S OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN 37 



lovers of scenery and laid great emphasis on choice of site, a hillside 

 spring being the ideal starting point of a garden. The gardens were 

 inclosed, not in this case so much for the sake of defense as for privacy, 

 repose, magnificence, and definite formality. The whole scheme of 

 buildings and gardens was designed as one. The scheme was made to 

 be lived in and often different portions were arranged for enjoyment 

 at different times of day. We read how the Emperor moved from the 

 water-sprayed central pavilion, cool even at noon, to the deep afternoon 

 shade of a grove of planes, and again in the evening walked in the 

 "moonlight court" full of the rich perfumes of gleaming white flowers. 

 The gardens were often on a scale much greater than any of their proto- 

 types in Persia, greater than the Italian villas of the sixteenth and 

 seventeenth centuries with which they were contemporary, or indeed 

 greater than any of the gardens with which we in modern times are 

 familiar except the more magnificent designs of the age of Louis XIV. 



These gardens came into being in one of two ways : either they sur- 

 rounded the palace or temporary dwelling of the owner, or they were 

 the result of the combination of two notable customs of the Moghuls, 

 garden making and tomb building. It was common for any prince or 

 noble to have constructed for himself a pleasure building in the midst 

 of a garden and to use this for his own recreation and that of his friends 

 during his lifetime, and for a tomb and a permanent memorial after his 

 death. There thus grew up under the Moghul dominion in India a 

 great number of these gardens, some of which have remained to the 

 present day so that their design may be appreciated, and still more are 

 in ruins with only traces of their plan. In the more broken and hilly 

 country, the design fitted itself to the topography and therefore varied 

 from place to place, although a certain consistency of scheme is trace- 

 able in such gardens as have come down to us. In these the main build- 

 ing was either at the bottom or the top of the terracing. As in the 

 Moghul gardens of Kashmir, of which the Nishat Bagh is an existing 

 example, advantage was taken of the change of elevation to secure by a 

 succession of terraces a combination of inclosure with an opportunity 

 for distant view. In the treatment of water any change of elevation 

 was seized upon to give the additional life and splashing of cascades 

 and water-chutes. In the great plains country around Agra and 



