Struck me, while walking to the nearby “public garden” today, that I had never been in a park, in Abu Dhabi. Not in four years.

How could that be?

–Half the year, it’s too hot in Abu Dhabi to be outdoors. You would go to a park, from May through October, only if you were stuck outside and were looking for a scrap of shade. It would be a place of refuge, then, not a destination.

–The southern/eastern end of Abu Dhabi Island, where we have lived, just doesn’t have many parks. Certainly not between Khalifa Park and the green belts on the other side of 19th Street, the older part of the city . (One park shows up on maps, near 25th Street, on Airport Road, but it hasn’t been kept up for years.)

–I’m not counting little strips of green, which happen from place to place. Like the median on 19th Street, wide enough to host the occasional soccer game. Talking about a real park, regularly maintained, perhaps even fenced.

Some other park notions:

To get plants to grow anywhere on the island (and in most of the country, for that matter), you need to truck in topsoil. The ground on Abu Dhabi Island is hard-packed sand, with some rocks. No organic material, because nothing grew here. Too hot, no fresh water. So parks are difficult to create and expensive to maintain.

Even after applying lots and lots of water, and delivering some soil, only a few trees are hardy enough to stand the weather, and the most common tree on the island is the ghaf tree, which looks a bit like an overgrown bush, but which produces a surprising amount of shade.

Palm trees, of course, can survive here, but even they need water.

The nearby “public garden” is mostly ghaf trees, perhaps because palms don’t create much shade.

It is a bit difficult to walk there because the main entrance is several hundred yards down a very busy street, Muroor, and the wall around the park is not something you can jump/climb.

The grass there is not some tall and pleasant variety you would see in a park in a more temperate region; it is almost uniformly Bermuda grass, which is considered a weed in most of the world but, at least, is grass-like, and greenish and can handle lots of heat.

So, anyway, it wasn’t Luxembourg Gardens. No flowers, no deciduous trees, not pillow-y long grass.

But it was nice to be in an area of nature, with shade trees and green.

I walked around the park about three times, and was stared at as a curiosity by the regulars. I kept in the shade, mostly, because it was 80 degrees, on the way to 83. (Yes, I did think of the rhyme about mad dogs and Englishmen …)

I now have been in an Abu Dhabi park. Not a big one. Not a famous one. But it had living things in it, and in a desert you appreciate that. I may go back.