Who says the era of the Airbus A380’s use is waning when clever minds can still find unique uses for the aircraft, or at least creations that look an awful lot like an A380?
A select group of gardeners in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates city that doubles as home base to Emirates Airlines, think they’ve landed on one that transformed an A380 replica into a garden gnome of sorts. Emirates Airlines is the largest operator of the A380, with 90 in its fleet at last count.
At the Miracle Garden in Dubai, believed to be the largest floral garden anywhere, a steel framework that closely resembles the jumbo jet has taken shape, except this A380 is covered in flowers, some 45 million petunias, marigolds, snapdragons, violas and geraniums to cover the structure’s 755,000 square feet of surface area. Gardeners used 9,000 flowers to create the Emirates logo alone. Weighing in at 30 metric tons, the flower-laced Airbus took 200 people some six months to build, consuming 144,000 hours of labor.
One of the hurdles the garden creators faced was how to water the flowers, some of which are sitting more than 75 feet above the ground. The flowered A380 creators haven’t yet divulged how they solved that problem.
Watch a time-lapse video of the garden’s creation at Aeronews TV.
