You can walk the long blocks of Olaya district for an entire afternoon and see nothing of the gardens that live inside them. The neighborhood reads, from the street, as a chain of plain stucco walls broken by green-painted gates. Behind those gates, in many older houses, sit small inner courtyards — sometimes four metres on a side, sometimes twelve — whose planting recipes have been carried forward, with patient adjustments, since the mid-twentieth century.
The Najdi courtyard is a particular form. It is not the lush riad of Marrakech, and it is not the geometric Persian char-bagh. It is drier, tougher, less ornamental. The walls are high, the floor is often pale stone or compacted sand, the trees are few but heavy with shade. The point is to make a pocket of cool, scented air inside a city that is otherwise paved and hot.
"An Olaya courtyard is engineered for the body sitting under a tree at four in the afternoon, when the wall behind you holds yesterday's cool."
The Working Planting Recipe
Almost every documented Olaya courtyard contains some version of the following: one or two bitter orange trees set near the wall, a pomegranate at a sunny corner, a jasmine vine carried along an iron trellis above a low stone bench, and, in better-kept gardens, a single climbing Damask rose imported originally from the Taif valley. Sweet basil and mint are kept in pots near the door. The bitter orange is rarely harvested for fruit; its job is shade and scent.
What distinguishes an active courtyard from a neglected one is the trellis. Where the jasmine vine is regularly thinned and re-tied, the air at evening carries its scent in waves. Where the trellis has been allowed to collapse into the tree below, the courtyard reads as a tired room. Flowarde catalogs trellis condition as one of the basic visit metrics.
The Editorial Project
Documenting these courtyards is delicate work. Most are private, most belong to families who would prefer not to be named, and most are best photographed only with permission and discretion. Our register includes nine Olaya courtyards as of the spring 2026 update. Each is recorded only with the host family's clearance, and the published images are limited to plant detail rather than architectural identification.