumis of Al-Rayan gathered at the last dying garden they had planted, on the cusp of park and not park, and sent for tools to cut it open, leaving the poles as markers to ensure they wouldn’t venture to far into the desert.
Reading the blue bands of sodium chloride, they began by planting two species of local halophytic desert plants, rughl el-malhe (Salt Bush) and murgh (Leptadenia) whose roots systems worked symbiotically to catalyse salt absorption and store it in their roots.
This toxic landscape could not follow the traditional rhythms of growth and succession, whilst the salt was absorbed by the Prickly Lettuce. Saline toxicity prevents it from entering its fourth growth stage of producing flowers and secondary stems – killing the plant. And so, in every generation, hidden amongst the swathes of the other two plants, they would plant the prickly lettuce waiting for it to bloom.
But deserts are not empty, they too are fluid systems. And so, when sandstorms hit the new gardens every decade, their disturbance introduced a new order, two metabolisms: of the garden and of the dune. The winds created new topographies of sand, dunes which blurred and buried the structure of their chain-link gardens, suffocating the plants below.
The gardeners embraced the entropy of the desert, planting thick-rooted desert shrubs to bind the sand of the dunes fixing them in place, before the winds changed again. Nested from the desert winds, they planted zaatar in the shade of the dunes. When the chain-link was barely visible under the new sands, they cut up the poles of the old fence into short pieces as datums to trace the generations of their planting.
And so, the gardeners shaped their planting and the dunes together, exposing and protecting plants from the wind, based their ability to tolerate it. When one of the gardeners studied a chromatogram of the zaatar, the blue band of sodium chloride had faded to almost white, instead new bands, green and yellow appeared. Chlorophyll b and carotenoids which signalled the health of the plants.
With the army gone, the chromatograms of the Al-Rayan’s plants unveiled an electric blue band of sodium chloride, salty brine which had permeated through the ground and spread under the fence, and further up the paper, a band of pink, sulphur dioxide, gas released into the air from the salt mining, which travelled for miles when the winds switched east.
For the first decade, they continued their disassembly, cutting out the mesh of the fences, allowing easier access for the people who were still fearful. Some of the metal was sold, and the rest of the mesh was used to create the structure for new gardens.
They planted this pair of species in swaths over generations, plants which grew and died, and were planted by the successive generations of gardeners from Al-Rayan. The unit of the plant was not measured by its singular unit of growth, but in its generational capacity to absorb salt. When they had reached the 5th generation of planting around 150 years, one of the gardeners tried to plant Khas al zeit (Prickly Lettuce) as a chemical indicator to test if the salt levels were low enough to generate new planting, but all of them died.
Until one morning, another 50 years after the first test, one survived, marking a new chemical era for Al-Rayan. And so, the khas el-zeit bloomed amongst the other plants, and was picked and eaten.
When the winds would switch, and sand began to gather in a new direction, they worked quickly to stabilize it. Their topographic manipulations indexing the shifting patterns of the desert winds, forms which began to shape each other through friction. Once more, the Fayoumis knew they were approaching the edge of the Sahara when they were greeted by the new gardens of Al-Rayan.