2. THE PARADISE GARDEN

The Paradise Garden was made in 2018 after I had spent much of the previous year visiting Islamic gardens around the world for a television series. After such a complete immersion in the various styles of Islamic gardens, I wanted to make something that would be a memento of what had been a profoundly enlightening experience.

Islamic paradise gardens were created primarily as places of shelter from the burning sun and as sources of the most precious commodity of all – water. But here, the western fringes of Britain, in Herefordshire, we are long on rain and lush green but short on arid desert, so the garden had to be adapted to the realities of our climate.

The paradise-garden idiom dictated lots of fragrance as well as colour, and that the plants should be based primarily on fruits. In Islamic gardens the four fruits – dates, oranges, figs and pomegranates – were essential. Dates were not a viable option in Herefordshire but the other three grow well in pots.

It had to have a building of sorts as a pleasant shelter (left) and I seriously considered making a rill as they feature strongly throughout the world of

Islam, but the budget stymied that (the

Paradise Garden was made on a shoestring, costing about as much as the sandwich budget for the average Chelsea

Flower Show garden).

In its place we have a very simple bubbling fountain set in a metal bowl – originally a fire bowl but with a hole drilled through it and a copper pipe passing down into a concrete tank below. The water feature is as much about sound as sight. It creates a continuous gentle murmur as the water bubbles up and spills over the edge of the bowl, to be recycled back down and up again from the cistern below.

The water feature in the Paradise Garden works well but was cobbled together from bits and pieces