About
the studio,
the practice.عن الاستوديو
Green Dubai is a small editorial garden studio. We grow, observe, write — and occasionally design private gardens for the patient client.
We started this in a small courtyard in Al Quoz, in the autumn of 2024. One ghaf tree, three pots of mint, and a lot of patience.
We do not believe a Dubai garden should look like a garden in Surrey or Kyoto. It is its own thing — half courtyard, half oasis. It rewards shade over spectacle, and patience over ambition.
Everything we publish, we have grown. Everything we recommend, we have killed at least once. The garden is a long conversation. We are still listening.
Five
principles.
Patience first.
الصبرEvery garden answer is a year long. We do not rush, and we ask you not to either.
Native, then naturalised.
المحلية أولاًBegin with what already grows here. Add what has settled. Resist the imported tropical.
Shade is structure.
الظل بُنيةThe first thing to design is the shade. Everything else follows from where the sun cannot reach.
Less is honest.
القليل أصدقA small garden, well kept, beats a large one barely surviving. We design for what you can sustain.
Water is currency.
الماء عملةEvery drop has a cost — to your bill, to the city, to the earth. Spend with intention.
And one more —
Sit in your garden, daily. Without a tool. Without a phone. The garden was the original screen.
A small team,
with dirt under their nails.
Layla Al-Rashid
Editor · FounderTrained at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh. Returned to Dubai in 2018 to grow what she had been told would not grow.
Yusuf Hassan
HorticulturistSpecialist in native species. Has personally planted over four hundred ghaf trees across the Emirates since 2019.
Mei Tanaka
DesignerFormer landscape designer at a Kyoto studio. Brings the discipline of the Japanese garden to the desert courtyard.
Omar Khoury
IrrigationEngineer turned gardener. Designs the drip systems that keep our gardens alive on 30% less water than the city average.
By the numbers,
since 2024.
A small studio. A few gardens. Some letters. We grow slowly because gardens grow slowly.
A short history.
We rent a small studio with a back courtyard. One ghaf tree is already growing. We plant mint, jasmine, and a row of bougainvillea.
We send a private letter to twelve friends about the season. They forward it. By the end of the year, two hundred people are reading.
A friend of a friend asks us to design a roof garden in Jumeirah. We say yes. It survives its first summer.
The journal goes public. The plant library is open to all. We start a slow program of monthly studio visits.