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  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 co
uld 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: