The Full Monty
An ancient desert garden inspires Monty to think of the role of water, and our thirst for green
A desert garden stirs thoughts of water
The green flow of our gardens comes as mental shade
It is a four-hour car journey from the Iranian city of Isfahan; mountains fringe both sides of the route; desert – sometimes sand, sometimes rocky – creates a flat plain between the ranges. As gardening country goes, this is what even estate agents might call challenging, but arriving at Pasagardae, by the tomb of 6th-century Persian ruler, Cyrus the Great, you’ll find what are among the oldest remnants of a garden in the world. Its hard landscaping and structure date back to circa 550 BC – that’s 1,200 years before the Islamic invasion of Persia and well over 2,000 years older than any surviving remnants of a British Garden. We Brits tend to conceive of a garden as a hierarchical order of herbaceous borders, but you’ll not find anything in those sun-baked excavations that match that limited concept. We value plants above all else, but in the scorched Middle East, the most beautiful thing that any garden could contain was water. I have just returned from northern India where it was 38°C (100°F) in the shade. But that is no more than gentle autumnal weather. In summer, in Agra, it can reach 50°C; your body loses water almost faster than you can drink it; you feel your skin blister and lips crack in minutes. So water means life. A metre or so under the level of the Pasagardae plain, is a huge charbagh [Islamic quadrilateral garden], its four quarters marked out with stone channels over a kilometre long, punctuated every 10 metres or so with square pools. Water would have run through these, swirling around the corners of the pools on its long journey. In the beds delineated by the water channels would have been fruit trees, whose flowers would have delighted as much as the fruit. As the beds were sunken they’d be flooded by diverting the channels when there was rainfall – although now this only amounts to about 30cm a year. Cyrus the Great would have sat on an exquisite silk or pashmina carpet in one of the pavilions in the garden, shaded by cool, insulating marble stone. He’d have felt the air freshened by the water and the fragrance of blossom. Beneath the trees there would have been a brief ecstasy of flowering in spring, especially of bulbs, but for the most part little else. Above all, the water was celebrated as both the source and supreme expression of man’s cultivation of the natural world. Well, so far, not so surprising. Go anywhere really hot and shade and water take on an urgency we can only experience on brief holiday forays away from the air conditioning of a vehicle or hotel. But I have spent quite a lot of time this year visiting the paradise gardens of the desert and it is a lesson in using – and perhaps being used by – that which is central to everything a garden should be. Every dominant condition will have an irresistable response that becomes craving. I suspect that for us in the UK our equivalent to the lust for water in the desert is an aching need for green. Tarmac, brick, stone, steel and glass assault us like 50 degrees of heat. The green flow of our gardens comes as mental shade and coolness, filtering the glare of modern life. The deepest yearning is always for what you once had and lost, not for an ideal. The oasis in the desert is the home you are always heading back to. Every culture and society has its own oasis. Ours is made of green fields and softly lit woods and flowers blooming in the dappled shade. It is the sweet earth bearing harvest and the dawn light accompanied only by birdsong. If few of us have ever had the luxury of living that life then most of us somehow feel that it is potentially ours to share, even if we have no intention of living in the country. So we make our gardens drawing deep from the green well of our rural past, set a paltry few hundred years ago. Set against Cyrus’s Persian garden that is a blink of the collective eyelid. And as that garden, and every charbagh that followed it, had water running through it like arteries in a body, so our gardens beat with green blood and dream green dreams that always