I IO 



Garden and Forest. 



[March 5, 1890. 



them can doubtless be obtained from other state govern- 

 ments as it has from that of this state. Contributions of 

 money would flow into the treasury of such an association 

 as soon as people became convinced that it was man- 

 aged judiciously and for the best interests of the public, 

 and the only real difficulty in carrying out Mr. Eliot's ex- 

 cellent suggestion will be found in securing persons of the 

 necessary attainments for such work with the leisure 

 requisite for the organization and management of such 

 a trust. Good men and women for such work are difficult 

 to find always, and the most fitting have generally their 

 hands more than full with public and private duties. 



We have occasionally suggested that perhaps the pro- 

 jectors of immense storage reservoirs for purposes of irri- 

 gation neglected to take into account the danger which 

 threatened life and property from these great volumes of 

 imprisoned water. The reply to these cautions has always 

 been that the problem was a simple one to engineers who 

 understood the physical conditions in the arid regions, 

 and that American skill could be trusted with the construc- 

 tion of the needed dams, which could be made absolutely 

 safe. The bursting of the great Walnut Grove reservoir in 

 Arizona, however, seems to justify all the warnings that 

 have been sounded. This work has been spoken of as a 

 masterpiece of engineering skill. It has been illustrated in 

 the press as one of the wonders of the country, and was 

 pronounced perfectly able to withstand any possible 

 pressure from floods. And yet it gave way at the very 

 first serious onset of the waters. The horrors of Johns- 

 town were not repeated simply because there were not so 

 many people in the track of the torrent. It is a misfortune 

 that Major Powell is less zealous to protect the natural 

 reservoirs furnished by the mountain forests than he is to 

 construct artificial ones, which certainly are less safe, 

 and which may be less effective than he imagines. 



The Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch. 

 XVIII. — The Mahometans in Persia. 



HAVING glanced at India as it was before the advent of its 

 Mahometan conquerors, we' may now turn back to 

 Persia, where these conquerors were to learn their skill in the 

 art of gardening. Persia is exceptionally interesting to the 

 student of history in any of its branches because it has so often 

 refreshed its power under the rule of a new dynasty or a new 

 race. From the time of Cyrus to our own, whatever the 

 name and the faith of its rulers, the individuality of Persia has 

 never been wiped out, and national tastes have persisted and 

 have influenced both the East and the West. In the sixth cen- 

 tury of our era not even Justinian's capital on the Bosphorus 

 was more splendid than Ctesiphon, the capital of the Sassanid 

 sovereigns of Persia, and their love for pleasure-grounds is em- 

 balmed in anecdotes that are repeated in every school history. 

 Poetical and religious writings still more clearly reflect the 

 national passion' for garden's. St. John pictures a purely 

 architectural paradise as the home of the Christian 

 blessed. But the seventh heaven reserved for the follow- 

 ers of Zoroaster, as described by writers of the Sassanid 

 period, was to be a garden with paths of polished gold, filled 

 with flowers and fruits and odors and with pleasure-houses 

 of diamond and pearl ; and one special spot is de- 

 scribed at length. Here, in white and golden robes, on 

 thrones of gold and silver, will sit the genii of water, of fire 

 and of plants, and with them the souls of " governors and offi- 

 cials, who have not failed in good works, who have dug foun- 

 tains and canals, built aqueducts, established inns and resting- 

 places for weary wanderers, laid out gardens for the pleasure 

 of the poor, and not impiously hewn down trees and plants ; 

 who have guarded the sacred fire and followed the religion of 

 Zoroaster." * 



Into the luxurious and intellectual land of Persia broke 

 the rude, conquering, proselytizing Arab shortly after the 

 death of Mahomet in the seventh century. Here, for the first 

 time, he came in contact with a highly developed civilization. 

 Here he quickly absorbed its lessons, and, gradually amalga- 

 mating with the native Persian, developed the arts and sci- 

 ences which he found in bud ; and hence all he had learned 



*Justi, " Geschichte des alten Persiens." 



was carried westward over half the ancient empire of Rome 

 and eastward much farther than the Roman had ever gone. 



There was no united kingdom of Persia for centuries after 

 the first Mahometan inroad. But this fact only served to in- 

 crease the splendor of the land at large, each district having 

 its lordly ruler and flourishing under his lavish hand.f When 

 we speak of Bagdad in the time of Haroun-al-Raschid, when 

 we read of it in the "Arabian Nights" or the poems of Per- 

 sian singers, we think of a city of gardens, shadowy with 

 Cypress, Poplar and Plane, plashing with innumerable foun- 

 tains and rivulets, sweet with a thousand odors, brilliant with 

 a myriad flowers by day and a million twinkling lamps by 

 night. Bagdad without its gardens, or Damascus, or Shiraz, 

 or Ispahan, would be like Rome without its hills, like Venice 

 without its waves. 



The western Asiatic, with his strong feeling for architectural 

 beauty, never made the mistake of surrounding stately build- 

 ings with grounds of a purely " natural " character. His 

 urban gardens, as we can be sure even from the fanciful 

 descriptions in the " Arabian Nights," and as will be shown 

 when we speak of the gardens of the Arabs in Europe, were 

 formal in arrangement, with marble walks and benches, regu- 

 lar avenues, and a multitude of fountains and pavilions. 

 Shade and coolness were the things he cared for most, and 

 the odor of flowers was as much prized as their beauty. But 

 the semi-poetic, semi-fantastic cast of the west Asiatic mind 

 leads it to appreciate picturesqueness and variety as well as 

 symmetry; and whenever it has been inspired by romantic land- 

 scape forms, it has reproduced their charm in appropriate situa- 

 tions. A mediaeval writer, Abu Ishak Ibrahim, called El 

 Istachri, in his " Book of the Roads of the Countries " (which 

 treats of the whole of Islam, but especially of Persis), tells of 

 five thousand country-houses or " castles," some standing in 

 the neighborhood of towns, but some deep in the mountains. 

 Half a dozen centuries make as little change, very often, in 

 the tastes and customs of oriental as does half a century in 

 those of occidental nations. Modern Persia is but the degen- 

 erate child of mediaeval Persia ; and thus, when later on we 

 shall read of the aspect of the Persian country home of 

 to-day, we shall realize that in mediaeval years a romantic 

 wildness, carefully simulated by art, distinguished its grounds 

 when the natural character of the landscape permitted. 



The. planting of shade-trees along streets and highways was 

 sedulously practiced in mediaeval Persia. Teheran was called 

 "the city of Planes," from its embowered streets, and the 

 Plane was everywhere the favorite tree for such purposes. J 



What we call Saracenic architecture was born under the 

 Mahometan rulers of Persia, and was based on ancient Persian 

 elements. So, too, was the gardening art that accom- 

 panied it as it spread to the Atlantic and the Ganges. 

 There were no such masters of the art of gardening as the 

 Mahometan shahs and khalifs during the whole thousand 

 years which divided the eclipse of classic architecture from 

 its renaissance in modern Italy. While Gothic architecture 

 was so splendidly developing in the north, gardening art, as 

 we have seen, scarcely there deserved the name. But the 

 two arts flourished hand and hand in the Mahometan south, 

 and, indeed, the work of the mediaeval Mahometan gardener 

 has, in some respects, never been surpassed. Is it not in- 

 teresting to know that in this case, as in the case of ancient 

 Athens and Rome, the first impulse, the first teaching, came 

 from Persia ?$ 



All along the north coast of Africa and over many of the 

 southern shores of Europe the Mahometan conquerors grad- 

 ually spread, at first destroying like very Goths, but soon 

 repairing the relics of ancient beauty which they found, or 

 creating new beauty on newly chosen sites. In the fourth 

 century, as has been told, Belisarius found the Vandals 

 luxuriating in a thousand villas and gardens in those parts 

 of Africa where at first the Phoenician settlers and then the 



t Jaeger, in his " Gartenkunst und Gaerten," compares the influence upon 

 national culture exerted by these local capitals to that exerted by the many small 

 courts of Germany during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But it 

 should be remembered that in the middle ages there were no other countries 

 where science and art were similarly fostered. "Their splendid palaces, " says 

 Hallam. " History of the Middle Ages," of the khalifs of Bagdad, "their numerous 

 guards, their treasures of gold and silver, the populousness and wealth of their 

 cities, formed a striking contrast to the rudeness and poverty of the western 

 nations in the same age. In their court, learning, which the first Moslems had 

 despised as unwarlike, or rejected as profane, was held in honor." 



t Benjamin: "Persia and the Persians." Colonel Yule, in the notes to his edi- 

 tion of Marco Polo's "Travels," gives an interesting account of some famous 

 Plane-trees in Persia : and the Venetian adventurer's own story of the "Old Man 

 of the Mountain" and his " paradise " well illustrates the national delight in gar- 

 dens. 



§ The inborn oriental love for gardens shows, of course, in Mahomet's own 

 descriptions of paradise; but, although the imagination of the Arab had been 

 fired by the achievements of others, his artistic instincts found but slight chance 

 to express themselves until he came under Persian influence. 



