Gardens of Granada: Garden Design in the Americas

There is also talk of marble porticoes and pavilions, light arcades, baths, and cedar groves, which together convey an impression of the Villa d'Este crossed with Stourhead. If these descriptions are true (and there are the remains of terraces which seem to substantiate them) the gardens of the Aztec king must have been very like those of great Asiatic potentates; they read like Marco Polo's account of the gardens of Kublai Khan... indeed, they read suspiciously like a description of the gardens at Granada in the conqueror's own land of Spain, and the similarity with Spain becomes even more striking when we hear of internal courts or patios in which there are outdoor fountains. But in all this it is necessary to make some allowance for what the conquistadores thought they were seeing, which would naturally assume the shape of things they knew, and also perhaps some allowance for what they believed that their correspondents in Spain would be impressed by their seeing. The court of Spain knew the gardens of Granada and they knew patios: that Montezuma possessed similar gardens magnified the achievement of those who had overcome him. If the palace gardens of Mexico were really like this it would argue that some secondary tradition hastened their development into these elaborate forms. Perhaps we should look for the missing influence in the shadowy Toltec civilization which stood to the Aztecs as Rome to the Italian Renaissance. But although there are remains of Toltec buildings, there are none now of their gardens or their literature by which we can judge them. Again it is possible that the religion of the Aztecs, fanatical, priest-ridden, based on fear and sacrifice, dictated their attitude to nature and consequently shaped their gardens rather as animism in quite a different way shaped the gardens of China. If so, there is no evidence of it.