The garden carpet

A Persian garden begins with a wall and a line of water. Inside the wall, two channels cross at right angles and divide the ground into four. This is the chahar bagh, literally ‘four gardens’, the plan behind the gardens of Isfahan, Kashan, Shiraz and many more. The word for a walled enclosure in Old Iranian, which reached Greek as paradeisos, is where English gets ‘paradise’.

A map you can walk on

A garden carpet lays that plan on the floor. Broad blue bands run the length and width of the field: these are the channels, and they often carry fish, ducks and ripples. Where they cross there may be a pool or a pavilion. The rectangles between them are planted with cypresses and flowering fruit trees, with small animals between the trunks. The view is from two places at once. The channels are drawn as if from above, the trees as if from the path, standing up from their beds. It is not a mistake of perspective. It is the way you would describe a garden to someone who had never seen one.

One of the finest is the Wagner Garden Carpet, a seventeenth-century carpet attributed to Kerman in south-eastern Iran and now in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow. Later weavers carried the idea in simpler forms: the Bakhtiari compartment designs of west-central Iran, in which each square panel holds a single tree or flower, owe something to the same way of seeing.

The appeal is plain. In a country where much of the land is dry and the winters are hard, a garden carpet puts spring in the room. Persian writers return again and again to the image of the beloved garden, and the most famous carpet of all, the lost Spring of Khosrow, was said to be exactly this. The Persian Garden, a group of nine gardens, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2011.