Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
MONTY DON
Fragrant, soothing and sophisticated, Islamic gardens have been heaven on earth for centuries, says Monty Don
Our expert travels the globe to marvel at the magical paradise gardens of the Islamic world
Although last year I wrote in these pages weekly and filmed more than 30 Gardeners’ World episodes as well as a dozen programmes from the Chelsea, Hampton Court and Tatton Park flower shows, plus Gardeners’ World Live in Birmingham, 2017 for me was dominated by the making of a two-part television series, Paradise Gardens, which starts on Friday on BBC2.
Whereas on a couple of occasions last year we made two hour-long Gardeners’ World programmes in three days in my garden, these latest two shows took six months to make and involved travelling to Spain, Morocco, Turkey, Iran and India, as well as various locations here in England.
But then it is a huge and fascinating subject. Most of us have referred to our own gardens as paradise, or ‘a little bit of heaven’, and what we mean is that they are beautiful, peaceful refuges from the cares of normal life. But for desert Arabs living a nomadic existence 1,500 years ago, the one thing that made life possible, let alone tolerable, was an oasis. Without occasional patches of green with fresh water there would be no life at all. Compared to the suffocating heat, sandstorms, interminable salt flats and razor-sharp rocks, an oasis really is heaven on earth.
The concept of paradise being a garden goes back almost 5,000 years to Babylon, in what is now Iraq, but the first reference to the word comes from the Persian pairidaeza, which means an enclosed garden. When the Arabs invaded Persia in the seventh century AD they quickly adopted the Persian idea of the paradise garden. Combined with the Koranic references to Paradise as a garden flowing with four riv- ers of water, milk, honey and wine, we have the Islamic paradise garden that has been a central part of Muslim culture right across the world.
While I’d read about these paradise gardens and visited a few, I realised that of all the kinds of gardens on Earth these were the ones that I knew least about. Yet Islam is one of the world’s great religions with more than 1.5 billion followers forming the majority of the population in some 50 countries. In an age when there is so much misunderstanding and suspicion between Islam and other faiths I wanted to explore and celebrate the major achievements that bind us all together through that great cultural leveller – the garden.
And so I travelled around the Islamic world visiting as many gardens as I could. In southern Spain I visited the oldest continuously occupied royal palace in Europe, the Real Alcazar in Seville, which has a fascinating combination of Islamic and Christian architecture and gardens known as Mudejar – and the most fragrant roses I’ve ever encountered! In Granada, the Alham- bra is a vast series of palaces, each with a garden, each a glorious example of paradise on Earth – and this was the last stronghold of the Moors who left there on the morning of 2 January, 1492, following a war that ended seven centuries of Islamic rule in Spain.
As our word paradise is of Persian origin, any attempt to understand or appreciate the gardens of Islam has to go via Iran. But for six months our attempts to get filming visas came to no avail until I received a phone call one evening last September saying that visas had come through for myself and Derry Moore, the photographer with whom I have written a book on paradise gardens, to go three days later for just five days. So we set off with very few contacts, met up with an Iranian crew – of whom only one spoke any English – and spent a fascinating, intensive four days filming and photo- graphing Persian gardens. Although we in the West regard Iran with mixed feelings, my experience was of a stunningly beautiful country in which I was shown nothing but extreme hospitality.
Persian gardens provided the framework for all future paradise gardens created in the then Arab world, from Syria down through Egypt and on to Sicily and Spain. As well as the nature of the pairidaeza, with their enclosed charbaghs (see box below), the Persian gardens were sensuous, romantic
places rather than just symbols of life contrasted against the harshness of the desert. Any lover of gardens sooner or later discovers these wonderful, almost mythical, spaces and longs to see them. If that garden lover is also attempting to understand and discover as much as possible about Islamic gardens in general then the draw is irresistible.
Gardens in Iran such as Bagh-e Fin, Chehel Sotoun and Bagh-e Eram are not just beautiful but great cultural monuments, and seeing them brought a perspective to all the other paradise gardens I visited in the Islamic world.
The great Mughal empire, which stretched from northern India up through modern Pakistan, Kashmir and Afghanistan, introduced tomb gardens – vast and exquisitely beautiful mausoleums set in the middle of huge charbaghs. The most famous of these, and one of the most iconic buildings in the world, is the Taj Mahal. This was built by the Mughal ruler Shah Jahan in memory of his beloved wife Mumtaz, who died giving birth to their 14th child in 1631. The Taj took 17 years and 20,000 craftsmen to complete, and remains one of the most beautiful constructions ever made. But the tomb itself is ‘just’ the centrepiece of the garden, which was radically replanted by the British in 1903 and now features sweeping lawns and mature trees rather than its original fruit trees in sunken beds.
Less well known but almost as beau-
tiful is Humayun’s tomb in Delhi, which was built nearly a century earlier. Seeing the orange sun rise through Delhi’s smog over its dome with the garden laid out around it remains one of the most haunting moments of last year.
I did not, however, have to travel the world to see all the paradise gardens. Back in 2000 Prince Charles had the idea of a garden based upon a pair of Turkish rugs he owned, and this was the birth of his Carpet Garden. Carpets have been an essential feature of Islamic gardens since the days of Persia’s founder Cyrus the Great around 2,550 years ago. The finer carpets were often conceived as mini ‘gardens’ themselves with flower designs woven in, designed to be sat on outside in the summer months and used indoors in winter, when you brought the garden with you. The Prince’s Carpet Garden was originally designed and constructed for the Chelsea Flower Show in
2001 but was rebuilt back at Highgrove, his Gloucestershire home.
This garden is a classic charbagh with a raised fountain in its centre, spilling into a broad scalloped marble basin and surrounded with a plinth and steps decorated with Moroccan zellij (geometric pattern) tiles. You enter through a wooden door in a blank wall and emerge into an enclosed, jewelled space, rich in colour and texture. The enclosing walls that lend the sense of a Middle Eastern courtyard are a lovely apricot colour and complemented by terracotta pots filled with pink and red roses and the peach-coloured terracotta tiles on the paths. It is as though this rather pure, austere idea has been allowed to breathe and express itself in the language it feels comfortable with – that of an English country garden blended almost perfectly with a Middle Eastern charbagh.
This really is the great lesson I have learnt from visiting these glorious paradise gardens all over the world. Although it has provided me with new and sometimes exotic experiences, as well as an insight into a religion and culture I did not know enough about, through the great medium of gardens it brought home that most important lesson of all: that whoever we are, wherever we come from and wherever we believe we are going to, it is not our differences that matter but those things we share that enrich us all.
Monty Don’s Paradise Gardens starts on Friday, 9pm, BBC2. The accompanying book by Monty, with photos by Derry Moore, is published in March.