Garden Features in Islamic Gardens - Part 2
Water features:
Pools,
Fountains,
‘Chadar’ waterfalls,
‘Chabutras’
Pools
These are always a regular geometric shape – never like a natural pool. Most common are octagons, rectangles and eight-pointed star shapes. But ten and twelve sided polygons and six, ten and twelve pointed stars are also used.
Sometimes pools include curved shapes but these are regular and symmetrical. For instance: http://www.gardenvisit.com/ge/madrasah_e_chahar_bagh.htm
There is one style of pool which has distinctive lotus leaf shapes along its edges, e.g. http://www.gardenvisit.com/ge/mahtab_bagh.htm The Taj Mahal garden has pools like this.
Sometimes four very small eight-sided pools are placed around a larger pool in a symmetrical arrangement.
Sometimes flower petals or flower heads are scattered on the surface of the water as a decoration. In Syrian tea-gardens there are often fresh marigold heads floating on the pools. Sometimes elegant metal jugs of rosewater are placed beside pools.
There are some pools where the water’s surface is always rippled by fountains. There are others which are very still and mirror-like. Some pools are slowly fed by an underground water source so that they are permanently overflowing into channels which lead away from their base. This gives the pool’s surface a beautiful, smooth, glassy appearance. The Garden of Fin has both types of pool: http://www.gardenvisit.com/ge/bagh-e-fin.htm
Fountains
An important thing about Islamic gardens is that they use many small fountains rather than a few big ones. Give an Islamic gardener some extra waterpower for fountains and they would use it for some more small fountains rather than make their existing fountains rise higher. Islamic gardens do not use giant single fountains like those often found in grand European gardens. Also, they never use human statues, like those in Italian Renaissance fountains.
A famous type of Islamic fountain is the low, delicate, round, scalloped fountains which are found throughout the Alhambra and the Generalife gardens at Granada, Spain. Sometimes these fountains produce very small bubbling jets which create a gentle pulsing in the water in the scalloped bowl. Such subtle water effects are what give Islamic gardens their atmosphere – not big, dramatic fountains. A related type of fountain is the low, rectangular fountains in white marble which are used in the rushing, turquoise-tiled water-channels of Iran’s Garden of Fin.
One shape for traditional Syrian fountains is shown in a modern Syrian sales catalogue http://arabiannights.ca/marble.html . Fountains in these shapes often produce several fine sprays of water. Syrian and Spanish gardens also sometimes use fountains where water falls into bowls in tiers.
The most common type of fountain in India, Pakistan and Iran is shaped like a short pillar and sometimes carved into a stylised lotus flower shape. In an Islamic garden display at the Scottish national museum in Edinburgh in 2006, there was a fountain with an elaborate lotus flower shape. It was made by a Muslim community group in Scotland and had a star-shaped base, decorated in mosaic.
Islamic gardens in Spain, Morocco and Turkey often use wall fountains. These are a way of bringing water into a garden. It falls from a spout into a tank, from which it flows into water channels in the garden. Pictures can be seen in a sales catalogue for Moroccan fountains http://www.waterfeatures2u.com/.
A famous image of Islamic fountains is a long pool in the Generalife Gardens, Granada, where a line of fountains arch over the water. While these fountains are a post-Islamic addition, such fountain arches are also used in other gardens in Islamic countries like Iran and Syria. In another courtyard in the Generalife, arching fountains give a wonderful, lively sense of water around you.
Another common image is the rows of fountains in Mughal lakes or water channels, like this Mughal garden in Kashmir. http://www.gardenvisit.com/ge/achabal.htm
‘Chadar’ waterfalls
In Pakistan, India and Iran there is a special type of man-made waterfall called a ‘chadar’. These are sheets of stone or white marble, set at angles between 30 and 70 degrees, whose surfaces are carved to produce ripples in water flowing over them. One common pattern is the ‘pigeon-breast’, where a pattern of little scallops is carved all over the marble. Another is a herringbone pattern of V shapes. Many chadars are quite small. But there are some large ones in Kashmiri gardens where the hilly landscape made this possible. Sometimes chadars were placed facing sunlight so that reflection would make the water bright. There are pictures of chadars in the Slide Show in the Middle Terrace section of the Virtual Tour of Shalamar Gardens http://mughalgardens.org/html/shalamar.html
A much simpler version of this idea can be seen in the streams flowing down the ‘Stone Park’, just outside Teheran, Iran. This is a steep hillside where there are many tea gardens and restaurants among streams and woods. Streams have been lined with concrete with little pieces of slate set on their edges underwater to create ripple patterns on the water’s surface.
‘Chabutras’
These were described earlier. They are the sitting platforms placed in pools or at the junctions of water channels in India and Pakistan to provide a feeling of being surrounded by water.
To see a picture of a ‘chabutra’ on top of a big ‘chadar’ waterfall, scroll to ‘Figure 8’ in http://www.gardening-uk.com/waterlands/fountains/evolution.html