The Evolution of Western Garden Design: the Great Moorish Gardens of Spain

Now, where were we on our exploration of the history of western garden design?  Just about to depart the Islamic gardens of the Middle East, as I recall? Let’s have a quick recap of the classic garden elements we met there.

The concept of gardens as heavenly paradise is documented as arising as early as the Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia, around 4000 BC.  These paradise gardens were surrounded by walls, and in such a dry environment water features and shade were cherished elements. The first illustration here shows an antique Persian rug design demonstrating such a paradise garden.  Note that the garden’s walls are represented by the borders surrounding the rug, and a central water pool, complete with fish, owns the center of the rug, with running water rills reaching out from it to break the garden into quarters. Trees are seen both in the inner border (cypresses) and the patterns of the garden quadrants.  

Quadrants!  These are essential to this conversation.  The ancient Persian paradise gardens were split into quadrants by axes of water rills or, far less often, simply by paths.  The concept is repeated throughout Islam’s Qu’ran (the Koran), there called chahar bagh (four gardens).  The Qu’ran itself was written during the lifetime of the prophet Muhammed, which would be in the early seventh century of the Modern Era (AD), but the concept of a paradise garden as we know it far predates the book, and Islam itself.  We see paradise gardens carried from ancient Persia to the layouts of gardens in the Indian subcontinent, culminating in the great Kashmiri Mughal gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But we see it even more clearly in the Islamic designs carried westward by the Moors to Spain.

The Moors originated as a nomadic people, mostly but not all Islamic, traveling across North Africa, establishing new cities and conquering existing ones.  In 711 AD, they crossed into Europe at Gibraltar and established an advanced civilization in the area they called Al-Andalus, now known as Andalusia, in the south of Spain.  Under Moorish rule, Al-Andalus eventually expanded to cover most of the Iberian peninsula. Scientific, philosophical, and horticultural knowledge from the highly literate Arab world was joined with the local cultural history of Christians and Jews in the area, and universities and hospitals were established.  This area of Spain was recognized as the center of western civilization during the Middle Ages. A relatively peaceful era of religious coexistence lasted until the expulsion of the Moors and the Jews by the forces of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille in 1492. Some remnants of Moorish populations remained for another 100 years or so, until the last were finally suppressed by the Catholic church, enforced by the Spanish Inquisition.

However the greatest palaces and gardens of the Moorish period in Spain remain largely as they were built, and they are paramount among the finest gardens in Europe prior to the Renaissance.  In fact, the great gardens of Spain are now called mudejar in style – meaning “allowed to remain”.

In the study of garden design, we are taught time and again about the brilliant use of underground water channels engineered by Andre LeNotre to run, with gravity, the fountains in the gardens of Versailles. Where do you suppose that idea came from? The Moorish gardens in Andalusia, or course. When the Moors arrived in Spain, they utilized remnants of aqueducts built centuries earlier by the Romans. Adapting these with both underground and above-ground gravity-fed channels (qanats and acequias), the Moors provided irrigation for agriculture and running water sources for daily bathing -- a religious necessity in Islam, but a new concept for the native population -- and for pleasure gardens. In the hot and dry climate of southern Spain, the sound of fountain, generally low and burbling so as not to lose large amounts of water to evaporation, and of running water was as important as it had been in ancient Persia, and as satisfying. In fact, Andalusian gardens relied more on the water features than on plantings to create pleasure. The overarching shade trees of ancient Persian gardens gave way in many Andalusian paradise gardens to neatly trimmed hedges and geometrically planted fruit trees; in others, shade trees were replaced or augmented by pergolas. Flower gardens sometimes were reduced to container plantings in courtyards – always highly scented – and to intricately ornamented paving patterns. But the geometric, axial statements of water were inevitably present.

Also present were the surrounding walls. Paradise gardens were not public, as had been the case previously in Spain, with a few remaining structures reflecting the traditions of ancient Rome. Great households in Moorish Andalusia were built around private courtyards that allowed natural light to reach into interior rooms. This was especially important in the Harem areas, where the women of the household were allowed to circulate without hijab. The courtyard walls of these areas were cut into lacy patterned wooden or stone carved screens, admitting light, the sound and humidity of the water, and scented breezes, without allowing strangers to see in.

Patterned walls are another essential characteristic of Moorish courtyards. Typically, Islamic buildings are ornamented by calligraphic carvings. Literal representations of humans and animals are frowned upon in Islamic tradition, but stylized calligraphic versions of writings from the Qu’ran are common wall embellishments. Walls are also embellished with floral and geometric patterns.

One of the earliest Moorish gardens in Andalusia remains at what is now the official residence of the Spanish royal family, the Real Alcazar of Seville. The Moorish fortress and palace begun on the site in 712 AD and added onto for many centuries was destroyed after the Christian reconquest of Seville, but many of the Moorish gardens remain, although more modern gardens now co-exist with them. A classic example of a garden in the Moorish tradition is the Patio de las Doncellas, the Courtyard of the Maidens, built around a rectangular reflecting pool surrounded by geometric plantings of pruned trees and arched walks. The original garden had been removed but was then rebuilt in its original style at the time of King Peter I of Castile (Peter the Cruel). In the mid-twentieth century the garden was paved over for a movie production, but has now been restored once again to its original Moorish style.

In Cordoba, on the site of a prior Visigothic church, building began in 784 AD of the Mezquita, now known as the Grand Mosque-Cathedral since it was reconfigured to include a catholic cathedral after Cordoba was returned to Christian rule in the thirteenth century. Construction of the Mezquita took over 200 years, and the Mosque is one of the largest in the world. A photograph of the Mihrab (the prayer space designating the direction facing Mecca) shows one of the many untouched Moorish elements in the edifice, with exquisite characteristic decoration.

Among the extensive gardens of the Mezquita, a famous courtyard known as the Patio de los Naranjos (the Court of the Oranges) shows a modern re-installation of the original Moorish irrigation system of small flowing rills that watered the extensive, geometric grid of orange trees.  These rills are in turn fed by rainwater guttering and storage cisterns. This is an early and very well-thought-out version of what we now call a rain garden.

In fact, the most important donation of Moorish gardens to the western tradition of garden design is probably the detailed engineering of irrigation systems.  Running water supplied in the main structures for bathing, for cooling sound and humidity, and for irrigation of paradise gardens then traveled outside of the central structures to water orchards and terraced fields that supplied food for the cities surrounding these great palaces.  Frequently the final structure at the end of the carefully guided acequias would be a mill for grinding grain – the waterways were never wasted.

The greatest example of a huge Moorish irrigation system serving all of these needs is at the Alhambra and the surrounding plantings of the Generalife in Granada.  Water was provided to them by the Royal Waterway, rising as winter snow melt in the Sierra Nevada mountains many miles away.  

The Alhambra was at first built as a fortress beginning in the year 889 on a rugged hilltop at the site of ancient Roman fortifications.  In 1238, the emir Muhammed Al-Ahmar began restoration of the fort, and his family eventually became the first kings of Granada, inhabiting a complex of six new palaces and outlying support structures that they added to the site in the early fourteenth century.  Between the fort and palaces is the Plaza de los Ajibes (the place of the cisterns), an integral part of the water supply system.  The magnificent carvings, surface embellishments, pavings, and arcades of the palaces were built by teams of Moors, Jews, and Christians working together, as was characteristic of the Moorish era in Spain.  On this site the structures were built primarily of brick and stucco; Alhambra means “the red hill”, so-called because of the red brick walls of the buildings.

Following the Christian reconquest of Spain in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella chose to make the Alhambra the permanent site of their court.  The buildings, although decoratively modified slightly in later years to reflect a more modern European Renaissance style, remain now as they were laid out in the Moorish era – rectangular buildings centered on courtyards, each designed around classic features of a paradise garden and characterized by fountains, reflecting pools, and flowing water rills.  Most of the architectural integrity of the Alhambra that had been modified under Christian rule was restored in the 1930’s to its original grandeur.

The Patio de los Arrayanes, the Court of the Myrtles, stands at a prominent entrance to the palaces, and strikes an immediate tone of wealth and power. Surrounded by intricately carved arcades, it is centered on a brimming reflecting pool over 100 feet long and sixty feet wide, populated with goldfish and bordered by trimmed myrtle hedges. The pond is filled by two fountains. To maintain constant flow and such a high volume of water in all seasons was unknown elsewhere in Europe at the time, and for centuries to follow. To do so in such a dry environment would have struck a visitor as magical at that time – as indeed it seems now.

The Patio de los Leones, the Court of the Lions, is the central courtyard of the Palace of the Lions, a very late addition to the “new” palaces of the Alhambra built by Muhammed V, who spent a brief period in exile and adopted ideas from Moroccan and ancient Roman palaces he visited during his exile, and also from the stylings of the homes of his friend Peter the Cruel. The size of this courtyard approximates that of the Court of the Myrtles, but its appearance is far more austere. It is a traditional four-square design, split by axial water rills that rise from a central fountain, a circular basin held on the backs of stone lions. While the courtyard is very much in the tradition of Persian paradise gardens, the fountain is not, as it relies on images of living animals. Realistic images of animals or humans would never have been seen in traditional Islamic gardens. But as Moorish traditions diverged from their Persian forebears, such oddities began to be seen in Spain. The trees which would have shaded such a garden in Persia are also transformed to something new in the Court of the Lions – their place is taken by 124 white marble columns that are said to represent palms in an oasis. But the “palms” are not geometrically placed. The paradise garden model has evolved.

Outside the walls of the Alhambra, a summer palace was built, the Generalife.  The palace has long since been destroyed, but some outbuildings and the gardens that surrounded it remain and are what is known as the Generalife today.  The gardens are terraced, reaching down the hillside in many carefully irrigated layers that include herb gardens, orchards, and finally food farms.  The Moors had brought with them from the Middle East a vast knowledge of horticulture and agricultural practices that have informed agricultural methods on the sere hillsides of the Iberian Peninsula ever since.  

A notable remaining courtyard in the Generalife is the Patio de la Acequia (9), a very long, slender space planted with shrubs and herbs alongside a relatively narrow rill into which small fountains spray from both sides (9). These small fountain jets are a relatively recent addition – Moorish gardens would never have wasted so much shooting water to evaporation. The Patio de la Acequia is perhaps a model for the Patio de las Doncellas in Seville – recall the shared link through Peter the Cruel? Certainly it is the model for many modern public garden designs today; we have all seen it copied in one way or another. But note the name: “the courtyard of the water ditch” is an appropriate translation. This is no grand sign of power, like the Court of the Myrtles. This is a working space. And this is the essence of what the Moors delivered to European garden design: even a working space, a passage for an irrigation ditch, is made beautiful. It is worthy of time spent at meditation and prayer. Like all gardens, it is a paradise.