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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 January 2025
The Persian Garden
In the 1859 edition of his Rubáiyát, Edward Fitzgerald summarised the meaning of gardens in Persian culture in these few lines:
With me alone some Strip of Herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown,
Where name of slave and Sultan scarce is known,
And pity Sultan Maḥmūd on his Throne.
This version of a Persian quatrain by Omar Khayyam draws a very incomplete picture of our subject, but it was clear enough to appeal to a romantic view of the Orient prevailing in Europe at the time. Scenes of this kind have often been visualised in illustrated editions of the Rubáiyát, where solitary figures or couples in amorous embrace are shown revelling in the beauties of nature. In spite of the fact that such images have become a cliché, they are not irrelevant to our understanding of authentic values in Persian culture. It is undeniable that gardens did have an exceptional attraction for Persians and figure most prominent in their literature and art, but also in their ordinary way of life. Moreover, the few features mentioned in this little poem correspond to ideas expressed time and again, not only in the quatrains of Khayyām, but also in numerous other Persian poems.
What does the quatrain really say about Persian gardens? First, that they are tiny pleasure grounds, existing rather precariously as strips of green carved out of the waste land on the one side and the land used for practical purposes by the farmer on the other. Secondly, that gardens are places for the recluse, for anyone who wants to be free from the restraints of society and who looks upon the powers of the world with scornful pity.
In this paper I intend to pay some attention to the background of this cliché. I am not qualified at all to deal with the concrete aspects of gardens in Persia. The limitations of my competence force me to restrict myself to evocations of Persian gardens in literature. My examples are taken from the Islamic period. This is not only because the scope of today's conference is limited to gardens in the Islamic world, but also because pre-Islamic data concerning the artistic appreciation of gardens in Persia are very few indeed, whereas the material available from Islamic times is extremely abundant.
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