What constitutes paradise has always depended upon the prevailing conditions. For the ancient Persians, enduring harsh conditions on a dusty and riverless plateau, water was manifestly the source of life. They developed underground canals called quanats to feed their irrigation ditches, and centred their gardens on intersecting canals, producing the classic quartered design—the chanar bagh. The gardens were walled and inward-looking, excluding the desert, and they were filled with all of the things which a desert-living people would enjoy: trees such as date-palms, pomegranates, cherries, and almonds for fruit and shade, cool kiosks, sweet scented shrubs, roses and herbs, pools and bubbling fountains. We derive our word ‘paradise’ from the Old Iranian (Avestan) word for such exceptional gardens, pairi-daeza, which was later shortened to paridiz. It is useful to make a distinction between wilderness or ‘first nature’ and the ‘second nature’ of human settlement and cultivation.
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