SOON AFTER WE swept away the last construction dust, we invited into our house our neighbors, who had been so kind to us during our move into the Albayzín. In fact, they were more than kind—they offered us late dinners and rambling conversation, they cuddled our daughter, they gave us mysterious recipes for curing olives. Their hospitality seemed to this American like something out of The Arabian Nights: if, for instance, any weekend evening, we knocked upon the door of any family among them, soon we would be at table, our daughter would be playing with their children, and we would be talking late into the night over superb bottles of vino tinto. They were so good to us that with shame I admit that at first I thought they might be pulling our legs. But no, they were not; it was their nature and our privilege.
In the Albayzín, to invite someone into a carmen is to invite them into your garden, the hidden center of life. Our whole house gave on to the garden: the blue-tiled entryway and the dining room both had double doors that we could open upon the fruit trees and flowers. The bedrooms had small idiosyncratic terraces, and the torreón above, where we had our bookshelves and computers, had its own tilting terrace that looked over the grapevine and roses, honeysuckle and jasmine. In the warm air of twilight and evenings, we dined outside with our new friends, in sight of the Alhambra, to the felicitous music of the fountain, the air full of the fragrance of orange and lemon blossoms. As the sky darkened, we lit candles as the children played under the trees, splashed in the fountain, costumed themselves in any clothes they could find, and dashed through all the rooms of the house. Later, as they tired, they would one by one wander sleepily until they found a couch, a bed, or a cushion, until the house was full of snoozing children. In whatever room you entered, there might be one or two dreaming little ones.
These nights were so peaceful, I sometimes thought I was dreaming. To what rare world had we been transported?
As our first summer ripened, I grew more curious about the design of the garden, for it seemed to inspirit us all. A loved garden, with the right design, brings to most of us a rare pleasure; it seems like a blessing of centuries, enveloping, protective, suggestive.
I would like, reader, to have you at this table, just now, with us, so that we might talk of the time travels of this one garden, in the middle of this ancient neighborhood. It is a small garden, but its presence had in our lives an uncommon influence and gentleness. As we set ourselves to read our way into the history of our barrio, we began with our curiosity about our garden, and how so modest a space could offer such welcome and provoke such musings. It seemed to have a power beyond itself.
The original part of the garden, with the big trees, comprised four rectangular beds created by pathways crossing at right angles in the center. As we looked into the history of gardens, we found that this four-part symmetry had ancient Middle Eastern roots. The first recognizable such garden is pictured on a bowl from the ancient city of Samarra—a sketch which, astonishingly, is four millennia old. And an existing archeological site, the garden of the Persian Cyrus the Great from 550 BC, shows clearly the same four-part design. A long road, full of delights, leads from those early centuries to our little plot in the Carmen de Nuestra Señora de la Purificación.
The form is common and classic. It combines a restricted set of elements: symmetrical beds, moving water, a peaceful blaze of flowers, a rich assortment of fruit trees, slanting light, and aromatic plants, all in a protective surround of walls. Though this kind of garden is often called an “Islamic Paradise Garden,” the design is pre-Islamic; more than pre-Islamic, it is pre-Biblical. I think of it as something at the root of the mind. We find it in site after excavated site in the Middle East, and in the writings of classical antiquity, beginning with accounts of Persian gardens by the bellicose Greek adventurer Xenophon. He translated the Persian word pairidaeza, which meant “a wall around,” into the Greek paradeisos. This word held on to its meaning of pleasure-ground, or enclosed garden and orchard. Centuries later, when the Hebrew of the Old Testament was translated into Greek to produce the legendary Septuagint, the translators, needing a word for the Garden of Eden, were delighted to have one at the ready.
Any musing about gardens leads straight to the Book of Genesis, which held to the blessed association of paradise and gardens, an association that runs all the way back to the wedge writing of Sumer. That is, as far as a written reference can go. As happens so often when I read through texts I know, I found that I had never read Genesis carefully enough. I had thought that Eden was a garden. I was wrong. Eden itself is not a garden at all; rather, it includes a garden, planted especially and personally by God, whom we should call the first gardener. He put it, smartly enough, on the east side of Eden in the morning light. It is there, and not elsewhere in Eden, that Adam and Eve are given life. And it is there that the water of paradise, after passing through this singular garden within Eden, splits into four rivers which descend to favor the earth below with the fresh water of life. Eden was then not just the place where human life began and beauty took form; it was the source of the water which gave life to the world around.
We came to see the way the garden worked in favor of life, and to see what the garden walls were good for: they were not for keeping people out, but for concentrating beauty within. As we sat outside and talked with our neighbors in the candlelit evenings, sometimes with children asleep in our laps, we would settle into a rambling and branching conversation unlike anything I had ever known. Near us the fountain made its feathery music, the pomegranate and persimmon trees stood in a full flourishing, and the rose wound up a pipe beside us. Even the shadows seemed fragrant. It looked to me as if our friends, without their knowing, had come to shine with their natural patience and generosity; by some millennia-old theurgy, the garden around us had made their good natures visible.
Conversation and gardens belong together. Both are forms that, rightly used, bring into view what otherwise is hidden. Each has its own rhythms and requirements, but with the same power as other art forms to provoke the emergence of some idea, some hope, some joy, into the light of understanding. Somehow, living in another language brings a person into meditation upon conversational art and its hidden rules, which are as liberating as the rules which govern the sonnet, or haiku, or geometric tile work of the Alhambra, even the paintings of the Annunciation; or the rules that govern the art of gardening. All these rules, however differently they are applied, set a demanding order, necessary so that a clear liberty might rise within us.
The garden being an ancient form, there are myriad ancient stories meant to give meaning to the form. Genesis led me on into this tradition of stories. And although Genesis is finally, of course, a story of disobedience and expulsion, it is not, despite its almost-crazed influence upon our ideas, among the most beautiful or playful of its genre.
So many stories ran through our conversations that we should tell one of them. We will throw off the sour narrative of Genesis and go instead to one of complex whimsy and pagan energies: the story of the Garden of the Hesperides. This divine garden grew, like the garden within Eden, on the side of a mountain. Flourishing there was a tree with golden apples that bountiful Mother Earth had given to the delighted goddess Hera, the wife of Zeus, as a wedding present. Anyone who ate an apple would become immortal; and once immortal, if she then had some ambrosia, she would be granted godly powers. This, of course, looks forward to Genesis, when an alarmed God is trying to prevent Eve and Adam from becoming “as gods.” Yet rather than Adam and Eve, in the Garden of the Hesperides lived three nymphs known for their melodious singing. Curiously, their garden, as though the mythmakers had Persia in mind, grew within a wall. In that place of protected pleasures, the lovely nymphs were in full possession of the apples, and guarded them in company of, you guessed it, a serpent—there he is again, this time one with a hundred heads. Enter Hercules, who had already cleaned the Augean stables and wrestled the Minotaur to the ground. Hercules first, and comically, has to find the garden, and on his search he is always being challenged to combat by swaggering young men, scatterbrained as usual, all the more so because most of them are sons of gods. Hercules dispatches them all and finds his way to Prometheus, who once stole fire from the gods and gave it to all of us. In punishment, Prometheus is chained to a rock, where an eagle comes and stays all day, eating his liver; then overnight, his liver grows back, and so arrives the eagle the next morning to dine again. Hercules, who has learned a thing or two, is having none of it. He kills the eagle, Prometheus tells him where the garden is, and Hercules goes straight on to kill the serpent and take possession of the apples, which are eventually returned to Athena. Athena then passes them on—straight back to the nymphs in the garden, to whom, she decided, they rightfully belonged. Even the slain serpent found his place among the stars, in the constellation we know today as Draco.
This is just one garden story, but it is wonderful, full of suggestive detail and drama. We wish that Eve had been able to have some nymphs for company, so as to be able to make use of all she learned at the Tree of Knowledge. But Eve had the dull Adam, rather than the valiant Hercules, and she had the Old Testament God, in a foul mood, rather than the helpful, wise Athena. Such men have given her trouble ever since.
But however much the two stories of Genesis and the Garden of the Hesperides mark two poles of our experience of the sacred, there is a telling, deep theme the two stories share: gardens are where fate is decided; gardens mark decisive turns of events in the story of our life on earth; gardens safeguard wisdom; gardens hold beauties that help us learn how the order of nature offers the secrets of life. The special garden in Eden, the nymphs’ garden of the Hesperides, and various other mythic plantings would all take form and have a place on earth as the iridescent gardens that mark history throughout the Middle East. These same gardens, bearing their fragrance and coolness, came to be cherished across northern Africa, coming finally to the Iberian peninsula. Warm Andalusia holds some of the finest of these gardens. Granada held some of the finest in Andalusia. In all these travels, such gardens have held fast to their association with the origin and future of beauty.
As the summer began to loosen with heat, this history came home to us as we watched Gabriella and her friends ride tricycles along the garden paths, lay out like leopards on the thick branches of the fig, eat persimmons and pomegranates, and cry out at the world they made as they romped together in the green shade. If all that hard work by God, Cyrus the Great, Hercules and Athena, nymphs and snakes, and centuries of gardeners across countries and continents can lead to the making of a place that gives such various joys, then it stands to reason that it may be a place of learning.
In the hot months in the Albayzín, we saw the way the plants, with water and care, leapt from the soil. Such was the vigor of the grapevine and the honeysuckle that they began to grow straight into the bedrooms. The garden and house embraced one another, took up an amorous life together, so that every room came to include air and flowers, trees and starlight, rustling water and ripening fruit. How had this unity, so easy and preternatural, come to be here in Granada?
As our neighbors shared their lives with us, so all of us shared in the lives of those before us who loved this sunny hillside and loved southern Spain. As we learned of our compatriots over the past centuries, we found that we were participants in Mediterranean history in ways we could not have foreseen. It was our first hint that Granada, somehow, offers a clear window for looking into our whole past; it offers a chance to see how singular events took form, and why.
Let me give you, in one short paragraph, as the children play, the ebullient history here: it begins in 7 BC, with early settlements of a people known only as Iberians. They lived just up the hill from our house, and throughout Andalusia. In the ensuing centuries, an array of cultures, both distinguished and ragtag—Greeks and Phoenicians and Carthaginians—settled along the eastern and southern coasts of Andalusia, which in those days had more pristine beaches but fewer tapas. Then, beginning early in the second century BC, sonorous and imperial Rome put the region under its military grinding stone, marched all over Iberia, built roads and aqueducts, and moved in for three centuries of sun and red wine and occasional mosaics. Then in the fifth century AD, a rough medley of Germanic tribes invaded, with the Visigoths prevailing after confused decades of spasmodic military action. For two hundred years, Iberia meant Christian Visigothic Iberia. The brawling culture of the Visigoths was followed by the nearly eight centuries of Islamic Spain, a period which is referred to today as Al-Andalus. And then the fateful year, for Spain and for the world, of 1492.
There you have a one-paragraph children’s sketch of Spanish history. We will, in this conversation with you, see our way into that span of centuries, in more of their dark, rambunctious detail, as they played out in our experience living in the barrio we would come so wholeheartedly to love.
What did this history mean for gardens? Consider together the myths of the early Mediterranean, Cyrus’s careful four-part garden, the paradise in the Bible and the Koran, and the enclosed gardens of the Middle East, which are studies in botany, beauty, and peace: all this delectation of design and association is concentrated in the Persian garden, a gift of the Middle East to Europe. But before these gardens arrived in Iberia, they made a bizarre detour to Italy, entering Imperial Rome when general Lucullus brought back his own account of Persian horticulture. And not just his account. He brought his own rootstock—peach trees, cherries, apricots—all for his garden in the hills of Rome. The descendants of these gardens, in present-day Rome, are a joy. But they seem distinct from Roman gardens from the classical period—which we know about to some extent from the writings of Pliny and Cicero, among others—mostly because of the fixative qualities of lava. When Vesuvius blew off in 79 AD, it buried Pompeii and Stabiae and neatly preserved their houses and gardens for all of us to study. What we find are not just incinerated gardens, but florid wall paintings of gardens. Many of the scenes are, to my eye, ridiculous; I am heartily glad to have the paintings, in place of the actual plantings. There are ornate fountains, frilly and scalloped flower beds, fishy pools, heaping ivy and myrtle, fussy pergolas, and statues, ad nauseam, of gods and goddesses, to say nothing of the portrayals of large estates imitating the Persian hunting preserve, in which boar and bull, lion and deer, and other magnificent animals sport around, killing each other, or being killed themselves in virile sport. As to the grander horticultural projects of Rome, let us leave aside the bushes trimmed into the owner’s initials, the grottoes, and, eventually, the grotesque projects of topiary, in which pliant hedges metamorphosed into ranks of centurions and preening warships. This was a society that wanted to remake even the hedges in its own image.
Roman Italy had the luxury of water, the wealth of empire, and a robust taste for excess. With unrestrained appetite it fed on nature, until in the fourth century the Germanic tribes fed on it.
As they fed on Iberia. When after decades of military scrimmaging the Visigoths took power in Iberia, they fell heir to the villas of the Roman province, sited in the river valleys or near springs in the mountains. What they made of these sites of luxury and plenty is anybody’s guess. But we may be sure they did not take trowel in hand and begin working the soil, nor begin trimming the hedges into escutcheons, nor adopt botany as a central study. In fact, nothing known about them leads us to think they enriched the verdant Iberian estates with Teutonic flower beds. Rather, they carried on in their tempestuous ways. They specialized in theological fisticuffs with the holy Catholic church, submitting to orthodoxy and winning the wealth and power that come to losers in such bouts. Battening down to make their historical mark, they gave us squabbling aristocrats, a furious enforcement of feudal rights, the periodic robbery of the populace by taxation, cantankerous secession struggles, and a randomly murderous anti-Semitism. After a couple of centuries of such devotions, the people of the Iberian peninsula, numbering five to six million, rightfully began wondering about deliverance. We like to think that some of them even longed for an experience of gardens that seemed to live only in scripture and in stories. Their hopes on all fronts were about to be addressed.
In the year 711, a Muslim leader named Tariq ibn Ziyad set off from North Africa and showed up in Iberia with seven thousand soldiers—a tiny force, mostly Berbers. He set up a fort and command post at Gibraltar, which takes its name from him—the Arabic jabal tariq means “mountain of Tariq.” He proceeded inland, encountering almost no resistance. The Visigothic King Roderic, hearing of the visit, cobbled together his army and attacked Tariq’s force, and here the historical accounts head off into absurdity. For Roderic’s force is variously numbered, all the way up to 100,000 men, enough to crush Tariq and his Berbers like so many little beans. Whatever their numbers, the two armies fought for seven days, the Visigoths lost, Roderic was killed in a ditch, and city after city surrendered to Tariq. Later, with modest Arab reinforcements from Yemen and Syria, the newcomers took over and, swiftly, occupied nearly the entire Iberian peninsula. As conquests go, it was an absolute cakewalk. The ease had little to do with the ferocity of the invaders and much to do with the traditional corruption and rampant idiocy of Visigothic rule. So began a new chapter in Iberian, and European, history. For Al-Andalus would be, for nearly eight hundred years, a mixed Christian, Jewish, and Muslim culture, celebrated in its own time, and now, finally, in ours.
Why do we just now recall this history? Because 711 was not just a promising moment for people. It was a sensational moment for gardens. After 711, in the Iberian peninsula, gardens took on a luster and variety unknown elsewhere in Europe. They became places of longing and thankfulness, meant, in remarkable concord with the classic stories we have visited, to bring together the sensual and divine. A poet in the eleventh century, Ibn Jafaya, who lived not far from Granada, would write:
O citizens of Al-Andalus, how happy you must be to have water, shadows, rivers, and trees! The Garden of Eternal Felicity is not beyond your world, but is part of your earth . . . Do not believe that you might enter into hell. No one enters into hell after being in the gardens of paradise.
How did these extraordinary gardens get here? By means of coincidence, uncanny chance, a strange, fateful chain of cause and effect; as a result of events so improbable that they seem to belong more properly in a novel of adventure than on the pages of history. The whole story turns on the travels of one desperate, brilliant, hunted man, and to understand our garden we need to know his strange and perilous life.
Let us open another bottle of vino tinto and follow this strange history a bit farther. Perhaps two bottles, since this story is of such unlikelihood, and such far-reaching, country-making consequence.
In Damascus, in 750, ruled the Umayyads, the first Islamic dynasty after the death of Muhammad. Just over one hundred years after the death of the prophet, the forces of Islam—first military, then administrative—had settled an area the size of the Roman Empire, having within their dominion the land from present-day Morocco to the Indus River in India. These early years of expansion, even today, we read about with incredulity. The movement of peoples upended the medieval world and brought to power a third great monotheism.
Meanwhile, on the ground in Damascus, the capital of this new empire, political differences festered. The Umayyads, originally from Mecca, had rivals: the Abbasids, named after Abbas, the uncle of the Prophet. In a spirit of reconciliation, the Abbasids invited the extended family of the Umayyads to an opulent dinner in a palace in the capital. As a prelude to the feasting and merriment, the Abbasids suddenly and with gusto slaughtered their guests, one and all. This breach of hospitality formed merely one part of their evening plans, however. Immediately after their strenuous dinner, the new rulers sent horsemen to kill those Umayyad family members who had been unable to attend the macabre dinner in Damascus. One of the Umayyads, a prince of nineteen years, grandson of an earlier caliph, lived with his brother in the village of Rusafa, on the banks of the Euphrates. The murderous soldiers besieged their house, and the two young men sprinted to the river. The prince swam across and looked back as the soldiers filleted his brother. Assuming, no doubt, that appeals to mercy and witty rhetorical gambits would not save him, he fled. So began five years of traveling in disguise, on the run, hunted and alone, moving cagily and nimbly across northern Africa, relying on friends, passing coded messages, taking refuge, hiding and waiting and watching with the alertness of a man who knows that swords are being sharpened with him in mind.
The perilous journey of this one man transfigured history. For at last he arrived at the northwest of Africa, across from the Iberian peninsula. Looking across the Strait of Gibraltar, what did the prince see? A warm and sweet land only recently taken possession of by the followers of Tariq ibn Ziyad; a land apart, separated by water from the region ruled by the blood-soaked, victorious Abbasids; a peninsula in play, whose political and military chieftains happened to include friends of his family. Just the place, he thought, that could use a Umayyad prince, ready after his adventures to match wits and strategy with anyone in the world. He passed messages to his compatriots, planned his political way forward, crossed the strait, and began his search for allies and power. Enough Syrians, Yemenis, and Berbers sided with the young prince, now all of 25, to give him the throne of Al-Andalus. In July of 756, he entered the city of Córdoba as emir. And all of Europe set off in another direction.
Not long after assuming the emirate, as he consolidated power, managed a vast new dominion, fought local wars, made peace, and fended off assassins sent by the Abbasids, his mind turned to—gardening. For in Rusafa, the Syrian estate he had fled, he remembered the palace of his grandfather, the Umayyad Caliph Hisham. Through that palace passed a stream that irrigated a symmetrical, four-part garden, the first known such garden in the Islamic world. The young prince, known as Abd al-Rahman I (the name means “The Servant of the Merciful”), soon began to construct for himself his own country palace, just north of Córdoba. He sited it by a stream and designed new gardens, sending abroad for a whole exotic mix of plants and seeds, assembling them carefully, and making a legend from leaf and petal. When the palace was complete, in unity with its extraordinary garden, various in form and fragrance, it was celebrated by the Arab historians of the day and proved so beautiful it was used for the next two hundred and fifty years. Thus began in Iberia, in the eighth century, a tradition of horticultural collection and experiment more devoted than any in medieval Europe, which would wait centuries for comparable botanical devotions. Rahman planted palm trees, he imported the pomegranate, he saw to the cultivation of the fig, the apple, and the pear. The people of Al-Andulus, following his example in ensuing centuries, would cultivate widely in Iberia most of the crops and plants we find today in Spain, thirteen hundred years later. The orange, for example, as well as the lemon, quince, and apricot, the date palm and peach, asparagus and jasmine, rice and sugar cane. Even the artichoke.
Historians have even looked at the pollens of the Iberian peninsula and written up a whole list of the plants grown there in the Middle Ages. It stuns in its scope: carob and acacia and mulberry, lilac and hydrangea and a dozen distinct roses, lavender, wisteria, and acanthus, water-lily, chrysanthemum, and sweet violet. Some were imported, others not. But all were used, for food, or for medicine, for their fragrance, or for the unabashed joys their company provoked.
Abd al-Rahman I was the emir who loved growing things, whether countries or plants. And he loved gardens so much that, during his rule, he left the royal residence in the heart of Córdoba and went to live among the gardens he had created. He named his country palace Rusafa, and so united his lost family house in Syria with his new, cherished home in Iberia. So was the dynasty of the Umayyad boisterously reborn, this time in Europe.
Power and gardens came into a close bond in Al-Andalus. Our young prince would rule for thirty-two years. During his life, country houses with gardens and light-loving water and flowering fruit trees would curl around Córdoba like arms full of stars. These estates, called munyas, held all manner of delectations but also were deliciously productive, part of an agricultural revolution that took hold in Al-Andalus.
These are the time travels of our little garden in the Albayzín, full of children. It held a meaning and a design that had come into our lives from the green havens of early myth and Holy Scripture, and from the legendary gardens of early Persia, across North Africa with Islam, and then, borne in the mind of a runaway and hunted prince, to Iberia. In the centuries that followed the creation of Rusafa, near cities throughout Andalusia, people built gardens modeled on the original munyas encircling Córdoba. And throughout Al-Andalus, in the histories of the day, we read of the families of the time bringing to their gardens all the beauties they could gather. Poets wrote there, in new, brilliant forms with melodious names like the muwashaha, or the zajal, and recited their lines among friends in the fragrant shade. When the practical men of Al-Andalus perfected distillation, intoxicating drinks were shared alongside the lemon and flowering almond, the pomegranate and basil, grape and olive and blue lily. Musicians invented new forms of song and used instruments like the ‘ud, which became the lute used in the Renaissance, and the rabab, which gave birth to the viol family. So were gardens used for the gathering of talent; and into such places of peace and refuge and music, for centuries men of power invited scholars and mystics for conversation and counsel.
I have wondered whether the course of politics and power in Al-Andalus was determined in large part by clear, improvisatory conversations in one or another garden in Toledo or Granada, in Seville or Córdoba, and I wish for all of us an assured method of time travel to visit those gardens and those gatherings. In any case, more than any European epoch I know, the history of Iberia in the Middle Ages is inseparable from a history of horticulture. It is a good omen in a culture and should be encouraged in our present day. Heads of state would work more justly and humbly, I think, if they had to attend to the flowerbeds and prune the fig and pear trees, and so came to play a role in the mindful, observant, responsible life of a society that understands and cultivates the land. A quote from an agricultural manual of the time will give us a sense of life in the country houses that were the model for our carmen. This is a description of the work in August:
. . . juice is extracted from two different kinds of pomegranate and mixed with fennel water to make a thick ointment for the treatment and prevention of cataracts and other diseases of the eye. The first dates and jujubes begin to ripen, the smooth-skinned peaches are ready for plucking, the acorns take shape, the water melons, known as “al-hindi,” are now ripe. The late-ripening sweet pears are picked and jam is made from them. The gray mullets leave for the sea in the rivers and are caught in large numbers. Pilchards are also in abundance. The following medicinal herbs are ready for gathering: sumac, the seeds of the white poppy, from which syrup is made, rue seeds and “badaward,” stavesacre seed and abrotanum. Instructions are given for the requisitioning of silk and indigo . . . The gardens are planted with autumn beans, sky-blue stock, turnips, carrots, chards.
Two centuries after the first Umayyad prince arrived in Iberia, a descendant of his, Abd al-Rahman III, would bring to apotheosis all this planting and botanical study. In 936, he began construction of the Madinat Al-Zahra, named, it is said, after a beautiful concubine who had transfixed the caliph. The breathy word Zahra means Venus; so did she and that bright planet gave their name to a garden palace that is, to this day, one of most famous missing buildings in the world. In fact, it is better known than many buildings we actually have.
Built about six miles from Córdoba, in the oak woodlands in the hills west of the city, Madinat Al-Zahra comprised three levels, stepping down toward the river valley. Its site was precisely like that of the Albayzín: it fell away to the south, so as to give full light to the flowers and bring slanting, searching light into all the rooms. At Madinat Al-Zahra, the whole site was illuminated throughout the day. The lower levels held houses and mosques, but the level above was full of orchards, with pavilions set among the flowering trees. The upper buildings held sumptuous reception halls: arches made of ebony and gold, walls inlaid with gems and mosaic, and everywhere a filigree and tracery of plaster showed sinuous forms of vines and leaves. The walls glittered, and as the hours of the day passed, the changing light made the incised plant life seem to move slowly, to weave and bloom; it was as if the plasterwork was meant to become a whole garden that gave back light. As if this were not enough, in the ceiling of a ceremonial room hung an enormous pearl, a gift for the caliph from the emperor of Byzantium. Below, in the center, shone a pool filled to the brim with mercury. When the sun struck the pool, the mercury threw light in thick beams into the room; when a servant made ripples in the mercury, the beams narrowed into streaks of lightning. They had brought the very weather inside.
But all this sumptuous intricacy was nothing without the real gardens. Throughout the complex, aqueducts brought water to fountains, which overflowed into channels and filled big quiet pools that extended toward the south. The pavilions rose among pomegranate, fig, and almond trees. Roses and lilies and myriad flowers from throughout the Mediterranean bloomed in the rich soil, and the builders placed miradors with arched entranceways to overlook the shining water and blossoming trees. The water in the pools reflected the miradors, pavilions, and palatial façades, as well as the trees and sky, so that the colors of the garden, the water lilies, the musically beautiful archways and movement of clouds and light all presented themselves again in lustrous reflections. It was an ecstatically calculated unfolding of beauties. Reading about it, one thinks of Venice, city of reflections, a splendor so intense that our perception, as though on a hinge, swings open onto another reality.
MADINAT AL-ZAHRA TOOK forty years to build. On November 10, 1010, it took a day to burn it to the ground. An internecine fight between political factions loosed a brutality that destroyed the caliphate, and a contemporary said, “the carpet of the world was folded up and the beauty that was an earthly paradise was disfigured.”
It is a fate that the Albayzín, as we will see, came near to sharing. But that was centuries later. Buildings can be burned, and cities razed, but traditions of real beauty have resilient life; and so the love of gardens endured, bearing the form throughout southern Iberia. And in Granada that tradition would be, by a constellation of lucky chances, made part of the daily life of the city. As we sit under our grape arbor, by the side of the pomegranate tree, we look upon the hill where such knowledge took wondrous form. On that hill, a family made a home that would influence crucially the history of Granada and begin the path that leads eventually to our little garden in this ancient neighborhood.
Shortly after the torching of Al-Zahra, the gentleman and scholar Ismail Ibn Naghrela fled Córdoba and ended up in Granada. Naghrela headed a Jewish family of wit and experience, and for some years, he served as vizier to the king of Granada. After his death, this powerful position passed to his son Yusuf. The family built a palace on the Sabika hill, where the Alhambra now stands. The usual poets lurked around, and, rhyming suspiciously, talked up the grape arbor, rose, myrtle beds, and date palms; there were filigreed walls and paving of alabaster and marble, towers and intimate meeting places with walls of arabesques. Lion fountains, by now, could not be avoided, and Yusuf’s palace had a phalanx of lions, on the rim of a fountain, once again devoting themselves to the arts of irrigation. Never have so many big predatory cats been pressed into action in the company of orange blossoms and flowering jasmine.
Such luxury held sway among the wealthy, the powerful, the favored. But in Granada, in the eleventh century, we find witnesses to the creation of a simpler house, with a smaller garden. Rather than serving as a base of power, these gardens gave their bounty for the delectation of family, close friends, and loved ones. Such houses ringed the Albayzín and extended into the country. They had a mix of crops grown for the family and for the rambunctious markets of the city center; they had water wheels, corrals, aviaries, and canals.
From the Sabika hill, in the center of Granada, where sits the Alhambra, these small farms could be seen all around, so that chroniclers described their city as adorned in bright, lovely necklaces. In the fourteenth century, the poet Ibn al-Khatib cut loose with this encomium:
Farms and gardens were in such number that Granada resembled a mother surrounded by children . . . Villas and royal properties encompassed the city like bracelets . . . vines waved like billows . . . the nightingale of the trees preached a sermon . . . the winds exhaled perfumes . . . Like the sky of the world beautified with stars so lay the plain with towers of intricate construction . . .
There is no space not taken up with gardens, vineyards, and orchards.
One looked upon a fecund countryside, the like of which can today hardly be imagined surrounding Granada or any other Andalusian city. Listen to this description, by the Italian Andrea Navagiero, classical scholar, aficionado of poetry, and Venetian ambassador to Granada in the early sixteenth century. He writes:
As much as on the plain as on the hills, there are to be found, albeit invisible on account of the trees, so many little Moorish houses scattered here and there, that if they were brought together they would form a city equal in extent [to Granada]. And even though the majority are so small, they all have their waters, their roses, musk rose and myrtles, and a complete refinement . . .
All this, from a sophisticated Italian accustomed to the splendor of Venice, the poetry of Pindar, the prose of Cicero, and the countryside of Northern Italy. It is just these beautiful houses, descendants of the munyas that ringed Córdoba, that are the first in Granada to carry the name of carmen. Our carmen, and all the carmenes in the Albayzín, have as their ancestors these refuges of knowledgeable beauty.
Navagiero’s account is confirmed from more than one source, including that of Hieronymous Munzer, a German who traveled through Granada about the same time:
Outside the city, in the Vega, there are large orchards and plantations irrigated with the water of canals led off the two rivers [the Darro and the Genil], which also operate many flour mills; so that everywhere Granada abounds in water from rivers or from springs. From the houses the view is a happy and delightful one at all seasons of the year. If one looks toward the Vega, one sees so many plantations in cool spots and so many settlements . . .
The adventures of the carmen were not over. During the time of real prosperity and power in Granada, from 1002 to 1492, the Albayzín came to hold so many houses that its population was over three times what it is today. The wealthy reserved for themselves the few spaces large enough to permit a garden to grow as part of the life of a house. How did the carmen, a house in the country with an enclosed garden and enough space for food crops, come to be imported into the Albayzín itself?
To understand this simple house with a garden, we had to study our own neighborhood. This we ardently wanted to do, as we settled into the pleasures of living in the Albayzín. Our garden, with fresh mountain water and hot summers, gave us a soft extended fireworks of flowering trees, and the children tracked the petals through the house. We began to cook with everything we grew. We had white figs in summer, which we ate off the tree for dessert, or baked in little galettes with brown sugar and cream. In the fall, we picked the pomegranates as they ripened and made pomegranate juice, or added the seeds to salads, or used them in a pomegranate tagine. The persimmons, which left to themselves fell like neon bombs to coat the unwary in persimmon jam, we harvested gingerly. We used them for luscious breakfasts or dessert, or baked them into moist cakes for Gabriella’s school. The blossoms of the lemon tree gave everyone an uplift of pleasure, and we cured the lemons with salt and cinnamon, cloves and coriander, and then used them promiscuously in our cooking of Moroccan dishes. The grapes we left as an offering to the birds.
In November, we harvested and cured the hundreds of olives from our lone tree; and even in January, we were harvesting oranges and drinking their juice, preserved in the cold, in midwinter.
Beneath the fruit trees, Lucy planted more roses, and borders of lavender and santolina, myrtle and sage, thyme and rosemary, violets and iris. The jasmine and passion flower flourished near the pilar. On the other side of the garden, a honeysuckle rose up the side of the house headed for the railing of the torreón. And in so small a space, there was still room for tomatoes, arugula, and mint. The fountains ran through the hot days and warm nights. In any room of the house, we could hear the sound of water. At night, the down-canyon breeze brought the fragrance of the flowers and the blessing of cool mountain air into the bedrooms.
Every morning, when little Gabriella would awaken, she would come on hands and knees up the narrow, curving stairs into the torreón. I would gather her in my arms, and we would go down to the trees to stand in the light together and greet each vine and tree by name, and wish them their fine day in the sun. She would point and chortle and look around wide-eyed. Among so many memories of our first months there, this comes back to me often, this standing in the morning light of the garden with my daughter in my arms.
We wanted to understand the Albayzín, just because we wanted to know whom we had to thank for all this.