AN ISLAMIC GARDEN VISIT

Well, expecting miserable weather at this time of year, we (husband and 3 adult children) left for southern Spain on Christmas Eve with walking boots, mountain bikes, and a ticket for me to the Alhambra in Granada.

The Alhambra palaces and Generalife Gardens are in a stunning location on a cliff top below the snow covered peaks of the Sierra Nevada. I strolled through them in warm winter sunshine that sparkled fountains, pools and rills flowing between walls and archways of carved cream stone and clipped cypresses.

My entrance to the Generalife Gardens began at a 20^th century labyrinth garden, with arched rose gardens and clipped cypress - a Muslim-style garden, with an irrigation channel crossing and pergola, to link the gardens with the palaces that are quite separate within the walled fortress.

The general theme of a traditional Islamic garden is water and shade, traditionally, a cool place of rest and reflection, and a reminder of paradise. Unlike English gardens, which are often designed for walking, they are intended for rest and contemplation.

This section of the gardens is attractive enough, with all the elements of an Islamic garden, but nothing prepares you for the real thing when you enter the 14^th century Court of the Main Canal, with its famous crossing jets of water, copied the world over.

With arcaded pavilions down each side, it was originally an interior garden with a small lookout chamber to one side, its lavish plasterwork decoration preserved from the time of Sultan Isma'il I (1314-1325). Low arched windows, a characteristic of Nasrid architecture, allowed people (men of course – women were kept within the confines of the harem), to lounge on silk cushions on the floor, and with their arm on the sill, contemplate the landscape around the Palace with the city of Granada far below.

The Canal Court is stunningly beautiful; the pavilions at each end are cool and shady, the plasterwork incredibly intricately carved and high vaulted timber ceilings very decorative. Arched water jets echo the pavilion arches, and light bounces off the water and the walls to the cool sound of splashing.

There is a lovely stairway from the Canal Court to the highest part of the gardens, known as the Water Stairway, almost enclosed by vaulted evergreen laurels for shade, down which water once flowed from the Sultan's Canal into 3 circular basins; it now flows down the parapets along inverted pantiles, the circular basins now lost.

Elsewhere, lush foliage plants and clipped cypresses enclose and frame basins and channels of flowing water (repeated within the Nasrine Palaces), knot gardens of clipped box, and terraces of vegetables and exotic fruits.