The Flowering Desert

Thirty miles north of Amman, Jordan, some 100 acres of bright green grass grew eight inches high. Around it lay dusty desert supporting a few tough shrubs. Soldiers of the Arab Legion last week were guarding the grass day & night to keep the goats and camels of the Bedouins from eating it down to the roots. The Bedouins themselves came in droves to admire the greenery, for no such grass had grown in that desert since the time of the Prophet.

Last summer Norman H. French of Casper, Wyo., water expert of the U.S. Point Four program, went into the desert with a gang of Arabs and some U.S. earth-moving equipment. Jordan gets some rain, but it usually comes in violent cloudbursts, and the hard soil sheds it like a slate roof. Instead of sinking in, the water roars down the wadies (dry washes) and is lost in the sand.

French and his earth-moving Arabs built dikes across three wadies and ploughed L-shaped ridges in the flatland below the dikes. Then they waited for a cloudburst. On Oct. 30 the heavens opened in fine Biblical style. The water filled pools behind the dikes; it ran around their ends and was distributed over the flatland by the waiting ridges. In a week it was all absorbed, saturating the soil five-feet down. Beyond the dikes, the soil was as dry as ever.

Soon grass began to grow. Skeptical locals predicted that it would shrivel and die like the short-lived grass that sometimes springs up in the desert. But it kept on growing, and is growing still.

The technique of "water spreading" is an old story in Wyoming, where French comes from, and is often used to improve the grazing for cattle and sheep. It is even older in the Middle East, where it was used sporadically thousands of years ago. For reasons more social than technical, it has died out. Point Four experts estimate that vast areas of desert can be made productive by reviving the technique. They are now trying to develop camel-drawn earthmovers so that the Arabs can do their own water spreading at almost no cost except labor.

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