Kurdistan: Recovering a Garden of Paradise, Photo Gallery

Many Kurdish farmers maintain traditional methods of harvesting. At the foot of the mountains, farmers cut grain with a scythe and gather bundles of barley on their backs. Cultivated and wild grains have been ubiquitous on the Kurdish landscape for a long time; wheat, barley, and lentils were first domesticated here around 8000 B.C.  

Read more in our story, Kurdistan: Recovering a Garden of Paradise.

Hollyhocks grow wild throughout the region. The colorful stalks cascade down urban hills, colonize abandoned areas, and grow in fields of wild grain in the remote steppe. Hollyhocks have a long history in the region; pollen remains dating 60,000 years ago were found in Neanderthal graves in present-day Iraq. It's believed that the plants were used in healing and funeral rituals.

In the shadow of semi-trucks and car exhaust, sunflowers and scare-crows peer over fields of wheat in an urban test garden. Students from Sulaymaniyah's College of Agriculture harvest seeds of different wheat varieties to compare the nutritional content and soil compatibility of imported and domestic wheat. As many children of this generation reject their family's farms, the School's curricula focuses on balancing tradition with modern realities.

The city of Sulaimaniyah is filled with public green spaces. A large traffic rotary has been landscaped with drought-resistant flowers, concrete frogs, and globe-shaped benches painted like pomegranates. In the distance, the city's cranes build towards the sky. Mountains are an ever-present silhouette on the horizon. When agriculture began in the Fertile Crescent (in modern-day southern Iraq) about 10,000 years ago, it was nourished by water that flowed through Kurdistan's mountains, and swelled into the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

Park Daik (Mother Park), a lush garden in Sulaymaniyah, is cultivated on soil previously occupied by a Saddam-directed prison. At the center is a monument to the future: a woman holding a baby, sculpted as if she were growing from a tree, surrounded by lavender. Nearby, in Park Azadi (Freedom Park), a landscape of orchards and ponds fills the footprint of a former execution field.

In Kurdistan, flourishing gardens (real or imagined) are an ever-present contrast to the region's history of persecution. A verdant trompe l'oeil blooms next to an illustration of the city's conflict. A planter carved like a tree stump sits in the median. If Kurdistan is an oasis of peace in a volatile region, then its urban gardens—moments of green in the grey—provide an analogous respite in the dusty city. These walls line a main road that leads to Sulaimaniyah's central market.

Walnuts are an ancient Kurdish crop that once filled the mountainous region of Hawraman. Soft-shelled walnuts are uniquely prized, and believed to endow the Hawrami people with a particular cleverness. Hewing to traditional harvesting methods, farmers still beat the trees with willow branches.

Baziyan was once a well-known rice-growing region; now, the land is dry and many traditional rice varieties are nearly extinct. The First Lady of Iraq, Hero Ibrahim Ahmed Talabani, has initiated this local effort, on paddies tended by a Baziyan rice farmer, to recultivate an heirloom variety of rice called Qush Qaya. The round, nutty rice is just one of the many native plants Mrs Talabani recalls from her childhood, many of which have disappeared.

Since antiquity, local herbalists have prescribed the abundant, edible milk thistle (Silybum marianum) for many ailments. Modern Kurdish pharmacology research expands on traditional applications, identifying its seeds as an effective treatment for liver disease.

In collaboration with the Royal Botanic Garden at Edinburgh, scientists at Nature Iraq, a local environmental group, collect specimens for the forthcoming Flora of Iraq, a comprehensive guide to regional plants. A botanist with Nature Iraq dissects Centaurea regia, a native thistle, collected in the Qara Dagh mountains.

In Kani Sard, a village just two miles from Jarmo (where wheat was domesticated around 8,000 B.C.), women make bread with bags of flour marked “Switzerland.” Subsistence farming is increasingly difficult with dwindling local support and resources. Lack of water has driven more than half of Kani Sard’s population to the city in the past few years.

A shepherd tends his flock of sheep by a gully where pink oleander grows wild, near Jarmo. Oleander has a fabled history in Kurdish culture; villages are said to be indebted to its poison, which was once yielded to defend against an invasion. Today, its translated name, Zhala, or Jhale, is given to baby girls.

A private home is carved into the Zagros mountains. At the edge of the pool the land slopes into groves of apricots, pomegranate, grapes, and cherries. An old Kurdish saying goes "The Kurd has not a friend in the world but his mountain," referring to its cavernous refuges, native plants, and water—all of which have supported the Kurds through years of assaults from neighboring countries. The mountains are also filled with beauty and peace.

Dr Jamal Fuad, former Minister of Kurdish Agriculture, and his wife, Cathy, own a teaching farm in the hills outside Sulaymaniyah. “It was truly the Garden of Paradise,” they remark. “There is nothing that cannot grow in this soil." Cathy grows native and non-native flowers in her greenhouse, including poppies grown from seeds she collected in California.

A museum in Halabja commemorates a 1998 chemical attack against Iraq's Kurdish people. Repurposed weapons canisters as planters are a sign of Kurdistan's resilience, and a symbol of their optimism and growth.

A plant shop owner shows a rose in the greenhouse. His shop grows out of the rubble of a destroyed building. He tends the plants with his son. Before opening the shop he was a schoolteacher; he loved plants and hoped that selling them would be profitable enough to provide for his family.

While farming and gardening are still largely the province of rural areas, houseplants are popular in cities. Sulaimaniyah's central market includes several garden shops that cultivate natives and non-natives, such as these petunias. The young man tending this shop's plants was named Daraswtawaka, which means "Trees on fire"—perhaps a reference to wars that have ravaged Kurdish land.

A woman under a canopy of grapes, a traditionally successful crop in Kurdistan's hills. Along with figs, pomegranates, and olives, grapes were among the first plants cultivated in the Fertile Crescent. While mechanized farming makes its way into the land, subsistence farms like her family's are becoming increasingly rare.