I remember that sunny morning of April 2008 when I visited Keukenhof with my colleagues from Pakistan. Keukenhof is the world's largest flower garden where approximately 7,000,000 (seven million) flower bulbs are planted annually.

It's located in South Holland in the small town of Lisse, south of Haarlem and southwest of Amsterdam. Bus can be catched from train stations of Haarlem, Leiden and Schiphol to access this bulbous paradise.








It opens normally from the last week of March to mid-May. In 2008 when I visited, it was opened from 20 March to 18 May. While in 2010, it will be open from 18 March to 16 May according to its official website.









This historic park is spread colorfully over a big land piece of 32 hectare with 15 kilometers of footpaths. It's very well planned and enormously filled with blooming tulips, hyacinths, irises, daffodils and other spring bulbs.

































The area where it's situated is also know as the "Dune and bulb Region" (Dune- en Bollenstreek in Dutch). The flowers fields outside the garden are evidence of this.









This park is also quite visible through following video.

Overall, this was a great experience and I enjoyed it very much. I get excited by the magnificent specs of color whenever I remember this exquisite work of art and nature. I strongly recommend that take your camera along on this unique experience to get it with you for your whole life.

Global trends of human population show hat urbanization is increasing day by day. As a result of which, modern housing projects are coming on the view along with a lot of global planning and environmental concerns. Like other nations, Pakistanis also like to get urbanized in a short time and their keenness on these lines has lead them to work on modern urban housing projects and/ cooperative housing societies intensively. Dozens of housing projects have been accomplished successfully and dozens of projects are still in the way of completion in different cities. No matter how big the city is, modern house building activities can be observed enormously. Apparently it's good that my motherland is getting urbanized at a quick pace, the concern is these housing societies are being often built on agriculture lands because of which food insecurity is increasing. Besides food insecurity, disturbance or complete removal of local flora and fauna will lead to the highly important global environmental issues. Present wheat and sugar crisis, electricity crisis and environmental risks somehow come under the consequences of this so called urbanization or modernization trend. But on the other hands, they claim that they are going to strengthen the country economy, by creating too many business opportunities (as construction work creates the business opportunities for all kind of industry) for different stockholders and by creating the job opportunities for the local citizens ultimately playing their role highly in the poverty alleviation. What if they cut and remove some old plantation to meet their purpose, they plant thousands of modern colorful plants by following the proper landscape principles. True they disturb the local environment initially but they are going to give a brand new environment also with a lot of rare landscape features additionally, in the nearest future.

Leaving all the urban planning issues aside, I''m concerned here about how an environmental balance can be created locally. In the title, Palm Royale (a modern housing society in Faisalabad whose landscape project I've been doing in the recent past) represents the housing societies built or being built in the country while Royal Palm (which is of course the most famous palm plant Roystonia regia) represents all type of plantation, being removed or being installed to complete these modern housing projects.

It's true that these housing societies are creating a lot of business opportunities for the local industrialists and also playing their role in the poverty alleviation by creating hundreds of job opportunities for the local manpower. They also look true in their modern landscaping claims, these pictures which I've drawn from different housing societies are also the evidence of this claim.

Like these have very beautiful and well planned green belts.



and



These have well landscaped amenity parks





are well maintained





and well equipped with modern landscape features.

Hence they look absolutely true in generating secure and serene environment for their inhabitants, a lot of business opportunities for the local industry and a lot of job opportunities for the local manpower. However these societies should be planned by the concerned authorities in such a way that agriculture land and old flora and fauna should be saved as much as possible, to avoid the national food insecurity and environmental concerns.