The 2009 ASHS Annual Conference

What do we owe to classical Islamic culture in terms of garden design? Many of us have read, or heard in a lecture, that the view of a garden as an earthly paradise may be attributed to the Islamic religious culture. To what degree is this a tenable explanation? Is there any truth at all to it? It is all myth? Western history does show us that the walled garden, with a central water feature, has been repeated for a millennium throughout the Middle East and North Africa, in Spain, and even in India. In all these locations, the garden design has been associated with Islamic rulers and culture. But if it did not come from Islam, then where did this concept originate? In many ways, it is reasonable to believe that cultures from arid lands would tend to appreciate the visual comfort of running water and lush, green plantings. In contrast to the harsh landscape outside the walls, these gardens do provide a quiet, tranquil vision…in some ways, an escape from reality. And, since the Middle Ages, western culture has more or less equated the cultures of the arid Middle East and southwest Asia with Islam. But it was not always so. Islam as a political and cultural force is a relative newcomer to the region. By the 4^th and 5^th centuries BCE, a millennium before Islam’s rise across the region, the great Persian rulers Xerxes, Darius, and Alexander had spread their culture from the Bosporus to the Indus Valley. This was the culture which actually promoted the walled garden rich with plantings and water features throughout the realm…called at that time “the whole known world.” So while almost all of our existing examples of the gardens representing paradise date from the reigns of Islamic rulers in the 10^th through 15^th centuries, these are just the most recent and best preserved examples of a tradition more than 2,000 years old. And, so far as we may determine, there was originally no religious significance to the gardens…and the idea of a “paradise on earth” may be more a cultural than a religious concept.