Temptations Found in Gardens of Islamic Delight

You would hardly expect the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx to have reproduced the sensations of that 14th-century palace complex in Granada, Spain, in its exhibition opening on Saturday, “Spanish Paradise: Gardens of the Alhambra.” What point could there have been in trying to replicate the heavens depicted on the ceiling of the Hall of Ambassadors, its wooden pieces inlaid with mother-of-pearl stars? Or to imitate the “Escalera del Agua” — the staircase in the palace gardens whose hand rails have carved channels in which currents of water flow, so that as you descend under overhanging trees you feel immersed in a rushing stream? The exhibition catalog tells us that the garden designer Russell Page called the staircase “the best thing in gardening that I know anywhere in the world.”

Any such reproduction would have been doomed to failure, so instead the Botanical Garden has created an exhibition of allusions and images, a three-part homage to the impact of the Alhambra and its gardens. Outdoors, in collaboration with the Poetry Society of America, the Garden mounted 16 panels of nature poems by Federico García Lorca, who was born near Granada and was intoxicated by the Alhambra.

In its library gallery, a show of four centuries of rare prints, folios, paintings and other artifacts evokes the lure the Alhambra had for visitors. Organized by Patrick Lenaghan, a curator at the Hispanic Society of America, the exhibition includes some of the first portrayals of the palace interior from the 17th century, etchings of Romantic images created by the artist David Roberts and others, and pioneering 19th-century photographs of its stunning facades and courtyards. There are also materials associated with Washington Irving, whose 1832 book, “The Alhambra,” so popularized the palace — then a pile of relics and ruin — that it still pays homage to Irving by preserving the rooms in which he stayed.

But the heart of the garden’s exhibition is a 15,000-square-foot portion of the Haupt Conservatory. Visitors are welcomed into the central court with a modest reproduction of one of the Alhambra’s fountains and the gentle sound of flowing water that accompanies any walk through the palace’s courtyards or its terraced gardens (known as the Generalife).

But how do you honor the beauty of those gardens without mounting a cheap imitation? Through allusions and impressions. And once you enter here, you are struck first by the smell, which awakens the recollections of a visit to the Alhambra. Here are two varieties of lavender flowers; citrus trees, bearing sour oranges, lemons and calamondin; jasmine vines in bloom, winding up pillars; crepe-myrtle, safflower, rosemary and valerian arrayed in geometric beds. And the scents, with their sweet spice, seem to invoke the mythic imagery of the place and its hold on the imagination.

The exhibition’s curator is Penelope Hobhouse, one of the world’s authorities on Persian gardens, who has explained that they are designed around corridors of walkways and the sounds of flowing water. Courtyards are divided into quadrants with central fountains, their arrangements and vistas meant to inspire contemplation while suggesting Persian notions of Paradise — which is, of course, a garden.

So here, too, at the Botanic Garden is a long main corridor of plantings inspired by a 19th-century watercolor showing the palace’s Patio de la Acequía. Rows of Italian cypresses create green architectural boundaries near the conservatory windows; myrtle hedges enclose beds of flowering plants; there are evocations of the arches of the Alhambra visible at the far end, where a miniature version of one of its keyhole-shaped fountains murmurs. The plants on display are all associated with the cultivation of gardens in Islamic Andalusia, in southern Spain.

The gardens of Andalusia, we learn from a fascinating book cited by the exhibition, “Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain,” by D. Fairchild Ruggles, drew on the technologies of irrigation established in the region by the Romans but expanded the area’s repertory of plants, bringing in seeds from distant parts of the Islamic empire, transforming the Spanish landscape.

The fig tree that we see here could have, like its ancestors, been cultivated with seeds from Asia; one suggestion is that the poet Yahya al-Jazal took them in a stack of books from Byzantium to Cordoba in the year 840. In the 10th century, we also learn, the ruler Abd al-Rahman I received pomegranates as a gift from his sister; though the fruit was spoiled during the journey from Syria, the seeds were still cultivated and ultimately became a “natural” part of southern Spain. The Damask Rose plants here might have been used for rose water and teas, their name referring to origins in Damascus, Syria.

The thing is, it is impossible to know precisely what the gardens held in the 14th century. The Alhambra itself was damaged first by the intrusion of a full-scale Western Renaissance courtyard after the Christian conquest of this last holdout of Muslim rule in 1492, and again a century later by a gunpowder explosion. Initially, there were probably no arching jets of water as can now be seen in one Alhambra courtyard.