They say the first garden was not grown but imagined.
Before there were spades or seeds, there was longing, to bring heaven down to earth, to make beauty obey symmetry, to find silence that could bloom. From the desert enclosures of Persia to the monsoon gardens of India, the garden has been humankind’s most eloquent expression of order and desire, a marriage between art and philosophy, a juxtaposition between soil and soul.
Every civilisation has shaped its vision of paradise differently, yet in each, the garden becomes a mirror: of faith, of empire, of how a culture imagines its place in the cosmos. A ‘jannat’ or paradise.
The story of the garden begins in Persia, where the word ‘pairidaeza’ an enclosed walled space, first gave birth to the idea of paradise. In the royal gardens of Pasargadae, water flowed in four directions, symbolising the elements and the divine order of the world.
These gardens were not only refuges from the desert but reflections of the cosmos, perfection made visible through balance. Persian poets turned them into metaphors for the soul: Saadi’s rose, Hafez’s nightingale, and the garden’s endless conversation between longing and fulfilment. Even in Persian miniature paintings, paradise is plotted in ink, a map of faith disguised as foliage.
In China, the garden was not a conquest of nature but its conversation. Daoist philosophy taught that harmony was found not in control but in flow. Thus, the classical gardens of Suzhou twist and unfold like poetry, moon gates frame shifting vistas, ponds mirror the sky, and stones rise like ancient mountains.
The Chinese scholar-garden was a universe in miniature, designed for reflection, brushwork, and verse. ‘A single leaf,’ wrote Tao Yuanming, ‘can awaken heaven and earth.’ These gardens did not imitate nature, they became nature distilled, where art and philosophy were simply two faces of the same leaf.
In Japan, the garden evolved into meditation. The Zen masters of Kyoto found beauty in absence, raked gravel as flowing water, stones as islands in an imagined sea. Ryōan-ji, perhaps the most famous of them all, holds only 15 rocks upon a bed of white sand, yet no viewer can see all 15 at once. The unseen becomes the point.
Here, the philosophy of wabi-sabi, beauty in imperfection and impermanence, which is popularised abundantly over social media now, takes root. Moss creeps across old steps, blossoms fall before they are full. The Japanese garden does not celebrate eternity; it teaches us to love the fleeting, the unfinished, the almost.
In the Islamic world, the garden became a map of the divine, the charbagh, a quadripartite garden, mirrored the Quranic paradise of flowing rivers beneath eternal shade. Water was sacred geometry in motion.
When this vision travelled to India with the Mughals, it met a new sensuousness. Babur, nostalgic for the rivers of Central Asia, transformed the Indian landscape into a living manuscript of paradise. The Shalimar Bagh in Kashmir, the Aram Bagh of Agra, and the Taj Mahal’s gardens united Persian symmetry with Indian abundance.
In miniature paintings, these spaces shimmer with peacocks, fountains, and cypresses, where love and divinity mirrored each other. Each garden was not simply royal pleasure but a metaphysical statement: life, like water, must flow toward beauty.
In Renaissance Italy, gardens became theatres of intellect. At Villa d’Este and the Medici gardens, nature performed under human direction, terraces, fountains, and statuary aligning with stars and reason.
France perfected this power. At Versailles, Louis XIV declared his sovereignty through symmetry itself, every hedge trimmed to order, every avenue extending like the rays of his emblematic sun. The French formal garden was reason turned landscape, an empire of precision.
But rebellion bloomed in England. The Romantic age turned against the rule of geometry. Landscape gardens at Stourhead and Blenheim embraced the irregular, the picturesque, the wild. Nature was no longer a servant of kings but a mirror of emotion. A garden walk became a kind of pilgrimage, through ruin, reflection, and renewal. One of my fondest memories whilst studying in England is of Fountains Abbey and its magnificent gardens.
But long before the Mughals, India had sacred groves, temple gardens, and forest hermitages. The banyan sheltered discourse; the peepal marked enlightenment. The divine was understood not as distant but immanent, blooming, breathing, fragrant.
When Persian formality met Indian fertility, the result was neither copy nor conquest but a confluence. Gardens of Delhi, Agra, and Kashmir combined Persian geometry with local flora, mango, champa, jasmine, lotus.
In Rajput and Mughal miniatures, the garden is not mere background, it lives and thrives on romanticism. Lovers meet under moonlight, courtiers walk beside lotus ponds, and even gods wander among flowers. The garden in Indian imagination is not separate from life, it is life, cultivated and sanctified.
Even today, the tulsi plant at the threshold continues that inheritance, small, sacred, breathing continuity between myth and morning ritual.
The modern garden has become both refuge and resistance. In cities of glass and glare, the act of growing something is almost revolutionary, a quiet refusal to forget the rhythms of the earth.
Urban parks, botanical conservatories, even reclaimed spaces like New York’s High Line or Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay, carry forward the old philosophies in new forms. They remind us that the garden has always been an act of translation, between wildness and will, between what we inherit and what we hope to preserve.
Designers like Geoffrey Bawa and Charles Correa have turned landscape into ethics, reimagining paradise not as perfection but as balance, a space where human desire and natural rhythm coexist.
Across millennia and empires, the garden remains the same eternal metaphor, our attempt to domesticate infinity, to place the sky within reach of our fingertips.
Its philosophies may differ, symmetry or spontaneity, abundance or austerity but they all spring from one longing: to reconcile the human with the divine.
Every gardener, knowingly or not, continues that lineage, the old covenant between earth and imagination. To tend a garden, even a window-box or a courtyard tulsi, is to participate in the oldest act of hope.
In the end, every garden whispers the same truth: paradise was never lost, only waiting to be reimagined.