From a bird's-eye view, dozens upon dozens of nurseries can be seen dotting the city for several kilometers, featuring colorful flowers, massive trees, and decorative plants. Around them, hundreds of workers flit about planting and trimming plants and plucking weeds from the ground and out of clay pots.
This is a scene from Pattoki, a city in the Kasur district of Pakistan's most populous Punjab province, that exporters and government officials say is the largest nursery market in Asia. Spread over a thousand hectares, the market employs around 100,000 people directly or indirectly.
"This [nursery] is spread over ten villages and each village's population is estimated to be around 10,000 people," exporter Lala Shaukat told Arab News in Pattoki last week. "This is a profitable business and people are earning well from it, and this [Pattoki] has become Asia's biggest [nursery] market."
"Pattoki is indeed Asia's largest nursery due to its sprawl at a single place, in one city, and this is the biggest market in Pakistan from where the plants and flowers are not only supplied across the country, but also exported to Saudi Arabia, UAE and other Gulf countries," said Dr. Basharat Saleem, a deputy director at the Punjab general agriculture directorate.
Read more at arabnews.pk