Uttara's Diabari becomes a hub of more than a hundred plant nurseries

Diabari, in the north of the capital's Uttara, has long been a popular spot for its quiet, open surroundings. By November 2025 the area had also become a sprawling green marketplace. More than a hundred nurseries, large and small, had grown up in rows along the riverbank in Uttara's sectors 15 and 16, Jagonews24 reported on 23 November 2025. People of all ages came every day from Dhaka and the neighbouring districts to buy plants for their homes, offices and rooftop gardens, and with the winter flower season just beginning, owners and workers said it was one of the busiest times of their year.

Looking south from bridge No 11 in sector 15, rows of nurseries line both sides of the road, like a long strip of green embroidery laid along the way, and there are more nurseries to the north of the bridge. In all, the report counted more than a hundred nurseries, large and small, in the Diabari area. From a distance the colours of the plants, the many shapes of the leaves and the bright flowers turn the whole place into an unusual sight. Passers-by stop as they walk: some smell the flowers, some look over new seedlings, and some simply take in the rows of green before going home.

For government and private development projects, rooftop gardening entrepreneurs and ordinary buyers, Diabari's nurseries had become one of the capital's most dependable sources of plants. Some nurseries specialise in large fruit saplings, others in rows of indoor plants, and others in local and foreign flowering and fruit trees; ornamental and medicinal plants are on sale too. That variety, the report said, is the area's biggest attraction: in short, almost every kind of seedling and plant can be found there.

Diabari was a destination for city people well before the nurseries filled it. Prothom Alo reported in September 2024 that every autumn, in the Bengali months of Bhadra and Ashwin, rows of kash flowers rise on Diabari's open ground beside a body of water, and that people come from all parts of Dhaka at that time of year; stalls selling fuchka, chotpoti, jhalmuri and candy floss had grown up beside the kash fields. Diabari lies in Uttara, and Banglapedia describes Uttara Thana of the Dhaka metropolitan area as covering 36.91 square kilometres, formed as a thana in 1988 and bounded by Turag thana and Gazipur Sadar upazila on the north. Even this largely urban thana listed vegetables as its main crop and mango, jackfruit, banana, blackberry and coconut as its main fruits in the 2001 census figures Banglapedia reproduces.

In the monsoon, fruit and forest saplings sell best. With the arrival of winter, the report said, the mood of the nurseries changed completely. Traders became busier, and owners and workers hardly had time to breathe, because November opens the key season for winter flower seedlings. Marigold, violet, calendula, cosmos, gerbera and petunia were the flowers in highest demand. Workers were busy preparing seedbeds for winter flowers, sorting seedlings, preparing soil and pots and tending the plants, from dawn until night, so that the whole nursery quarter had turned into a living green workshop.

These are the classic cool-season flowers of Bangladeshi gardens. Banglapedia's entry on garden flowers explains that the country's 'season flowers' are mostly exotic herbs commonly cultivated in winter and especially loved for their bright blossoms in the dull winter landscape. Its list includes African marigold (Tagetes erecta), French marigold (Tagetes patula), pot marigold or calendula (Calendula officinalis), cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus), petunia (Petunia hybrida), dahlia, chrysanthemum, phlox, zinnia, pansy, snapdragon, aster, sunflower, dianthus and others. The same encyclopedia notes that many of the country's present garden plants are of foreign origin, brought by traders, travellers and rulers, some from as far as China, Japan, Africa and tropical America.

Marigold is also one of the cut flowers grown commercially in Bangladesh. Banglapedia's floriculture entry lists marigold, in yellow, red and orange varieties, alongside rose, gladiolus, chrysanthemum and tuberose among the locally produced flowers traded regularly on a commercial scale. Diabari was not the only place preparing for the season: Prothom Alo reported on 1 November 2025 that Gokul village, 12 kilometres north of Bogura town beside the highway, had more than two hundred nurseries, with more in the fields of neighbouring Dhawakola, and that work on winter flower seedlings, including gladiolus, chrysanthemum, marigold, gerbera, tuberose, dianthus, balsam, periwinkle, gazania and petunia, was under way there.

Each nursery in Diabari has three to five permanent workers, the report said, and extra day labourers are taken on according to the season and the workload. Women as well as men work in the nurseries.

A worker named Imran, watering a seedbed, said he had been working in the nurseries there since the coronavirus period. "Preparing seedbeds, planting seedlings, watering, mixing fertiliser: everything has to be done on time," he said. "Demand for flowering plants is much higher in winter. So from the start of winter our workload keeps rising as we raise seedlings of flowers and winter vegetables. Workers in every nursery work from dawn until night." If the seedlings were raised well and ready in time for the winter season, he said, the nursery market would be lively.

Another worker, Abul Hossain, said he had worked as a nursery labourer for a long time. "I water the seedbeds and plants regularly, several times a day," he said. "If any leaf or stem is damaged, I take action straight away."

Besides plants, the nursery quarter sells mixed soil, drums, pots, hanging baskets, GI stands, organic fertiliser, pesticides, spray bottles and the rest of the equipment a garden needs, so buyers can collect everything from one place. Nurseries elsewhere in the capital work the same way. Prothom Alo reported on 15 October 2025 that Dhaka's nurseries sold, besides young plants, soil, pots, water sprayers, pruning scissors, pesticides and fertiliser. Sellers in Agargaon, Mohammadpur and other areas told the paper that plastic pots cost Tk 50 to 500, watering devices Tk 100 to 500, a weeding tool up to Tk 250 and pruning scissors around Tk 400; small packets of fertiliser sold for Tk 20 to 50 and a sack of soil for Tk 100, while small clay pots cost Tk 100 to 300 and decorated clay pots Tk 500 to 700. A nursery owner in Mohammadpur told the paper that the accessories cost more than the plants: a small plant of Tk 50 would need about Tk 150 of pot and fertiliser to go with it.

The same report gave nursery owners' estimate of the trade's size: about 800 nurseries, small, medium and large, in Dhaka city and its surroundings, of which about 450 were small and 250 medium, with about 300 inside the Dhaka city corporation areas. Most, the owners said, were clustered at Agargaon, the 300 Feet and 100 Feet roads, Diabari, Doel Chattar, Bailey Road, Kakrail and the Beribandh embankment road, with about 500 more in Savar, Ashulia, Rupganj and Gazipur around the capital. In winter the city's roadside nurseries do their biggest trade in flowering plants: Prothom Alo's photo report of 19 January 2024 from Agargaon, Dhanmondi, Shyamoli and Mohammadpur found pavement and van-top nurseries selling flower plants for between Tk 50 and Tk 500.

As space in Dhaka's homes grows scarcer, many people now use their rooftops as small plots for farming, growing vegetables, flowers and fruit. That has created a large group of customers for the nurseries. Nursery owners told Jagonews24 that 40 to 50 per cent of their buyers were now rooftop gardeners, who took not only plants but also services from the nurseries: building beds, mixing soil for pots, drainage, rooftop garden design and pesticide management.

"Many people don't know at first which plant should go where," the owners said. "We lay out the plan for the whole roof. That is why rooftop gardeners are now our biggest customers." This ready-made service had become popular with busy Dhaka residents, and demand for nursery plants was rising not only for roofs but also for balconies, office receptions and restaurant decoration.

Every day, the report said, crowds came from Dhaka and nearby districts to buy plants for homes, offices, restaurants and rooftop gardens. Some came to start a new garden, others to add plants to an old one, and families, young people, garden entrepreneurs and corporate representatives kept the green market busy from morning to evening.

Azim, an employee who had come from Hazaribagh in Dhaka to furnish a new rooftop garden, carried a list of plants to buy and had two assistants with him; his budget was Tk 20,000 to 25,000. They went from nursery to nursery, looking and bargaining to buy the best plants within the budget. Azim said his employer had given him charge of the new rooftop garden, so he had come to collect the flowers, fruit trees and ornamental plants it needed. "I'm buying mango, malta, lemon and other local and foreign varieties of fruit trees. With so many nurseries here, there is a better chance of choosing good plants," he said. He was also going to buy pots, prepared soil, drainage material, organic fertiliser and other garden supplies, and the nursery workers explained the different sides of rooftop garden care to him.

Public bodies had been encouraging the practice. Prothom Alo reported on 14 June 2023 that the government had decided to give a 10 per cent holding tax rebate on houses with rooftop gardens in city corporation areas, after a request from Dhaka North City Corporation, on conditions that included keeping the garden clean and taking measures so that mosquitoes could not breed. In August 2024 the Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education instructed 33 government schools in Dhaka to set up rooftop gardens and green walls under a project of Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University's horticulture department funded by the Bangladesh Climate Change Trust Fund, intended to reduce heat and carbon emissions in the city; one staff member and five students from each school were to be trained in garden upkeep, according to the same paper.

The mosquito condition reflects a real risk. The World Health Organization's dengue fact sheet of 21 August 2025 advises removing artificial habitats that can hold water and covering, emptying and cleaning domestic water storage containers every week, since dengue is spread by Aedes mosquitoes. For a rooftop garden that means pots, trays and drums that do not hold standing water. For pests and diseases on plants, gardeners can take advice from the agriculture office of the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) in their area before using any pesticide.

Banglapedia defines a nursery as an establishment or area for the propagation, production and distribution of plants, plantlets or seedlings for transplanting or for sale. The term first meant a place where seedlings of valuable forest and fruit trees were raised; as interest in horticultural and ornamental plants grew, the idea widened, and modern nurseries also breed plants and develop new varieties, supplying home gardeners, flower and fruit growers, farmers and foresters with seeds and seedlings of specified quality.

Planting useful trees around the homestead is an old practice in Bangladesh, but raising plants in nurseries is recent, the encyclopedia says. In the middle of the 19th century the Forest Department first developed nurseries for forest trees; this was later extended to some commercial fruit trees, at government level only. Private nurseries for horticultural plants appeared in the middle of the 20th century, and the Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation and the Horticulture Division of the Ministry of Agriculture set up nurseries in different parts of the country. Nursery practice gained momentum in the early 1980s with the great demand for plants and growing awareness of planting economic trees.

The species Banglapedia lists as common nursery plants match what Diabari's buyers were carrying home: forest trees such as mahogany, sissoo, koroi, rain tree, neem, akashmoni, teak, gamari, kadam, champa, pitraj and jarul; fruit trees such as mango, sapodilla, jackfruit, litchi, guava, coconut, boroi, bel and papaya; ornamentals such as thuja, araucaria, palm and krishnachura; seasonal and perennial flowers such as dahlia, cosmos, chrysanthemum, marigold, phlox, rose, bougainvillea, china rose and periwinkle; and vegetable seedlings such as tomato, cabbage, cauliflower, capsicum, gourds, Indian spinach and brinjal. Government nurseries also raise medicinal plants, and people are motivated through the Tree Plantation Programme to plant them at home.

State tree planting campaigns helped build that market. According to Banglapedia's entry on social forestry, the Forest Department created two forest extension divisions, at Rajshahi and Dhaka, in 1962-63 and introduced a tree planting day on 1 June; the campaign grew from a day to a week, a month and then three months. A later Asian Development Bank financed Upazila Afforestation and Nursery Development project set targets that included 345 nurseries in upazila complexes and help, with training and financial assistance, for entrepreneurs to establish 100 private nurseries.

The busiest selling time for Dhaka's nurseries outside winter is the monsoon, when the Forest Department holds the National Tree Fair. Prothom Alo reported in July 2024 that the department started the first tree fair in the capital in 1994 to build interest in tree planting and make seedlings and garden inputs easy to find; after a large turnout, fairs were held across the country from the following year, and during the June to August monsoon they take place at division and district level and in many upazilas. The 2024 fair at the old trade fair ground in Agargaon ran for 39 days instead of the usual month because of the Eid-ul-Azha holiday; it had 118 stalls, 75 of them run by private nurseries, and according to the fair's information centre about 30.5 lakh seedlings worth more than Tk 16 crore had been sold by the day before it closed. A nursery manager at the fair said fruit trees suited to rooftops and decorative indoor plants sold best, with mango the top fruit tree.

The 2025 fair began on 25 June, later than the usual start on World Environment Day, 5 June, because of the Eid-ul-Azha holiday, under the theme 'Let us do planned afforestation, build a green Bangladesh'. A sociologist of the Forest Department's social forestry wing in charge of the information centre told Prothom Alo that 92 private nurseries and six government institutions took part and that 14,78,632 seedlings worth about Tk 12,74,86,146 had been sold by Friday 25 July, against 31,85,993 seedlings worth more than Tk 16.28 crore at the same point in 2024; the organisers attributed the drop partly to the late start. Many visitors at the fair were buying for rooftop gardens. That monsoon trade in fruit and forest saplings, followed by the winter rush for flower seedlings that Diabari's workers described, shapes the nursery year.

Banglapedia describes both amateur and commercial floriculture in Bangladesh as still at a nascent stage. Trade in the sector covers cut flowers, foliage plants, propagules of ornamental plants and inputs such as growing media and pots, and demand for foliage plants, cut flowers and seeds of seasonal flowers is rising slowly; a limited quantity of rose and tuberose is exported to the Middle East and Europe, and private nurseries are coming up to meet domestic and potential export demand. The cut-flower business began with sales at holy shrines and became popular with the general public after independence, after which farmers took up commercial flower growing to supply the capital and other towns. The Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute has opened a Floriculture Research Centre to promote commercial flower cultivation.

Diabari, the Jagonews24 report said, is not only a business centre but also one of the main sources of the city's greening. Most of the plants used in government and private projects, road development, schools and colleges, offices, shopping malls and parks come from there. Beyond beautifying Dhaka, the nurseries contribute to protecting its environment: the trees help clean the air, lower the temperature and give birds shelter. Many people come to Diabari's hundred-plus nurseries to escape the city's crowds and dust, to get a touch of green, to get to know familiar and unfamiliar plants and to find some peace of mind, the report said, at a time when city life runs on stress, fatigue and restlessness.

Photo: Tarunsamanta / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources: Jagonews24; Prothom Alo; Banglapedia; World Health Organization