The walled garden of Iran and its Mughal descendant in India: a rectangle divided into four by water channels and raised walks crossing at a pool or pavilion, shaded by trees and planted with fruit and flowers, an image of paradise in a dry land.
The Persian garden is the oldest continuous tradition of garden design. At Pasargadae, Cyrus the Great’s capital of about 546 BC, the excavated palace garden has stone channels laid out round a rectangle, and Xenophon describes the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger showing off the straight rows of trees he had planted himself (The paradise: a walled garden in straight rows). The Old Persian word for a walled enclosure gave the Greeks paradeisos and the world the word paradise.
Under Islam the garden took its classic form, the chahar bagh or fourfold garden: a walled square or rectangle divided by two crossing axes of water and raised walks into four quarters, each of which may be divided again (The fourfold garden). The Qur’an describes paradise as a garden with four rivers, of water, milk, wine and honey, and the plan was read in that light, though it was also simply the way to water a garden by gravity in an arid land. A pavilion stood at the crossing or at one end, open on all sides to the breeze and the view. The beds were sunk below the walks so that the flowers looked like a carpet seen from above, and the plane trees, cypresses and fruit trees gave shade.
Babur, the first Mughal emperor, brought the garden from Kabul to India. His memoirs describe how, finding the plain of Agra flat, hot and without running water, he laid out gardens there with wells, water wheels and tanks, in an order and symmetry the country had not seen (Order and running water in a flat land). His successors set their tombs in gardens: Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi (1560s) at the centre of a charbagh, the Taj Mahal (1632–48) at the river end of one, so that the tomb rises against the sky. In Kashmir, Jahangir and his nobles built terraced gardens up the hillsides above Lake Dal, at Shalimar and Nishat, where the water falls from terrace to terrace over carved stone chutes, the chadar, and past niches for lamps and flowers, the chini khana.
The planting carried meanings. The cypress, evergreen and straight, stood for eternity, and the flowering fruit tree, almond, plum or cherry, for life and renewal; Persian and Mughal poets and painters set the two together. Roses, narcissus, tulips, irises and carnations filled the beds, and the chinar, the oriental plane, shaded the gardens of Kashmir. The Moorish gardens of Spain, the Generalife and the courts of the Alhambra, belong to the same family.