LAHORE: The Horticulture Agency Lahore has launched a plantation campaign on Atta Bakhsh Road under the Green Lahore vision of Chief Minister Punjab Maryam Nawaz Sharif, with 3,600 new bamboo plants to be added along the corridor.
Managing Director PHA Ahmed Usman Javed said in an official statement that plantation work had been started along Atta Bakhsh Road and that bamboo would be planted along the five-kilometre stretch.
The bamboo will be planted along the sewage drain adjacent to the road, the MD said, in order to enhance environmental beauty as well as increase greenery around the drain.
Plants already exist along the road, he said, and the agency is now adding 3,600 new bamboo plants to the existing cover.
The choice of species is practical rather than ornamental. Bamboo establishes quickly, grows dense and tall within a short period, and forms a continuous screen — which makes it a common choice for planting along open drains and utility corridors, where the objective is to shield an unsightly stretch, bind the soil at the edge and add canopy without requiring the space a mature shade tree needs.
Open drains running alongside arterial roads are a familiar feature of Lahore’s older drainage network, and vegetative screening is among the lower-cost interventions available where covering or rebuilding the channel is not immediately feasible.
Spread across five kilometres, the 3,600 plants work out to roughly 720 per kilometre — a spacing dense enough to produce a continuous green edge along the drain rather than an intermittent row, which is the pattern such corridor plantings usually aim for.
Plantation drives are judged less by the number of saplings placed in the ground than by how many survive the first two summers. Watering schedules, protection from grazing and encroachment, and replacement of failed plants determine whether a corridor of this kind reads as green cover in three years or as gaps along a drain.
That is particularly true of roadside stretches, where compaction, construction activity and utility work routinely disturb newly planted edges. The agency has not detailed the maintenance arrangement for the Atta Bakhsh Road planting.
Ahmed Usman Javed said the plantation drive on Atta Bakhsh Road would be completed next week.
He added that, in line with the vision of the Chief Minister Punjab, the plantation campaign was being expanded further across the city to make Lahore green and lush.
The campaign forms part of the provincial government’s broader urban greening effort in a city that records some of the country’s poorest air quality readings during the winter months, when temperature inversion traps emissions from traffic, industry and kilns close to ground level.
Roadside plantation is one component of that response, alongside the Punjab government’s parallel enforcement drive against brick kilns, industrial emissions and construction dust, under which inspections and sealings have continued across the province this week.
The Horticulture Agency Lahore is simultaneously running larger schemes in the city, including the Rs400 million restoration and beautification of Kamran Baradari on the River Ravi, which will add landscaping, lawns, walkways and jogging tracks at the heritage site.
Plant counts, road length and completion timelines in this report are as issued by the Horticulture Agency Lahore. The Lahore Times has sought details of the maintenance plan and survival monitoring for the new plantation.
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