Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

If Turkish gardens tend to look a little wild, it is partly because they contain so many trees. In Constantinople, at least, there is so little rain in summer that it would be almost impossible to keep the gardens green without them—to say nothing of the shade and privacy they afford. The old gardeners evidently studied the decorative effect of different kinds of trees. Those who have never visited Constantinople sometimes imagine the Bosphorus to be overhung by palms—I suppose because it washes the coast of Asia and hows into the Mediterranean. They are accordingly sadly disillusioned when they come to it at the end of a winter in other parts of the Mediterranean and encounter a snow-storm. As a matter of fact, the Bosphorus, which lies in about the same latitude as Long Island Sound, has been solidly frozen over two or three times in history. The last time was in February, 1621. That winter, if I remember correctly, was also severe for certain adventurers lately come from England to Massachusetts Bay. But if palms are as great a rarity in Constantinople as in New York or Connecticut, the trees that do grow there belong to a climate more like northern Italy. Among the most striking of them, and happily one of the commonest, is the stone-pine. These are often magnificent, marching in a row along the edge of a terrace or the top of a hill with full consciousness of their decorative value. The cypress, even more common, seems to me never to have been made the most of. Perhaps the Turks, and the Greeks before them, associated it too much with death to play with it as did the Italians of the Renaissance. The Constantinople variety, it is true, inclines to raggedness rather than to slenderness or height. Other evergreens, including the beautiful cedar of Lebanon, have been domesticated in smaller numbers. Being unscientifically minded, I can say that the magnolia might properly be classed among them, the Magnolia grandiflora of our Southern States, since it keeps its glossy leaves all winter long. One of the less tenacious brotherhood, the plane-tree, is easily king of the Bosphorus, reaching a girth and height that almost fit it for the company of the great trees of California. It always seems to me the most treey of trees, so regularly irregular are the branches and so beautiful a pattern do they make when the leaves are off. Limes, walnuts, chestnuts, horse-chestnuts, Lombardy poplars, acacias of various sorts, mulberries, the Japanese medlar, the dainty pomegranate, the classic bay, are also characteristic. The pale branches of the fig are always decorative, and when the leaves first begin to sprout they look in the sun like green tulips. The olive and the glorious oleander will only thrive in sheltered corners, while oranges and lemons grow in pots. In the hillside parks that are the pride of the larger estates, nightingale-haunted in the spring, pleasantly green in rainless summers, and warmly tawny in the autumn, deciduous trees predominate altogether. Among them is one of heart-shaped leaves and dark capricious branches with whose Latin name I am unacquainted but which is one of the greatest ornaments of the Bosphorus. The Turks call it ergovan, and its blossoming is the signal for them to move to their country houses. In English, I believe, we call it the Judas, after some legend that makes it the tree on which the traitorous apostle hanged himself. He would apparently have been of high descent, for the flowers, which took thereafter the stain of his blood, have a decided violet tinge. They fledge the branches so thickly before the leaves are out that they paint whole hillsides of April with their magenta.

A Byzantine well-head

A garden wall fountain

In addition to the woodiness of the Bosphorus gardens, Lady Mary Montagu remarked another element of their character which, I am afraid, has become less frequent since her day. However, if garden sculpture of one kind is rare, garden marbles of another kind do very definitely exist. Here, too, I fancy the Turk found something when he came. There is a smiling lion to be found in certain gardens who, unless I am greatly mistaken, has Byzantine blood in his veins—if that may be said of a water spouter. He is cousin german to the lion of St. Mark, who only improved on him by growing wings. There are also well-heads which are commonly supposed to have been turned to that use by the Turks out of Byzantine capitals. But I do not see why some of them may not be original well-heads. One sees exactly the same sort of thing in Italy, except that the style of ornament is different in the two countries. The purely Turkish garden marbles are of the same general order, having to do with water. And, although there was less need of them when nature had already been so generous, they are what the Turk brought most of himself to the gardens of the Bosphorus. The Turkish well-heads are not particularly interesting, being at their best not much more than a marble barrel. Much more interesting are the marble basins and the upright tablets behind them which mark the head of a water-pipe. These tablets are sometimes charmingly decorated with arabesques and low reliefs of flowers. But the real fountains are the most characteristic, and it seems to me that they offer the most in the way of suggestion to the Western gardener. I think no one has ever understood like the Oriental the poetry of water. Western architects and gardeners have, of course, made great use of decorative water; but we never seem to be happy unless we have a mountain of marble and a torrent of water to work with. Whereas the architects of the East have always known in this matter how to get the greatest effect out of the least material. There are charms in a shallow pool or a minute trickle of water which are of an entirely different order from those of an artificial lake or cascade.

A jetting fountain in the garden of Halil Edhem Bey

Almost every Turkish garden contains visible water of some sort, which at its simplest is nothing but a shallow marble pool. In the centre of the pool is sometimes a fountain which I always think of with regret when there is pointed out for my admiration a too fat marble infant struggling with a too large marble fish, or a dwarf holding an umbrella over its head. This fountain consists of nothing but a series of jets, generally on varying levels, set in a circle of those marble stalactites—here should one call them stalagmites?—which are so familiar in Oriental architecture. Nothing could be simpler, apparently, but nothing could combine more perfectly all the essentials of a jetting fountain. There is another fountain which deals even more delicately with the sound of water. This is a dripping fountain, set always against a wall or a bank. It is a tall marble tablet, decorated, perhaps, with low reliefs of fruit and flowers, on the face of which a series of tiny basins are carved. I have seen one where water started at the top from the eyes of two doves and trickled into the first little basin, from which it overflowed into two below, then back into one, and so on till it came into three widening semi-circular pools at the bottom. Selsebil is the name of this fountain in Turkish, which is the name of a fountain in Paradise; and a fountain of Paradise it may be indeed with all its little streams atinkle. A more delightful ornament for a garden does not exist, being equally adapted for the end of a vista or for a narrow space; and it requires the smallest supply of water.