24 ON SOME EARLY GARDEN HISTORY 



1350 yards long, " down the centre of which 

 ran a channel of water falling in terraces and 

 collecting here and there in large shallow basins 

 wherein fountains played ; where on either side 

 the channel was an avenue of trees and a paved 

 footway for pedestrians, and beyond this again 

 ran another avenue and a raised causeway, for 

 horses and vehicles, against the flanking walls." 

 Such was the approach which Shah Abbas, the 

 equally magnificent and art-loving contemporary 

 of Shah Jahan, created for his beloved Persian 

 capital, Ispahan, 



The grand old terrace gardens of India and 

 Kashmir lie for the most part forlorn and 

 neglected, or so changed that nearly all their 

 charm and character are lost. This is strange 

 when these large water-gardens have so much 

 in common with their European contemporaries, 

 the Italian gardens of the sixteenth and seven- 

 teenth centuries — ^the vast pleasure-grounds in the 

 building of which the Cardinals and Princes of 

 the Renaissance vied with each other, piling up 

 those wondrous terraces overlooking the blue roll- 

 ing waves of the Roman Campagna, or crowning 

 the heights of Fiesole above the quiet beauty 

 of the Arno valley, where the brown towers and 



