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Gardens of Islam
Early Muslims were pioneers in establishing botanical gardens and plant collections. The inhabitants of the early Islamic world were, to a degree that is difficult for us to comprehend, enchanted by greenery.
This love of plants is clearly shown in a genre of poetry, the rawdiya or garden poem, probably of Persian origin, which came to be one of the main poetic forms in the Abbasid orient from the eighth to the tenth century.
In the garden poem, the author exclaimed at the coolness of the shade, the heaviness of the perfume, the music of the running water, the lushness of the foliage and so forth - in short all the features of the artificially contrived environment which contrasted so strongly with the arid natural world. By the ninth century the genre had arrived in Spain where it was to reach its greatest heights. In the eleventh century; gardens became… probably the most common of all Arabigo-Andalus poetic themes.
Early Muslims everywhere made earthly gardens that gave glimpses of the heavenly garden to come. To give only a few examples, Basra is described by the early geographers as a veritable Venice, with mile after mile of canals criss-crossing the gardens and orchards; Nisbin, a city in Mesopotamia, was said to have 40,000 gardens of fruit trees, and Damascus 110,000; Al-Fustat (Old Cairo),with its multi-storey dwellings, had thousands of private gardens, some of great splendour; in North Africa, one learns of a multitude of gardens, surrounding and even inside cities such as Tunis, Algiers, Tlemcen, and Marakesh, places which today are not conspicuous for their greenery. In Spain, writers speak endlessly of the gardens of Seville, Cordoba and Valencia, the last of which was called by one of them as “the scent bottle of al-Andalus”.
The most spectacular gardens of all were those of the rulers... the garden of al-Mu’tasim at Samarra; the great royal parks of the Aghlabid Amirs of Tunisia, situated near Qairawan, and later the famous garden of the Hafsid rulers of Tunisia; those of the Fatimid caliphs of Egypt, and of the Vizier al-Afdal; the gardens surrounding the royal palaces at Fez and Marakesh; the great botanical gardens of ‘Abd al-Rahman, the first Ummayad Amir of Spain; the gardens of many of the Taifa kings of Spain; those of Timurids at Tabriz and elsewhere. One of the more elaborate gardens was that of Khumarawaih, a Tulunid ruler of Egypt in the later ninth century, who made a royal garden said to be in the Persian manner. According to al-Maqrizi, the glory of this garden was its palm trees, whose trunks were covered with gold; behind this covering were pipes which brought water up the side of the trees and sprayed it out from various openings into pools.
The first Umayyad Amir of Spain, Abd al-Rahman, was passionately fond of flowers and plants, and collected in his garden rare plants from every part of the world. The gardens of the medieval Islamic world, and particularly the royal gardens, were places where business was mixed with pleasure, science with art. Only many centuries later did Europe possess similar botanical gardens which helped to make it the same kind of medium for plant diffusion that the Islamic world had been in the Middle Ages.
Source: (Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World By A. Watson)
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