These projects were usually state sponsored and were often established as a form of a homage to the current imperial patriarch, the Qin dynasty, however, they took a back seat in the progression of Chinese scholarly gardening to the Yin Yang philosophy that dominated the countries academia in later centuries. The next chronological milestone in horticulture comes from what is now the longest surviving empire of the ancient world, the Chinese principality, beginning with the Qin dynasty approximately 200 BC. The horticulturalists of both these countries can, like the Persians, be considered geographical victim to, and conqueror of, the arid landscape.ĭespite the predating Egyptian, Roman and Hellenic empires, none had before employed gardens with such frivolity and with so great a gulf between the priorities of art and state. So emotive was this school of design, that its thematic sensibility travelled as far west as the Iberian peninsula (modern day Spain and Portugal), where the gardens of the Alhambra are a good example, and as far east as the flat lands of India, where the gardens of the Taj Mahal were laid out in the Persian style. The Persian garden is famous for its contrast with the landscapes it survived in – while the renaissance horticulturalists sought to form uniformity among that which nature already provided, the eastern garden is characterized by its ambition in the face of adversity, perhaps personified by the persistence of the legends of the garden of Babylon. These subterranean aqueducts were originally developed as a means to combat the hostility of the surrounding desert and make plausible the mass integration of agriculture, and also of water supply. It was the introduction of structures now referred to ‘qanats’ which made the impossible ideal of Persian design a reality.
Gardens emerged as an organic rebuttal to the harshness of the Iranian landscape and also as a testament to the ingenuity of contemporary engineering. The genesis of artistic horticulture began with one of the oldest recorded civilizations, in the Persian Empire – at its height over 3000 years ago. So we’ll use this article to pay some gratitude to, and hopefully learn the motivations behind, the green spaces of the past and how these reflect on those of the future. As a pursuit built as much on our own foresight as it is on our creativity, it is important to reflect on the schools of thought that drove previous horticulturalists, because, as influential as the great painters and film makers are on our artistic heritage, so of course must be the gardeners that came before you and I.
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