Watching the desert come back

Five hectares beside the Garagum canal, where we started planting in 2022.

Around two thousand trees now, most of them fruit — apricot, peach, plum, apple, cherry, berries, all local varieties — plus others put in purely for shade and for the birds. My father runs it: the irrigation, the pruning, and the yearly accounting of what made it through. Whatever didn't gets replaced, so the land stays fully planted instead of quietly thinning out.

It's working. There are more animals than there were, more birds, more of everything that turns up once there's water and cover.

But the trees are half the point. My nephews and cousins come out through the year, in every season, and what they're picking up there isn't gardening — it's that you can be part of an ecosystem rather than its ruler. That's what I want the place to teach, and it teaches better standing in it than said out loud.

For the older ones it's simpler. Somewhere to put the week down and do something slow, together, with the people they love.

You can follow the site on Restor — satellite imagery, species, the slow green returning frame by frame.