Free A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal by Michael Preston Diana Preston

sections of the garden, which they stocked with flowers and trees. The gardens thus became known as char baghs , ‘four-fold enclosed gardens’. ( Bagh is another Persian word for garden.)
    When Timur invaded Persia, he took back to central Asia much from the cultural reservoir that the country and its people provided. As well as craftsmen, he borrowed ideas from the ‘paradise garden’ and incorporated them into the gardens with which he surrounded his capital city of Samarkand. Because their kingdoms were hillier, and often better provided with water, Timur and his nobles made more use of running water in fountains and waterfalls cascading down through terraced gardens. From the limited pictorial and descriptive material available, they seem to have planted their gardens with fruit trees such as pomegranate, peach, quince and cherry, together with other trees, such as the plane and poplar. They filled the beds with flowers like the iris, rose, violet and narcissus. Interestingly, because of local conditions they apparently used clover, not grass, for ground cover. Timur gave his vast gardens encircling Samarkand romantic names such as ‘World’s Picture’ and ‘Meadow of the Deep Pool’. As he moved his nomadic encampment from garden to garden, Timur, who was tall and broad with a long white beard, had his throne placed on a platform above the spot where the watercourses representing the four rivers of life crossed, thus emphasizing his domination of the four quarters of the world.
    When Babur conquered India he brought with him the garden tradition. One of his first acts was to build cooling gardens in his hot new capital of Agra. These were essentially pleasure grounds – the biggest innovation of his successors was to make their gardens the setting for their tombs. The emperor and his nobles would create char baghs which they would enjoy and live in while alive and in which they would be buried when they died. The Moghuls introduced other developments including broader water channels and a greater use of large sheets of still water to reflect the tombs or pavilions built at the channels’ intersections. Shah Jahan usually built pavilions of white marble, sometimes with a counterpointing pavilion in black, as, for example, in the black pavilion that in 1630 he ordered to be constructed in the Shalimar Gardens in Kashmir.
    The Moghuls made even more use of running water in their gardens than their Timurid forebears. They incorporated fountains producing spouts of water and a romantic, cooling mist which brightened into a prismatic rainbow when struck by the rays of the sun. They added water shoots and embellished water channels by causing water to run down sheets of marble carefully carved in fish-scale patterns to produce ripples and reflections. As dusk fell and bats swooped down to drink, servants lit oil lamps kept dry in niches behind the falling water to enhance the velvet beauty of the night.
    Such was the importance of the garden to the Moghuls that they frequently used it as a metaphor for the state. Abul Fazl described Akbar’s motive in punishing wrongdoers as being to improve the world for all: ‘As gardeners adorn gardens with trees and move them from one place to another, and reject many, and irrigate others, and labour to rear them to a proper size, and extirpate bad trees and lop off rotten branches, and remove trees that are too large … and gather their various fruits and flowers and enjoy their shade when necessary, and do other things which are established in the science of horticulture, so do just and far-seeing kings light the lamp of wisdom by regulation, and instructing their servants, and thus appear the standard of guidance.’
    Whatever the symbolism they employed in their garden design, and however cleverly they manipulated the garden as a metaphor, Babur and his successors enjoyed their gardens profoundly for their natural beauty just as gardeners do today. They designed them to