Above is the local variety of Poinsettia. The hot house kinds can't live there, though - too hot!



As long as you water frequently (the soil is very sandy and the weather can be very hot) and add fertilizer often, nearly anything will grow. And there is a surprising amount of water there - in addition to desalinated potable water, we also had access to recycled and cleaned waste waters from the industrial park as irrigation water. In the summer, though, even that could get to be in short supply, so the best bet was to plant tropical plants which thrive in the heat - like the ones shown here, all of which were in our garden in Jubail, Saudi Arabia.



Below is a Hibiscus - we had both red and yellow ones.

Above is the Coral Plant (also called Fountain Plant or Firecracker Plant but which Charles calls "Witch's Broom"!). He thought he had eradicated it two years earlier, but it came back with a vengeance. It is a shrub from Mexico that thrives on the water that the front "patch" of garden got.

Above is bougainvilea, a vine which ranges in color from deepest red to white, and includes this peachy-orange as well.

There isn't really very much native in Saudi Arabia. Most of the ornamental plants are imports from Australia, South Africa and even Mexico!

Below is a kind of Frangipani, called the Temple Tree or Singapore Plumeria, fragrant as well as beautiful. There are other frangipani in the Eastern Province as well - pink ones!

Above: The Royal Poinciana (also called the Flamboyant Tree or the Flame Tree, I'm sure you can see why) is an import from Madagascar. For the longest time, the one in our back garden had not bloomed, but when out neighbor had his trees trimmed, our tree got more sun and flowered profusely.