A guest post by Nicolas Roth, a historian, gardener, and garden designer. His research explores visual and intellectual culture in early modern South Asia and beyond, with a particular focus on landscape and garden history.
Persian gardens have long been a potent symbol of Iranian cultural identity, commented on for centuries by both visitors to Iran and Iranians themselves. These evocations frequently suggest a timeless, unchanging tradition, dictated by supposedly fixed characteristics of the land and its people. Consider what aristocratic British writer and noted gardener Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) wrote in her 1926 travelogue Passenger to Teheran:
…a green cavern full of shadow, and pools where goldfish dart, and the sound of little streams. That is the meaning of a garden in Persia, a country where the long slow caravan is an everyday fact, and not a romantic name. Such gardens there are; many of them abandoned, and these one may share with the cricket and the tortoise, undisturbed through the hours of the long afternoon. In such a one I write. It lies on a southward slope, at the foot of the snowy Elburz, looking over the plain. It is a tangle of briars and grey sage, and here and there a judas tree in full flower stains the whiteness of the tall planes with its incredible magenta. A cloud of pink, down in a dip, betrays the peach trees in blossom. Water flows everywhere, either in little wild runnels, or guided into a straight channel paved with blue tiles, which pours down the slope into a broken fountain between four cypresses. There, too, is the little pavilion…
Almost a century later, the Iranian government highlighted the same water channels and pavilions as well as an even greater sense of ancientness and continuity in its 2011 application for “The Persian Garden” to be included in the UNESCO World Heritage List as a “site” composed of nine extant properties around the country:
Always divided into four sectors, with water playing an important role for both irrigation and ornamentation, the Persian garden was conceived to symbolize Eden and the four Zoroastrian elements of sky, earth, water and plants. These gardens, dating back to different periods since the 6th century BC, also feature buildings, pavilions and walls, as well as sophisticated irrigation systems. They have influenced the art of garden design as far as India and Spain.
Yet despite their undoubtedly ancient pedigree, Iranian horticulture and landscape design have by no means been without innovation or changing fashions. The steeply sloped garden with its complicated cascades of water where Sackville-West wrote – though she does not identify the specific one – was at most a few decades old, the result of new developments in garden design in late Qajar Tehran.
The new suburban estates of the royal family and high-ranking courtiers north of the city that were developed over the course of the nineteenth century adapted the geometry, water channels, and pavilions of longstanding tradition to the steep slopes of the Alborz. They introduced impressive flights of stairs, water falls, tall fountain jets, and other features that defined these spaces through their verticality and hydraulic potential.
Around much the same time, photography emerged as a common interest of Iranian elites, and early Iranian photographers amply documented these new landscapes. They also captured other novel aspects of the city’s elite gardens, including varying types of orangeries, the first Western-style greenhouses, and several recently popularized plant species featuring prominently in planting schemes. Together, these elements reveal gardens that may have emerged from the supposedly timeless “Persian garden” matrix but were also resolutely of their time, reflecting both change within Iran and the country’s engagement with global trends.
Orangeries – the English term fortuitously parallels its Persian equivalent, naranjistan – appear to have once been a conspicuous feature of the gardens of privileged households in colder parts of Iran, where citrus trees would not survive the winter out in the open. The Austrian physician Jakob Eduard Polak (1818-1891), who taught at the Dar al-Funun, Iran’s first Western-style polytechnic, and served as Nasir al-Din Shah’s personal doctor from 1855 to 1860, writes at some length about them:
Very luxuriously equipped is the orangery (narindschistan) in the gardens of rich owners. Although citrus fruit do not flourish outside in Tehran due to the harsh winter, they only require the light protection of an enclosure of wooden boards or of a depression with a tent set up above it and a light coal fire in order to survive. Moreover, orangery trees are placed in the lower front half of the south-facing winter living room, where the heat radiating from the fireplace benefits them. In the royal orangeries, however, the trees stand at a considerable depth and the furnaces several fathoms higher, as a result of which they freeze to death almost every winter and then have to be replaced at great cost.
Polak appears to have been writing about earlier, more improvised and ineffective constructions for protecting citrus fruit at the royal court; by the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Golestan Palace boasted an ornate brick-and-mortar orangery, with citrus trees permanently planted in the ground along either side of a fountain-studded water rill [Fig. 1-3].
As documented in a painting by court painter Yahya Ghaffari ‘Abu’l Hasan III’ from the 1870s, the space also doubled as a banquet hall [Fig. 4]. Winter frost damage is unlikely to have been an issue in this building, though insufficient light might have been, with windows only along one side of the corridor-like space. However, freestanding wooden orangeries, perhaps closer to what Polak saw, also appear to have existed in the palace gardens through the end of the century [Fig. 5]. The orangery integrated into the left wing of the main building of the Nizamiyeh complex may have provided better lighting, with a front of three massive window arches and a slanted roof that was either covered in glass or could be uncovered during the warmer parts of the year [Fig. 6].
While orangeries took various, more or less permanent forms, modern greenhouses constructed fully of glass also began to appear.
The Shemiran estate of prince Kamran Mirza Nayib al-Saltanah (1856-1929), known as Kamraniyeh, boasted some of the most lavish and oft-photographed gardens of late nineteenth-century Tehran; it also had a free-standing, pitched-roof glasshouse of a design typical of European and North American commercial greenhouses of the time [Fig. 7].
This appears to have been filled primarily with tropical foliage plants, as can be seen in a photograph by Armenian-Iranian court photographer Hovsep Khan Hovsepiants [Fig. 8].
Another image taken by Hovsenpiants attests to some of the horticultural fashions recorded by Polak. In his general account of Tehran gardens in the mid-nineteenth century, the Austrian doctor provides a specific set of flowers typically grown:
Most common are narcissi (narkis) in four different kinds, violets (benaefsche), amaranth (tadsche churus), tulips (lale), Fritillaria imp. (gule sernegun), Mirabilis jalapa (lal abassi), single hyacinths (sumbul), tuberoses (susan), single carnations (michek), Iris persica und florentina (zaembek). The fall floral display consists almost exclusively of chrysanthemums (gule dawudi).
Polak’s idiosyncratic and inconsistent transliterations of Persian plant names aside, this list is interesting because it combines wild flowers native to Iran and garden plants long celebrated in Iranian art and literature with newer arrivals that reached the region in early modern times as a result of European colonial expansion and globalization. Both the four o’clock (Mirabilis jalapa) and the tuberose (Agave amica, syn. Polianthes tuberosa) hail from Mexico, where they had been cultivated by indigenous gardeners long before being taken to Europe and Asia.
They quickly became widespread in cultivation in many parts of the world with suitably warm climates, but even so have been subject to cycles of waxing and waning popularity in some regions. Throughout much of Europe, for instance, tuberoses appear to have been better known and more widely grown in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than today. In Iran, too, where they are known today as gul-i maryam and not simply sawsan or “lily” as in Polak’s day, they appear to have had a nineteenth-century heyday as garden plants, captured in Hovsepiants’ shot of a large bed of tuberoses in full bloom [Fig. 9].
Chrysanthemums, which Polak indicates dominated Tehran gardens during the fall season, were likely also somewhat new in Qajar times. Cultivated garden chrysanthemums arose in China from complex crosses of multiple wild species at some point early in the first millennium of the Common Era. They do not appear to have spread beyond China, the Korean Peninsula, and Japan until the seventeenth century, when they began to appear abundantly in the literary and pictorial record across South Asia.
Their large-scale cultivation in Tehran was more likely part of an almost global nineteenth-century vogue of chrysanthemum enthusiasm, spurred by the introduction of showy cultivars from China and Japan. Pervasive in colonial India but also in Western Europe and North America, this trend saw the proliferation of societies of chrysanthemum aficionados and autumnal chrysanthemum shows. The carefully staked budding chrysanthemums lined up in pots on the grounds of the Golestan Palace are very much in keeping with the displays one would see at the latter [Fig. 10].
A further noteworthy “fashion plant” that appears in the photographic record of Tehran around the turn of the twentieth century is the Ethiopian banana (Ensete ventricosum). Native to much of East Africa and cultivated in Ethiopia for the starch contained in its stem for millennia, the plant only entered international horticulture when seeds were sent to the UK in 1853. However, within a few decades its massive, paddle-shaped leaves were rising over flower beds throughout much of Europe, the Americas – and, notably, Iran.
Court photographer Mirza Ibrahim Khan ʿAkkasbashi (1874-1915) captured specimens of the plants repeatedly over multiple years, from a youngish plant flanking Muzaffar al-Din Shah in 1896, the year he ascended to the throne [Fig. 11] to a mature individual in the background of a 1906 shot of the riotous summer bedding at the Sahebqaraniyeh Palace [Fig. 12].
At the northern outskirts of the growing city, these evolving features and plant choices were increasingly embedded within gardens whose design and relationship to the wider landscape represented innovation. While their strongly axial layouts and linear water channels constitute a continuity with older Persian gardens, and terraced gardens themselves were hardly new, the exaggerated steepness of these gardens, accentuating the sharply sloping terrain and highlighting panoramic views over the countryside and the city, was indeed novel.
Ubiquitous fountains shooting tall jets of water were an additional sign of modernization, their verticality often mirroring distinctive columnar plant stands punctuating the corners of cascades and staircases [Fig. 13-15]. Stairs became much more central design features, expanding from short flights connecting gentle terraces to stark, imposing vistas [Fig. 16]. The picturesque play with the steep terrain and increasingly daring waterworks also led to rather non-traditional features in keeping with contemporary European romanticism, such as the naturalistic waterfall at the Farmanfarma gardens in Imamzadeh Qasem [Fig. 17].
Strategically placed large and sculptural planters served to further highlight the structure of these ornate and whimsical structures, while extensive seasonal arrangements of smaller potted plants added decorative patterns along the vistas as seen from above [Fig. 18-20].
Like much in Qajar visual culture, these gardens were rooted in older Iranian models and cultural references and yet colored by the array of international influences and push for modernization that began to shape Iran and especially the country’s capital over the course of the nineteenth century.
And while gardens very much continue to be celebrated as part of Iran’s cultural heritage, the specific late-nineteenth century features of these spaces, from their orangeries and period plants to the most daring cascades, mostly survive in the pictorial record left behind by early Iranian photographers, who were fortunately prolific in their craft and eclectic in their choice of subject matter.
References:
Calvo Irabien, Luz María. “Aromas de México para el mundo, el caso del nardo: Polianthes tuberosa.” Desde el Herbario CICY 9 (2017): 60-62.
Emmart Trueblood, Emily W. ““Omixochitl – the Tuberose (Polianthes tuberosa).” Economic Botany 27, no. 2 (1973): 157-173.
Fardanesh, Farzin, and Fatemeh Farnaz Arefian. Persian Paradises at Peril: Landscape Planning and Management in Contemporary Iran. Cham: Springer, 2021.
Gharipour, Mohammad. Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in History, Poetry, and the Arts. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013.
Hobhouse, Penelope. Gardens of Persia. London: Cassell, 2003.
Ma, Yue-Ping, et al. “Origins of cultivars of Chrysanthemum – Evidence from the chloroplast genome and nuclear LFYgene.” Journal of Systematics and Evolution 58, no. 6 (2020): 925-944.
“Musa ensete: Ensete, or Bruce’s Banana.” Curtis’s Botanical Magazine 87 (1861): pl. 5223-5224.
Polak, Jakob Eduard. Persien. Das Land und seine Bewohner. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1865. Available online at https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_WBBOAAAAcAAJ.
Ritter, Markus, and Staci G. Scheiwiller, ed. The Indigenous Lens? Early Photography in the Near and Middle East. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018.
Sackville-West, Vita. Passenger to Teheran. London: Hogarth Press, 1926. Available online at https://archive.org/details/passengertoteher0000vsac/page/92/mode/2up.
“The Persian Garden” on the UNESCO World Heritage list, available online at https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1372/.
Thiede, Joachim, and Rafaël Govaerts. “New combinations in Agave (Asparagaceae): A. amica, A. nanchitlensis, and A. quilae” Phytotaxa 306, no. 3 (2017): 237-240.
Wilbur, Donald N. Persian Gardens & Garden Pavilions. Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1962.
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