Special issue with the Sunday Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Enchanted gardens : June 04, 2000

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Paradise on earth

Geeta Doctor

Writer and critic based in Chennai.

The myth of the enchanted garden brimming with life threads its way through the hidden channels of the human imagination, appearing in embroidery, art and architecture, in folk tales, history and poetry, as mysteriously as the lotus that springs out of the navel of a recumbent god, asleep on the shining waters of the ocean of eternal bliss.

S. K. Panda/Fotomedia

It sits at the doorstep of Scherazade's garden, listening through the marbled trellises of the Palace balcony, as she weaves a thousand and one tales that lull her Sultan to spare her life for one more night. Remember the one about the nightingale who used to sing outside the window of the Emperor who could not sleep, until he had a mechanical bird copied in gold and enamel by his craftsmen, to chirp and chatter at his royal will, and you will understand some of the power that nature has over mere art.

Gardens take us back to our earliest nature, hinting at a time of innocence, driven with the Wordsworthian impulse to look at the world with the imagination of a child. At the height of their fame, the Beatles bounced upon the stage and sang, "I'd like to be/ Under the Sea/ In an Octopus' garden in the shade . . . We would be warm/Below the storm/ In our little hideaway beneath the waves . . . Resting our head/ On the sea-bed/ In an Octopus' garden near the cave . . . ."

However brash and banal they may have sounded at the time, the simple, child-like rhymes of the Beatles have managed to tap at some hidden reservoir of myth that goes back to our oceanic beginnings. Like the echoes that speak to us from the spiralled chamber of a shell picked up from the beach, the idea of an Octopus' garden is not only enchanting, it also reminds us that there is another world down there, filled with the waving, swaying, moving, jewelled forms of living organisms, that suggest another reality altogether. It underlines the idea that we are the children of the Blue Planet. Water is our element. It is where life began.

In some cultures, it has wrapped itself in the guise of a serpent, or Leviathan, encircling the Earth, with its scales glittering in the light, with emeralds and amethysts dredged from the bottom of the Sea. In some it has taken the form of fountains, that sparkle like freshly cut jade, that tumble and fall with the promise of eternal youth. The earliest representations of the garden were made 5,000 years ago, by the Egyptians. The garden suggests a time when the nomadic way of life had been replaced by a more settled one, with the forces of nature being harnessed and cultivated to produce food. Indeed one writer, Simon Schema, writing in his voluminous compendium Landscape and Imagination goes so far as to blame the Ancient Mesopotamians for having started the process that we now call Global Warming. Or as he puts it, "The entire history of settled (rather than nomadic) society, from the irrigation-mad Chinese to the irrigation-mad Sumerians, is contaminated by the brutal manipulation of nature."

The Egyptians must have recognised the brutality of their methods, when they interpreted the cycle of the receding and flooding of the Nile, bringing down its precious life giving silt, in terms of the ritual death and rebirth of their many gods. The myth of the Garden of Eden watered by fresh streams and nurturing the Tree of Knowledge, with all its hidden lures and dangers in the ambiguous form of the serpent, is just as potent symbolism.

The secret fears and conflicting loyalties in both these cases led to some of the richest expressions of art centred on the garden as a source of pleasure as well as pain. In an Egyptian tomb painting that goes back to 1400 BC, we can see the very many trees and shrubs that have been planted around the rectangular pool of water, filled with birds and water lilies, rendered in a flat perspective, with elaborate floral borders, around the pool's edge, a style that was to re-appear in the Persian style of miniatures, and much later on as a simple lotus-filled border at the base of our own Rajasthani tradition of Krishna romancing the Gopis at Brindavan. It shows how even in its earliest form, the garden was a geometrically planned element, the "untamed" forces of nature contrasted and carefully balanced against the cultivated ones. It is no surprise that some commentators claim that "The making of a garden serves as a barometer of civilisation."

Jyoti Banerjee/Fotomedia

Kings and queens are frequently invoked in the history of the garden. The Persians elevated the idea of the garden as a re-creation of Paradise on earth, a pleasure garden filled in the four carefully divided sections with fruit trees, flowering shrubs, rose gardens and those scented with the heady fragrance of rare herbs. At the centre, the meeting point of the four articificially induced channels of water, with fountains playing at the intersections, there would be a mystic source, the knot tying all the disparate forces together, a symbol of the power of the ruler. These motifs are to be seen re-invented and re-interpreted and sometimes completely transformed in our own Moghul gardens. The idea of the Persian garden was to be embroidered on shawls, woven into tapestries, knotted in carpets, chiselled into marble domes, with blue, green and ochre inlay ceramic tiles, chased on the surface of silver ewers, or set ablaze on gold plated bowls and dishes, with semi-precious gems and enamel painting. No wonder that it is to them that we owe the idea of the garden as a place of earthly delight as immortalised in the poetry of Omar Khayyam.

Pleasure of a different kind is suggested in the Buddhist idea of a garden. Not only are these more abstract, more related to an entirely different cosmology of carefully differentiated layers of beings, all working their way up presumably along the path of multiple re-births, more hierarchical, but at the same time, they are more earthy. Though the famous Zen gardens seem to be suspended in an atmosphere of almost perfect beauty, their upkeep and maintenance depends on a daily exercise of very humble skills not unrelated to housekeeping.

In our own representations of the Buddha's life, what is so immediately evident is the ordinariness with which the events are portrayed. His Mother, Mayadevi, in a sequence made famous through different sculptural and painted representations, stops in a garden as she feels her birth pangs and holds on to a Tree. The Buddha himself is shown in the form of a tree. It is left to the viewer to make the necessary connections, an example of lateral thinking perhaps, and make the intuitive leaps from garden to the cosmos, from form to no form. The Japanese who categorise both painting and poetry into the four seasons, with a close observation of nature, are nevertheless adept at these rapid dislocations of images, as in this quaint poem - "Girls planting paddy: / Only their song/ Free of the mud." Konishi Raizan (1654-1716, Osaka).

By the time the Europeans got into the act, the art of gardening had become a science. They financed the expeditions to the interior "unknown" continents, bringing back plant and animal "treasures" that would form the nucleus of the famous horticultural gardens, such as the one at Kew, where we may go and gaze at our own botanical history and marvel at the way it has been preserved. They also created a whole fashion for the creation of parks, landscape gardens, Persian, Chinese and Indian gardens, by individuals on their estates. Some of this splendour is reflected in a scruffier form by our Maharajas and now taken over by their inheritors, the managers of the heritage hotels that are meant to entice those very same Europeans back to enjoy the sites of the original gardens.

Has the garden come a full circle? Are the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon that have immortalised the name of Nebuchadnezzar, to be seen on the Dalda tins that hang from the rickety window ledges and wooden railings of the chawl dwellers of Mumbai with a Tulsi plant, a stunted Ficus, or the trailing leaves of the "Money Plant" the plant most favoured by the urban dweller of today? In its more organised form, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon have been incorporated by architects into vertical gardens, into terrace gardens, interior gardens, patios and artificial gardens made of rock, or other synthetic materials that stimulate the idea of a garden. What Marin Antoinette's army of gardeners tried to do for her at "Le Petit Trianon", changing the scenery by night, so that she and her guests could enjoy a different landscape every morning, today with the benefit of advanced imaging techniques, clients may be able to do at the click of a button.

"We need new 'creation of myths'" remarks Simon Schema, "to repair the damage done by our recklessly mechanical abuse of nature and to restore the balance between man and the rest of the organisms with which he shares the planet." Or for those with more modest aspirations, you can buy a garden in a tray, a bottle, or a fish tank and change it around with a pair of chopsticks. These may not rank in the same league as the enchanted gardens that have come down to us through history, but the pleasure remains.