Enduring allure of the oasis effect
You might buy “Gardens of Persia” just for the 150 photos of languid Persian gardens, but there’s far more to it than that. Penelope Hobhouse has written a serious history of the Persian garden, tracing its roots as far back as ancient Mesopotamia. In effect, it’s a history of Iran and its neighbors as seen through their gardens, a jardin-centric history.
Hobhouse casts a genuine new light on the region. Shahs, caliphs, emirs and merchants all built gardens, whether for pleasure or grandeur, counting on the soothing interplay of water, flowers and architecture. Gardens have been as important to the local sense of the good life as buildings. Leaving the gardens out of Middle Eastern history is like leaving the palaces out of European history.
Hobhouse is a leading English gardener: She laid out a garden for the Queen Mother and, with her late husband, John Malins, was in charge of the National Trust gardens for 14 years. But she is describing a garden tradition quite unlike that of the English, with its vision of the garden as a private share of unspoiled nature.
That idea was unthinkable in the Middle East, where nature was arid and hostile; from the first, Persian gardens were enclosed by walls. The classic chahar bagh (quadripartite garden) is a protected paradise of fruit trees and flowerbeds, crossed by four placid canals (Hobhouse calls them rills) meeting at a central pool. Some rills are gentle cascades; some are reflecting pools, such as those at the Taj Mahal. Hobhouse finds the chahar bagh plan in the ruins of Cyrus the Great’s garden at Pasargadae, 6th century BC, and her diagrams of other Persian gardens show the stability of the design over the millenniums.
The Romans adopted features of the Persian garden for their villas, and Hobhouse traces its influence in India and Moorish Spain. In Central Asia, the fearsome military leader Tamerlane showed a gentler side by using gardens for public events, and as a result poets set many more of their verses among blossoming hyacinths and twittering nightingales.
This sort of garden is not for strolling in, like the English garden, but for sitting in. Despite the fact that gardening literature largely reflects the English tradition, here in the Southland we incline to the Persian sort of garden concept. We don’t “go for a walk in the shrubbery” as people do in Jane Austen novels -- we sit out in our gardens (under as much shade as we can contrive) with a cold drink. (If only we had the convenience of an ayvan, a sort of gigantic Persian alcove opening onto a garden, or at least a 40-columned pavilion fronting on the old swimming pool.)
Our climate is responsible for the design of our gardens, of course, and there’s a historical link as well. The Persian garden reached us through Spain with the mission gardens. The photos and Hobhouse’s descriptions can make even a nongardener want to see these marvels. She concludes the book with a plan for a garden tour of Iran, and one day that may be convenient to do. *
