Islamic Gardens and Landscapes
Publication Year: 2008
"In the course of my research," writes D. Fairchild Ruggles, "I devoured Arabic agricultural manuals from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries. I love gardening, and in these texts I was able to enter the minds of agriculturalists and botanists of a thousand years ago who likewise believed it was important and interesting to record all the known ways of propagating olive trees, the various uses of rosemary, and how best to fertilize a garden bed."
Western admirers have long seen the Islamic garden as an earthly reflection of the paradise said to await the faithful. However, such simplification, Ruggles contends, denies the sophistication and diversity of the art form. Islamic Gardens and Landscapes immerses the reader in the world of the architects of the great gardens of the Islamic world, from medieval Morocco to contemporary India.
Just as Islamic culture is historically dense, sophisticated, and complex, so too is the history of its built landscapes. Islamic gardens began from the practical need to organize the surrounding space of human civilization, tame nature, enhance the earth's yield, and create a legible map on which to distribute natural resources. Ruggles follows the evolution of these early farming efforts to their aristocratic apex in famous formal gardens of the Alhambra in Spain and the Taj Mahal in Agra.
Whether in a humble city home or a royal courtyard, the garden has several defining characteristics, which Ruggles discusses. Most notable is an enclosed space divided into four equal parts surrounding a central design element. The traditional Islamic garden is inwardly focused, usually surrounded by buildings or in the form of a courtyard. Water provides a counterpoint to the portioned green sections.
Ranging across poetry, court documents, agronomy manuals, and early garden representations, and richly illustrated with pictures and site plans, Islamic Gardens and Landscapes is a book of impressive scope sure to interest scholars and enthusiasts alike.
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Cover
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pp. 1-3
Title Page
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p. 4-4
Copyright Page
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p. 5-5
Dedication Page
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pp. 6-7
Table of Contents
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pp. vii-viii
Preface
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pp. ix-xii
Gardens are at once highly meaningful, expressing the position of humankind with respect to the earth and cosmos, and utterly ordinary, reflecting the need to produce a food crop in order to survive the fallow season and plant anew another year. Moreover, the urge to garden, to domesticate the wild landscape by clearing...
Chapter 1: The Islamic Landscape: Place and Memory
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pp. 3-12
Gardens and landscape are elusive subjects, positioned in both space and time, yet belonging to neither one exclusively. The Islamic landscape is particularly problematic because there is the additional question of what defines it. The Islamic world is broad and diverse with different ways of cultivating the earth and...
Chapter 2: Making the Desert Bloom: Transforming an Inhospitable Earth
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pp. 13-28
Islamic civilization brought dramatic changes to the landscape it inhabited. With the skillful acquisition and transportation of water, the parched lands of the Middle East and northern Africa flourished with human-made verdant oases that not only transformed the economy with their agricultural products but also became a powerful form of cultural expression. The techniques employed to effect this...
Chapter 3: The Science of Gardening: Agricultural and Botanical Manuals
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pp. 29-38
As the Islamic landscape changed considerably during the eighth and ninth centuries, government administrators, landowners, and farmers took notice. The Islamic political map expanded to include new areas of the world with different climatic conditions and agricultural practices. This, in combination with the...
Chapter 4: Organizing the Earth: Cross-axial Gardens and the Chahar Bagh
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pp. 39-50
Islamic gardens were not created ex nihilo. Like the religion of Islam and the culture that was born out of it, there were prior layers that help explain how Islam developed as it did. The earlier and contemporary societies of Byzantium, the Sasanians, and the city-dwelling Arabs and Jews expressed the relationship between humankind and the earth through the making of gardens, and thus to,,,
Chapter 5: Trees and Plants: Botanical Evidence from Texts and Archaeology
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pp. 51-62
Gardens are ephemeral. While the pavement slabs and stone or brick walls of a garden may survive through centuries of neglect, its trees, shrubs, and flowers will wither and reseed haphazardly, interspersed with weeds and volunteer species that were not original to the site. Given that living matter cannot be recuperated as easily as the more enduring forms of architecture, how then can we re-create the botanical...
Chapter 6: Representations of Gardens and Landscape: Imagery in Manuscript Paintings, Textiles, and Other Media
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pp. 63-74
Manuscripts from the thirteenth century onward depict landscapes and gardens in styles that range from schematic scenes lacking spatial depth to meticulously rendered landscapes, rich with detail and convincing observation. Because manuscript painting is a visual medium, it would seem to have an advantage...
Chapter 7: Imaginary Gardens: Gardens in Fantasy and Literature
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pp. 75-88
Arabic poems and narratives, and even Islamic religious texts, often describe gardens in fantastic terms. Although gardens with golden palm trees that bore emeralds for fruit existed only in the imagination, others in which tree trunks were wrapped with golden textiles were quite real. The latter did not attempt a convincingly natural style; to the contrary, the whole point of the theatricality was...
Chapter 8: The Garden as Paradise: The Historical Beginnings of Paradisiac Iconography
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pp. 89-102
The theme of paradise in the previous two chapters arose with respect to fantastic and ideal gardens in the literary imagination, and the sumptuous gardens of the royal courts. In this chapter and the next, we will consider paradisiac symbolism in mosques and tomb gardens. Paradise is envisioned...
Chapter 9: The Here and Hereafter: Mausolea and Tomb Gardens
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pp. 103-116
Although the Qur’an and various hadith describe paradise as a garden, and although the mosaic and stucco representations of trees and nature in mosques were evidently intended to call to mind the garden of paradise, we have not yet seen evidence that actual gardens in the first four centuries of Islam were interpreted...
Chapter 10: A Garden in Landscape: The Taj Mahal and Its Precursors
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pp. 117-130
Histories of Islamic gardens have traditionally focused on the garden as an enclosed, bounded entity with a definition as precise as that of a building. While this is a successful strategy for considering some aspects of the garden such as patronage and typology, it excludes other aspects of garden- making such...
Chapter 11: Religion and Culture: The Adoption of Islamic Garden Culture by Non-Muslims
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pp. 131-146
The classic Islamic formal garden has distinctive characteristics that define it as Islamic, such as the cross-axial chahar bagh plan and ornamental elements such as the chadar and chini khana. To this can be added regional variations such as the pavilion opening to the garden through a portico of horseshoe arches...
List of Gardens and Sites
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pp. 147-224
Glossary
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pp. 225-226
Notes
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pp. 227-240
Bibliography
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pp. 241-254
Index
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pp. 255-260
Acknowledgments
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pp. 261-262
Color plates follow page
E-ISBN-13: 9780812207286
Print-ISBN-13: 9780812240252
Page Count: 296
Publication Year: 2008
Series Title: Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture
