House and Garden 
pur Sikri and near Agra. He brought horti¬ 
culturists from Persia to look after them. 
None of these gardens now exist. Jahangir 
mentions one of them as being remarkable 
for a great many ancient cypress trees of ex¬ 
traordinary size. These were probably 
planted by Babar, as he apparently was the 
first to introduce the cypress into India. 
The earliest Mogul gardens which exist 
now in anything like their original condition 
are those which the Emperor Jahangir him¬ 
self constructed. Some time before he came 
to the throne he was at Udaipur in Rajpu- 
tana, and there, in one of the island palaces 
on the lake, is a very interesting garden, 
which, though probably not of his time, is 
of the Persian style which he introduced 
into Rajputana. It is not now cultivated in 
the old style, but the plan of it on page 215 
gives a good idea of its very original con¬ 
struction. The flower-beds are worked out 
with brick, covered with a fine polished 
plaster, into conventional floral patterns, 
imitating, with the living flowers planted in 
them, the design of a Persian carpet. The 
waters of the lake flow into the interstices to 
form the ground of the pattern. The plain 
spaces AA are platforms on which to sit. In 
the center of the garden is a small marble 
pavilion, probably for musicians ; to reach it 
one must wade through the water, or pass 
over a plank. A marble platform with beds 
for trees surrounds the garden. The larger 
pavilions on each of its four sides look out 
over the lake. 
At Udaipur also, within the Maharajah’s 
palace, there is a small courtyard (see page 
215) laid out in typical Mogul style. A 
marble tank in the center is surrounded by 
square plots, panelled by slabs of marble into 
geometric flower-beds. A rail of perforated 
marble encloses the flower-plots, four cy¬ 
presses marking the outer corners. In the 
Mogul times every palace contained within 
its walls gardens such as this, large or small, 
for the use of the ladies of the zanana. 
Jahangir’s most famous gardens are those 
which he and his accomplished Oueen, the 
beautiful Nur Mahal, “ the Light of the 
Palace,” laid out on a magnificent scale in 
Kashmir, after his accession to the throne. 
I he principal one, called the Shahlimar 
Bagh, measures 500 yards by 207, and is ar¬ 
ranged in four terraces; a masonry wall, 10 
feet high, encloses the whole garden. A 
mountain stream, as in the Bagh-e-Kilan de¬ 
scribed by Babar, is trained to pass through 
the center of the garden, filling its artificial 
reservoirs and irrigation channels, and falling 
from terrace to terrace over cascades built of 
masonry. Bernier, the French physician, 
who passed many years at Aurangzib’s 
court, visited Kashmir about forty years after 
the Shahlimar Bagh was made and thus de¬ 
scribes it: “ The most beautiful of all these 
gardens is one belonging to the King called 
Chahlimar. The entrance from the lake is 
through a spacious canal bordered with green 
turf and running between two rows of poplars. 
Its length is about five hundred paces and it 
leads to a large summer house placed in the 
middle of the garden. A second canal, still 
finer than the first, then conducts you to 
another summer house at the end of the gar¬ 
den. The canal is paved with large blocks 
of freestone and its sloping sides are covered 
with the same material. In the middle is a 
long row of fountains fifteen paces asunder; 
besides which there are here and there large 
circular basins or reservoirs, formed into a 
variety of shapes and figures. The summer 
houses are placed in the midst of the canal, 
consequently surrounded by water, and be¬ 
tween the two rows of poplars planted on 
either side.” 
He describes the Kashmir gardens gener¬ 
ally as being covered with fruit-trees, and 
laid out with regular trellised walks. They 
were usually surrounded by the large-leafed 
aspen, planted at intervals of two feet. The 
largest of these trees were as high as the 
mast of a ship, with a tuft of branches at the 
top like palm-trees. The reservoirs were 
stocked with fish, so tame that they ap¬ 
proached when called ; some of the largest 
fish had gold rings with inscriptions “ placed 
there, it is said, by the celebrated Nur 
Mahal.” 
Our frontispiece is a view from the upper 
pavilion of the Shahlimar Bagh, from a pho¬ 
tograph taken some years ago, and it shows 
the splendid avenue of plane-trees which 
line the principal water-course. It will be 
observed that Bernier describes rows of pop¬ 
lars, not plane-trees, on either side of the 
channel. In his account of the gardens at 
219 
