It's almost like Dubai is running out of superlatives: The city is already home to the world's tallest building, biggest shopping mall, and largest indoor amusement park. So where does it go from there? Why, it creates the world's largest floral installation in the world's largest flower garden, of course: Last week, Emirates and the Dubai Miracle Garden unveiled a little something they've been working on for a while—a life-size replica of the famously luxurious Emirates Airbus A380 covered entirely by flowers.
The installation, which opened to the public on November 27, involves a shell of the double-decker jet covered in more than 500,000 flowers and living plants that eventually, when in full bloom, will mean a total count of five million flowers, weighing more than 100 tons. The petunias, marigolds, snapdragons, geraniums, and more were grown over a period of four months in the Garden's nurseries, and it took a crew of 200, working 10 hours a day for 180 days, to build the installation. For the Emirates logo alone, written across the side of the plane, more than 9,000 flowers were used, and the 262-foot wingspan is blanketed in some 100,000 blossoms. Oh, and just in case the replica didn't look lifelike enough, its jet turbines move. Check out the timelapse video below, where Dubai Miracle Garden co-founder Abdel Naser Rahhal breaks down everything that went into creating the installation:
The Dubai Miracle Garden is famous for taking everyday objects—cars, trains, clocks, houses—and completely covering them with a mind-boggling array of flora, so it's no wonder it would raise the bar eventually, the Emirates A380 being the logical choice considering the prominent place it's taken in the international imagination—think showers and full-service bars on board. The A380 can be seen with regular admission to the garden, which costs 40 dirhams (about $10), and was unveiled as part of its fifth season, which lasts through the winter and spring months. (The garden is closed between June and September—turns out it's impossible, even for Dubai, to maintain a garden in 105-degree summer heat.)
Lots of flowers in one place is always impressive—remember that flower carpet in Brussels? But zooming out and considering that this 775,000-square-foot park of technicolor flowers is completely surrounded by the deserts of the U.A.E. gives this feat a particularly Dubai-esque impressiveness. Irrigated using recycled waste water—about 200,000 gallons of it a day—the Garden is just another Dubai moment where we instinctively want to ask, "Why?" But surely, for this city that gives a whole new meaning to over-the-top, the better question is: "What's next?"
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