Kashmir, described by Sir Francis Younghusband, painted by Major E. Molyneux

by Sir Francis Edward Younghusband

In the autumn the Nasim Bagh is more beautiful still, for then the chenars are in all the richness of their autumn foliage, and a more perfect camping or picnic spot man could hardly wish for.

The Shalimar Bagh

On the north-east corner of the Dal Lake, and approached by a canal about a mile in length, with banks of soft green turf, and running between an avenue of chenars and willows, is the Shalimar Bagh, or royal garden, the favourite resort of the Moghal Emperor Jehangir and his wife, the famous Nurmahal, for whom the Taj at Agra was built as a tomb. The gardens can also be reached by a beautiful road along the shores of the lake, nine miles from the city of Srinagar.

The situation is not so beautiful as the site of the Nishat Bagh, for it is almost on a level, and is surrounded by a high wall. But it is only in comparison with the Nishat Bagh that it can suffer disparagement, and anywhere else than in Kashmir it would be hard to find a more beautiful garden than the Shalimar on an autumn evening, when the great avenue of chenar trees is tinged with gold and russet, when the lofty mountains which rise behind it take on every shade of blue and purple, and the long lines of fountains running through the avenue sparkle in the sunshine.

SHALIMAR GARDENS

The garden is remarkable too for a pavilion, with exquisitely carved pillars of black marble. It is set in a tank in which play numbers of fountains, and round the borders of the tank are massive chenar trees. The total length of the garden is 600 yards, and it is arranged in four terraces, on three of which are pavilions. Except for the pavilion with marble pillars and the water channel, the garden is in a state of ruin; but Mr. Nichols of the Archæological Department Survey has attempted to reconstruct its former outlines. There is a tradition that the garden was originally larger than the present walled enclosure, and there are found along the canal which connects it with the Dal Lake the ruins of masonry foundations, which mark either the beginning of the old garden or the site of a pavilion within it. Causeways and channels probably extended across the garden with tanks and platforms.

The garden was in the strictest sense a formal garden, and in making his recommendation for its restoration, Mr. Nichols enlarges on the artificiality which is the charm of a formal garden. Appreciation of a formal garden requires, he thinks, an acquired taste, but the Moghals certainly understood such matters. They were quite right in selecting trees of formal growth, and planting them on geometrical lines, the essence of a good garden being that it should form a pleasing intermediate step between the free treatment which Nature lavishes on hills and plains, field and forest, and that necessarily artificial object—a building made by the hand of men.

Such are Mr. Nichols' ideas, for which there is a good deal to be said. But some may also think that when a once formal garden and formal buildings have already fallen into ruin and returned as it were to nature, there may be less need to restore the formality, and that to fall in with the ways of Nature may be the best method of adding to the existing beauty of the garden. In any case the improvement of the turf, the removal of modern hideosities of buildings, and the replacing of the makeshift fountains by fountains of really tasteful design, would greatly improve this beautiful garden.