By the late nineteenth century, the city of Ismailia in the Isthmus of Suez was dubbed the “emerald city.”1 Ismailia is located strategically halfway along the Suez Canal, between Port Said and Suez, and on Lake Timsah in Eastern Egypt. While the Suez Canal provided the economic and diplomatic raison d’être for Ismailia’s establishment, the city’s life and development depended on the fresh water canals built at the same time, bringing water from the Nile River to Ismailia, and used for horticulture, the city’s inhabitants, or transferred via other new canals to Suez and to Port Said. These canals also enabled the development of new green urban spaces on both poles of the canal: Zamalek in Cairo and Ismailia along the Suez Canal. Yet the “greening” of the desert was not simply about creating modern, livable cities. The infrastructure built by and for the Suez Canal Company itself—the freshwater and maritime canals, the railway and tramway lines, and water treatment plants—also relied upon the investment into agricultural research and the strategic acclimatization, transportation, and planting of trees. The research they sponsored sought solutions to silting, water evaporation, wind, and heat—problems which had led many canals built under Mehmet Ali to fall into disuse by the mid-nineteenth century.2 This paper argues that the politics of “greening the desert” was not only a rhetorical strategy to assert civilizational superiority, to inspire imaginations, or to draw workers and tourists to these cities, but also about the very practical and material need of the Company to maintain the infrastructure upon which it was founded, and was connected to broader commercial, agricultural interests. 3 Through the lens of the Suez Canal Company, this paper thus aims to draw connections between urban and rural landscapes, and between ideals or rhetoric about green space and the commercial interests of agro-scientific research. Using primarily the correspondences, printed materials, and photographs from the Suez Canal Company archives, writings by employees, and agricultural journals from the time, this paper will shed light on the Company’s and their employees’ interests in agricultural research and experimentation in the Isthmus of Suez in the mid to late nineteenth century.