Spanish Gardens Key West

The Alhambra goes on tour

The first thing you notice is the heat: the air is humid and a little heavy, like a Mediterranean summer. Next comes the soothing sound of water trickling in a fountain, then the smell - here, rich and earthy, there, sweetly perfumed by citrus blossoms and jasmine.

"Everybody talks about the fragrance," says Karen Daubmann, the director of exhibitions and seasonal displays at The New York Botanical Garden.

For those who take the 20-minute train ride from midtown Manhattan to its 250 emerald-green acres in the Bronx, any visit to the garden is like a day-trip to another land. Until August 21, the garden is showing vistas even more distant, in both geography and time: Spain in the age of Islamic rule (711-1492) and, by extension, the Middle East, wellspring of its art and culture.

This year's summer exhibition, Spanish Paradise: Gardens of the Alhambra, has transformed the Enid A Haupt Conservatory into a microcosm of Islamic Spain. While New Yorkers await the reopening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Islamic galleries on November 1 after years of renovation, the Botanical Garden is tiding them over with a glimpse of visual art forms that may rarely cross their minds: landscape architecture and garden design. (The Brooklyn Museum also has an extensive Islamic collection, reinstalled two years ago after its own major renovation.)

The path from the garden's gates to the conservatory sets the stage with Poetry Walk, a sampling of poems by Federico García Lorca, who was born in Granada in 1936, posted in the outdoor gardens. Then it's on to the conservatory, a glass confection reminiscent of London's fabled Crystal Palace of 1851.

The Alhambra is, of course, one of the jewels of civilisation. A cornerstone of Islamic Spain, it was rediscovered by the Romantics and is now a Unesco World Heritage Site. The fortress and palace in the hills overlooking Granada in southern Spain, completed by the Nasrid dynasty (1232-1492), blends mediaeval Spanish architecture with Roman, Islamic and even Renaissance elements. Its very name is believed to come from the Arabic Al-hamra, meaning red, for the red dust on the stucco fortress at the site.

The Botanical Garden seeks to replicate this not in exactitude, but in feeling and spirit. "Our goal is to evoke the Alhambra for those who've been there and those who want to go," said Todd Forrest, the vice president for horticulture and living collections. "They learn how innovative and inquisitive each of the builders were" as they worked to achieve beauty while making the gardens ever more productive. "That extends all the way from the garden's creation to today," Forrest added. "It's still a vibrant, living garden.

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