House&Garden 
Vol.II MAY, 1902 No. 5 
GLIMPSES OF MODERN PERSIA 
I. THE GARDENS 
I N spite of the conscientious efforts of picture of Paradise was only a sublimation 
travelers to disillusionize it, the West has of the Persian gardens of his day ; but that 
tenaciously declined, for a matter of some day has irretrievably departed, 
hundreds of years, to modify its conceptions The hard fact is that the modern Persian 
of the Orient. It is persistently incredulous thanks God if he can make one blade of grass 
of the decay, the 
threadbare ness, 
which pervades 
practically all Asiatic 
life. The Persia the 
Occident dreams of 
is the Persia of the 
Arabian Nights, of 
Lalla Rookh, of 
Saadi and Hafiz, of 
Ismael, and of Shah 
Abbas, the Grand 
Monarque, who to 
reclaim a cheerless 
swamp district on 
the shores of the 
Caspian and unite it 
with the rest of the 
empire, built a 
superb causeway of 
solid masonry, some 
hundreds of miles in 
length, the crum¬ 
bling ruins of which 
still look out dis¬ 
mally upon the way¬ 
farer through that 
pestilential country. The Persia which had 
its capital in Ispahan was worthy heir to the 
splendors of Persepolis and Ecbatana. In 
such a land, blooming from the Caucasus to 
the Indian Ocean, the bulbul may indeed 
have wooed the rose, to the music of 
fountains, in gardens shining with apples and 
pomegranates of gold. Mahomet’s alluring 
IN A PERSIAN GENTLEMAN S GARDEN 
grow where two grew 
before, and even that 
is not an unmixed 
blessing, for it is 
certain to subject 
him to redoubled 
exactions. In Persia 
nothing fails like 
success ; nothing is 
so dangerous or so 
expensive, even in 
the humblest sphere. 
Art and the worship 
of the be au ti ful 
do not go hand in 
hand with grinding 
poverty or insatiate 
official greed, and 
the Persian garden of 
to-day, even at its 
best, is like the palace 
and the temple, only 
a pale simulacrum 
of its predecessors. 
Unpleasant as 
such an exordium 
may seem, it is 
essential to establish this general background 
of condition, without which any truthful 
description of Persian institutions as they 
now exist would seem grotesque. 
If asked for the causes of artistic decline 
in Persia, 1 should say consuming poverty, 
and back of that, recurrent northern and 
eastern invasion, with its attendant spoliation 
*75 
