A walled paradise: a history of Iranian gardening

http://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2014/oct/30/iran-walled-garden-paradise

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Parks and gardens are attested in the land of Iran from the sixth century BC, when the Greek historian Herodotus tells us that the Persian kings liked gardening. Their gardens held every sort of plant and flower, irrigated by running water, a most precious commodity for the inhabitants of the plateau. The streams crossed at certain point to divide the gardens into four separate green spaces, which if we are to follow the famous archaeologist of Iran, David Stronach, would mean the first chahar bagh in history. This chahar-bagh model of landscape design was later to be exported to the rest of the world, to such places as Agra in India and Andalusia in Spain.

The Persians called these gardens, marked as a walled enclosure, a paradaida. The Greeks borrowed the term and used it in their language as paradisos. By the time the Bible was translated into Greek, the term already meant “a heavenly place,” a paradise, for those who responded to God’s commands. Iran had many of these paradises and the ancient Persians not only cherished them, but also used the concept as part of their ideological empire building. According to Bruce Lincoln, one of the great scholars of the history of religions, the Achaemenid Persians in effect meant to conquer the entire known world in the name of establishing paradise on earth.

By the late ancient period, Iran itself was imagined as a garden, where all of its good people lived. There was plenty of good earth and people, and hence civilization. The Iranians of the Sasanian period built a wall around Iran so as to protect the land and its people from the outsiders who sometimes were depicted as monsters and the unwanted. Huge walls in the north protected the Iranians from the nomads, be it Huns or the Turkic people, and in the south from the Bedouin Arabs. The seas protected the rest and provided defense to Iran which as a whole was imagined as a garden.

One of the greatest rulers that Iran has ever seen in its history, Khusro I, known as Anushirvan, has left a wonderful speech about Iran as a garden and its walls. These wise words are captured in the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi (Khaleghi-Motlagh viii: 345:275-82 ):

Iran is like a lush Spring garden

Where Roses ever bloom

The army and weapons are the garden’s walls

And lances its wall of thorns

If the garden’s walls are pulled down

Then there would be no difference between it and the wilderness [beyond]

Take care not to destroy its walls

And not to dishearten or weaken Iranians

If you do, then raiding and pillaging will follow

And also the battle-cries of riders and the din of war

Risk not the safety of the Iranians’ wives, children, and lands

by bad policies and plans

I think every ruler should read the Shahnameh as it was done so until a century ago and take heed of what Khusro Anushirvan has said. However, the walls did come down and Arabs, Turks, Mongols and others came into Iran. Still, Iran remained a garden and all these conquerors may have at first had a hand it its defilement, but then they themselves continued to build the garden. Even the actual walls were kept up to and this tradition went beyond the medieval period.

Iran or Persia, as it was known, remained a wonderful land of gardens, poetry and mystics. The Chahr-Baghs of Isfahan made that city one of the most wondrous in the world; the great poet Hafez is said to have been hardly able to leave his beloved Shiraz with its many garden; the great mystic Jami tell us that every fortunate person who enjoys these blooming trees, the shade, or the fruit he consumes, should act according to the laws of righteousness. So Iran as a garden lived on and Iranians lived in it and rarely left it, unless they had to.

There was a time that people stayed in this garden. Young men and women used to go abroad, but always came back to their home and tended the garden. Some of us now have left that garden. To many for whom the walls once protected the garden from the outsiders, now seem like the walls of a prison. More and more young people want to leave this garden and its walls. Many of them will leave and make their home abroad and become successful, famous or rich.

Still, they will always become nostalgic for that garden which they left. I, like many who are away from Iran, still wish well for that garden. We hope to again go back to that garden and tend its plants. But now I am are far away. Instead, I have built a little garden in my home to remember Iran that was once my garden.