The Fragrance of the Garden
It is the third morning of Eid al-Fitr and Fatima al-Rashidi has been in her kitchen since before the call to prayer. This is not unusual for Eid. The cooking began yesterday evening, the moment the moon was sighted that confirmed the end of Ramadan, and it will continue, in various forms, for the next two days: the ma’amoul date cookies already pressed into their carved wooden moulds, the qatayef pancakes stacked under a cloth, the lamb in the oven since midnight. The kitchen is warm and fragrant in multiple registers — rose water and cardamom in the pastries, saffron in the rice, the jasmine that she has placed in a tall vase on the counter because Eid is a day for beauty, and this is what beauty smells like to her.
The jasmine is from her garden in Amman, which runs along the back wall of the house in the old Jabal al-Weibdeh neighbourhood, in the part of the city that sits on limestone hills above the downtown. She has grown jasmine there for thirty years, since the year she married and moved into the house, training it along the garden wall and over the entrance gate so that the neighbourhood smells of jasmine on the evenings when the temperature is right and the wind comes from the east. On Eid morning, she cuts a quantity of it — enough for the house, for the small bundles she will press into the hands of the children of her neighbours when they come to visit, for the spray she will pin to her own jacket — and the cutting is, in her understanding of the day, as much a preparation as the cooking. You prepare the house for the guests. You prepare yourself. You prepare the fragrance that the day requires.
This relationship between flowers, fragrance, and Islamic religious observance is one of the less discussed dimensions of a tradition that has, in fact, an extraordinarily rich engagement with the natural world and with beauty as a category of religious significance. The Prophet Muhammad is recorded in the hadith literature as loving three things above all: women, fragrance, and prayer — and in the sequence of that enumeration, fragrance and prayer are placed together, in the order that puts prayer last and therefore highest, but that acknowledges the sensory world as a legitimate domain of the divine. The garden, in Islamic theology and aesthetics, is not an optional extra. It is a prefiguration of paradise. The fragrance of flowers is not a distraction from the sacred. It is one of its languages.
We traced seven flowers through the Islamic festival year — Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Mawlid al-Nabi, and the quieter observances that structure the Muslim calendar between the major festivals — and the theological and cultural histories that make each of them say something specific to the occasion it serves.
01 — The Rose
Rosa damascena — the Valley of Roses, Bulgaria / the Dadès Valley, Morocco / Taif, Saudi Arabia
The rose in the Islamic tradition is not the Valentine’s Day rose. It is not the commercial stem produced in a Kenyan greenhouse for a European market that has largely forgotten what roses used to smell like. It is, at its most specific, the Rosa damascena — the Damask rose, originating in the gardens of Damascus and cultivated for two thousand years across the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean for a fragrance that has shaped Islamic aesthetics, medicine, cuisine, and devotional practice in ways that cannot be disentangled from one another without losing something essential about all of them.
The rose’s theological significance in Islam derives in part from a tradition — recorded in several hadith collections, though its chain of transmission is debated — that the rose was created from the sweat of the Prophet on the Night of the Ascension, the Isra’ wa’l-Mi’raj, when Muhammad was carried from Mecca to Jerusalem and then through the seven heavens. Whether or not this tradition is accepted as authoritative, its existence reflects a widespread cultural understanding that the rose is a flower of particular closeness to the divine — that its fragrance participates in a quality of the sacred that other fragrances approach but do not reach.
In the Sufi tradition — the mystical dimension of Islam that has produced, over twelve centuries, some of the most sustained and sophisticated thinking in any religious tradition about the relationship between beauty, love, and the divine — the rose is the primary symbol. Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet whose Masnavi is among the most widely read works of world literature, returns to the rose repeatedly as an image of the beloved — both the human beloved and the divine one, the two registers being deliberately kept in productive ambiguity. The opening image of the Masnavi is the reed flute separated from the reed bed, crying from longing; but the garden of the Masnavi is a rose garden, and the soul’s longing for reunion with God is everywhere figured as the longing of a lover in a rose garden for the one who has left.
The commercial reality of rose cultivation for the specifically Islamic uses — rose water for religious and culinary purposes, rose oil for perfumery, dried petals for decoration and medicine — is centred in three regions that are worth understanding as distinct. The Valley of Roses in Bulgaria’s Balkan foothills, around Kazanlak, produces the majority of the world’s Rosa damascena oil in a brief three to five week window in May, the petals harvested by hand before dawn to preserve the volatile compounds that evaporate rapidly in heat. The Dadès Valley of Morocco, in the High Atlas foothills, produces rose water and oil for the Moroccan market and for export to the Gulf; the festival of the rose at Kelaa M’Gouna in May is among the most significant agricultural festivals in North Africa. The city of Taif, in the mountains of western Saudi Arabia, produces roses whose quality is considered by connoisseurs to be among the finest in the world — the Taif rose, Rosa damascena grown at altitude in conditions of significant temperature differential between day and night, produces an oil of particular intensity and complexity that is used in the most expensive Arabian perfumes and that commands prices reflecting its scarcity and its cultural prestige.
Fatima al-Rashidi’s Eid table carries rose water in a small bottle — Moroccan, from the Dadès Valley, the bottle pressed-glass with a silver stopper — that is offered to guests to pour over their hands before eating. The fragrance of rose water on the hands at Eid is, for those who have grown up with it, as specific a sensory memory of the festival as any flavour of any dish.
02 — The Jasmine
Jasminum sambac / Jasminum officinale — Amman, Jordan / Alexandria, Egypt / Lahore, Pakistan
The jasmine that Fatima al-Rashidi cuts from her Amman garden on Eid morning is not one species but the type — the general quality of jasmine, which in the Arabic-speaking world is yasmin and in the Persian-speaking world is yāsaman and in both traditions carries a weight of poetic and devotional association that the botanical name does not capture and is not designed to.
The Arabic word yasmin appears in Islamic poetry from the 8th century onwards and in the folk traditions of every Arabic-speaking country as a synonym for feminine beauty, for domestic fragrance, for the particular quality of a summer evening in a city that has gardens — which is to say, a city that has managed, against the odds of its climate, to produce the conditions for a flower that requires water and warmth and care. The jasmine garden, in the Islamic cultural imagination, is the garden of civilisation: not the wild landscape but the landscape that has been cultivated, attended, made beautiful through sustained human effort in a part of the world where such effort is required. The garden without jasmine is the garden that has not yet fully become a garden.
In Egypt, Jasminum sambac — the fool jasmine, ful in Egyptian Arabic, distinct from the yasmin of ornamental garden use — is threaded into garlands and sold by vendors in Cairo and Alexandria throughout the summer months. The garlands are worn around the neck, hung from rear-view mirrors, placed on household shrines, used to decorate the photographs of the recently deceased. On Eid days, the jasmine vendor is as much a fixture of the Egyptian street as the seller of kahk cookies. The fragrance of ful on an Egyptian summer evening is the fragrance of collective celebration — not the intimate jasmine of Fatima’s Amman garden but the public jasmine of a street that is, for this evening, fully itself.
In Lahore, the jasmine traditions of the Islamic festival world take a different form. The city of Lahore has been famous for its gardens since the Mughal period, when the emperors who presided over the most sophisticated aesthetic culture in the early modern world planted jasmine in the gardens of Shalimar and Wazir Khan and trained it over the walls of the city’s mosques. The tradition of mehndi — henna ceremonies that precede Muslim weddings — in Lahore includes the decoration of the ceremony space with jasmine garlands on a scale that can require hundreds of kilograms of fresh flowers; the jasmine of a Lahori mehndi on an Eid-adjacent occasion is both a festival flower and a wedding flower simultaneously, the two occasions overlapping in the densely social fabric of the festival week.
03 — The Narcissus
Narcissus tazetta — Shiraz, Iran / the coastal plain of Lebanon
The narcissus in the Islamic world is primarily a Persian flower — its most sustained poetic and philosophical treatment comes from the tradition of Persian poetry that runs from Hafez and Sa’di through Rumi and beyond, in which the narcissus carries associations with the eye of the beloved, with a narcissism that is specifically a quality of the divine beauty rather than a human failing, with the quality of seeing and being seen.
The specific variety is Narcissus tazetta — the polyanthus narcissus, multi-headed, intensely fragrant, the same species that appears in the Ching Ming guide as a Chinese New Year flower and in the Mothering Sunday guide as the Scilly paperwhite. In the Persian tradition, it is the flower of the winter garden and of Nowruz — the Persian New Year, which falls at the spring equinox and which is observed by Iranian Muslims, though the festival’s roots predate Islam in the Zoroastrian calendar. The narcissus is one of the seven symbolic items of the haft-sin table — the New Year display of objects beginning with the Persian letter sin — where it appears alongside hyacinth and other spring flowers as evidence that the year is turning, that the cold is ending, that the garden is preparing itself.
In the context of the Islamic festival calendar proper, the narcissus appears at Eid in the Persian-influenced cultures of Iran and Afghanistan and among Iranian diaspora communities worldwide, where the Nowruz narcissus has been extended into the Eid season by families who observe both traditions. In Lebanon and coastal Syria, where Narcissus tazetta grows wild on the hillsides above the Mediterranean, the flower has been gathered for domestic decoration on festival occasions since antiquity. The Bekaa Valley and the Shouf mountains above Beirut produce narcissus in the wild that Lebanese families gather on the occasions — Eid, New Year, spring festivals — that call for the fragrance of the season.
The narcissus’s poetic career in Persian is among the longest of any flower in any tradition. Sa’di, writing in the 13th century, compared the narcissus to the eye of the beloved — specifically its quality of appearing to look at you without seeing you, the glazed, inward quality of the flower’s gaze. Hafez, in the following century, made the narcissus a symbol of the eye of God, which sees everything without being seen. The theological extrapolation from a garden flower to a quality of divine perception is characteristic of the Persian mystical tradition in its most refined form: the flower is not merely an image. It is an argument about the nature of sight.
04 — The Myrtle
Myrtus communis — Morocco / Turkey / the gardens of al-Andalus
The myrtle — Myrtus communis, which appeared in the Jewish holidays guide as the hadassah of the four species and the hidden name of Esther — appears in the Islamic festival tradition in a different but related register, and its double presence in this series reflects the shared landscape of the Mediterranean and Middle East in which both traditions developed, using the same plants for purposes that were sometimes convergent and sometimes distinct.
In Moroccan Islamic tradition, myrtle plays a central role in the celebration of Mawlid al-Nabi — the birthday of the Prophet, observed on the 12th of Rabi’ al-Awwal, the third month of the Islamic lunar calendar. In many Moroccan cities, particularly in Fez and Marrakech, the streets surrounding the mosques are hung with myrtle branches on Mawlid, and the fragrance of crushed myrtle leaves fills the medinas in the days before and after the festival. Women carry myrtle sprigs and hold them to their faces; children are pressed with myrtle-scented water; the fragrance becomes, for the duration of Mawlid, the olfactory signature of the occasion.
The association between myrtle and Mawlid in Morocco traces to the tradition that the Prophet loved fragrance, that the plants most beloved of the Prophet are the plants most appropriate for celebrating his birthday, and that myrtle — whose fragrance was praised in pre-Islamic Arabian poetry and which appears in the hadith literature in the context of the Prophet’s appreciation of natural fragrance — is among these plants. The Moroccan Mawlid is among the most florally elaborated of all Muslim festivals: in addition to myrtle, the streets are decorated with candles, lanterns, incense, and flowers whose specific selection varies by city and neighbourhood but whose combined effect — fragrant, luminous, abundant — is one of the great public sensory experiences of the Islamic calendar year.
The Islamic garden tradition’s engagement with myrtle runs deeper than festival use. The riyad gardens of Morocco and al-Andalus — the enclosed courtyard gardens of the great Islamic palaces and townhouses, centred on a fountain and planted with a specific selection of aromatic and flowering plants — almost universally include myrtle as a border plant, clipped low into formal hedges that frame the central fountain and produce a background fragrance that the water amplifies and carries through the courtyard. The Alhambra gardens in Granada, the Generalife, the Alcázar in Seville: in each case, myrtle hedges are the structural element that holds the garden together, the aromatic frame through which the more spectacular flowering plants are understood. The myrtle in these gardens is not a festival plant; it is a permanent condition, a fragrance that is always present. But its presence on Mawlid, brought into the streets from the garden walls, connects the domestic and the public uses of the plant in a way that the festival reveals rather than creates.
05 — The Henna Plant
Lawsonia inermis — Sudan / Yemen / Rajasthan, India
The henna plant is not a flower in any conventional sense — its small, clustered white blooms, intensely fragrant but unremarkable in appearance, are not the point of it. The point of it is the dye produced from its dried and powdered leaves, which has been used across a territory stretching from West Africa through the Middle East and South Asia for body decoration, hair dyeing, and textile use for at least five thousand years. It appears in this guide because its use in the context of the Islamic festival calendar — specifically in the eid al-henna celebrations that precede Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha in many Muslim cultures, and in the wedding ceremonies that cluster in the festival season — is one of the most widespread and most specifically floral of all festival traditions in the Islamic world.
The fragrance of the henna plant in flower — intense, sweet, with a quality that perfumers describe as similar to rose but distinct from it, a green sweetness that the rose does not have — is itself significant in the Islamic tradition. The Prophet is recorded as having used henna and as having praised its fragrance; the plant appears in the hadith literature as one of those specifically associated with prophetic practice, making its use on festival occasions a form of sunnah — of following the example of the Prophet — in addition to whatever aesthetic or social function it serves.
The laylat al-henna — the night of henna, the evening before the wedding in most traditions that observe it — is one of the most elaborately floral events in the Islamic cultural world. In Yemeni tradition, the bride sits in a room decorated with flowers and fragrant plants while women apply henna patterns to her hands and feet, singing songs that have been passed down through generations of this same ceremony. In Sudanese tradition, the jirtig ceremony that precedes the wedding involves the bride being decorated with henna while seated on a jirtig cushion stuffed with fragrant herbs; the room is filled with incense and flowers, and the women present bring bundles of aromatic plants — henna branches, basil, jasmine — as gifts. In Indian Muslim tradition, the mehndi ceremony is among the most elaborate of all pre-wedding events, the quantity and complexity of henna applied to the bride’s hands and arms being understood as a reflection of the groom’s love: the deeper the colour when the henna dries, the saying goes, the more deeply the groom loves her.
The commercial cultivation of Lawsonia inermis for the henna trade is concentrated in Rajasthan, in the area around Sojat City in the Pali district, which produces the majority of the world’s commercial henna powder. The Sojat henna is distinguished by its high lawsone content — the compound that produces the red-orange dye — and its fine powder texture, and it is exported to markets across the Middle East, North Africa, and the global Muslim diaspora. The plant is cultivated in the Rajasthan conditions of dry heat and thin soil that produce the lawsone concentration; wetter, cooler conditions produce a plant with less dyeing strength. This geographical specificity — a Rajasthani plant at the centre of an Islamic festival tradition — is one of the more striking examples in this series of the way that the global commerce of festival materials connects places and traditions that would not otherwise seem to belong to the same story.
06 — The Date Palm
Phoenix dactylifera — the Al-Ahsa oasis, Saudi Arabia / the Nile Delta, Egypt / the Draa Valley, Morocco
The date palm is, like the wheat and barley of the Jewish Shavuot guide, not a flower in the conventional sense. It is included in this guide for the same reason they were included in that one: its relationship to the Islamic festival calendar is so structurally fundamental that omitting it in favour of more conventionally floral entries would misrepresent what the tradition is actually doing.
The date palm’s relationship to Ramadan — the month of fasting, the most significant period of the Islamic religious year — is specific and ancient. The tradition of breaking the fast at sunset with dates before the evening prayer and meal derives from a hadith in which the Prophet is recorded as breaking his fast with fresh dates, or with dried dates if fresh were unavailable, or with water if dates were unavailable. This practice — iftar beginning with dates — is observed by Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia, across fourteen centuries and an enormous range of cultural variation, with a consistency that few other religious practices match.
The date at iftar is not merely a food. It is the specific material through which the daily transition from the fast to the feast is made — the first thing to enter the body after the long hours of abstention, sweet and nourishing and carrying the fragrance of the palm garden in which it grew. The varieties considered most prestigious for Ramadan use — the Ajwa of Medina, the Medjool of Morocco and Jordan, the Khudri and Sagai of Saudi Arabia — are distinguished by qualities of texture, sweetness, and what Arabic connoisseurs describe as barakah: a quality of blessing that is understood as inhering in certain dates more than others, most especially in those from the palm groves of the Hejaz region, grown in the landscape through which the Prophet himself walked.
The date palm’s presence in the Islamic aesthetic tradition extends well beyond its culinary role. Its fronds appear in mosque decoration across the Islamic world; its form appears in the carved stucco of the Alhambra and the tilework of the great Ottoman mosques; its silhouette against the sunset is among the most characteristically Islamic of all landscape images. In the Quranic text, the palm tree appears in the story of Mary’s delivery of Jesus — she is commanded to shake the trunk of a palm tree so that fresh dates fall for her to eat — a passage that gives the palm a significance in Islamic understanding of the shared Abrahamic narrative that is distinct from its specifically Muslim associations.
The Al-Ahsa oasis in eastern Saudi Arabia, which contains the largest concentration of date palms in the world — approximately three million trees in a single oasis — was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018, the citation acknowledging not only its agricultural significance but its cultural and historical importance as a landscape that has sustained human settlement and a specific civilisation of date cultivation for approximately five thousand years. The groves of Al-Ahsa in the Ramadan season, when the dates are ripening and the harvest is approaching, are among the most affecting landscapes in the Islamic world: the specific smell of ripening dates, the weight of the heavy bunches on the fronds, the sound of irrigation water moving through the channels between the trees. It is the smell and sound of iftar, approached from the other end — not from the table but from the palm itself.
07 — The Hyacinth and the Violet
Hyacinthus orientalis / Viola odorata — Isfahan, Iran / the gardens of Ottoman Istanbul
The hyacinth and the violet appear together in this guide as a pair because they are paired in the tradition that most specifically connects them to the Islamic festival year: the Ottoman imperial garden culture of the 15th through 18th centuries, in which the cultivation of certain flowers in certain colours for certain festival seasons was not merely an aesthetic activity but a form of religious and political expression.
The Ottoman garden tradition — which drew on Persian garden aesthetics, Islamic theology, and the practical knowledge of gardeners who served the imperial household and the great mosques — distinguished carefully between flowers appropriate for different seasons and occasions. The hyacinth, flowering in late winter and early spring, was associated with the period around the Prophetic birthday of Mawlid and with the early days of spring that precede Ramadan. Its fragrance — described in the Ottoman poetic tradition as rayhan, a general term for fragrant plants associated with paradise — made it a natural choice for mosque decoration in the weeks of heightened devotion. The violet, smaller and more modest, was associated with the quality of humility (tawadu’) that Ramadan’s disciplines of fasting and prayer are intended to cultivate.
In Isfahan, the capital of the Safavid empire that was the Ottoman’s great contemporary and rival in Islamic cultural production, the spring festival of char-shanbeh suri — the Wednesday fire festival, a Zoroastrian new year custom that Iranian Muslims continued to observe — was accompanied by the decoration of houses and public spaces with hyacinths. The hyacinths of Isfahan’s bazaar in early spring, their fragrance penetrating the arched vaults of the covered market, were among the first sensory announcements of the Persian New Year approaching; their presence on the haft-sin table and in the mosques simultaneously expressed both the pre-Islamic spring festival and the Islamic love of garden fragrance in a combination that the Iranian cultural tradition has maintained, without apparent contradiction, for several centuries.
The violet’s Islamic festival associations are most concentrated in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman cultural sphere — Turkey, the Levant, and the Balkans — where the spring violet has been connected since at least the 15th century with the pre-Ramadan period of sha’ban, the month before the fasting month, during which increased devotional activity is recommended and during which the fragrance of violets in Istanbul’s gardens and markets has historically marked the season’s approach. The Ottoman confectionery tradition produced violet-flavoured sweets — menekşe şekeri, violet sugar — that were made in the violet season and offered as gifts in the weeks before Ramadan, the fragrance of the sweets carrying the devotional associations of the season they marked.
Coda
The third morning of Eid al-Fitr is drawing toward noon in Amman, and Fatima al-Rashidi’s house has been receiving visitors since after the morning prayer. The children of the neighbourhood have come for their Eidiyya — the envelopes of money that adults give children on Eid, a tradition as structurally similar to the Chinese red envelope at Lunar New Year as the jasmine tradition is to the Indian festival fragrance culture. The kitchen smells of rose water and cardamom and the last of the jasmine she cut this morning. She has been pressing jasmine sprigs into the hands of every child who has come to the door.
An architect named Omar Saleh, who teaches Islamic garden history at the University of Jordan and who has been a neighbour of Fatima al-Rashidi for twenty years, says the thing that this series of guides has been reaching toward from several directions: that the Islamic tradition’s engagement with flowers and fragrance is not decorative in the contemporary sense. It is not the decision to make an occasion more pleasant. It is a theological position about the nature of the world.
“In Islamic theology,” he says, sitting in Fatima’s garden with a small cup of coffee whose fragrance adds its own register to the jasmine and the rose water, “the world is a sign — an ayah. Everything in the created world is a sign pointing toward the Creator. The fragrance of a rose is a sign. The form of a palm tree is a sign. The way a narcissus appears in winter from what looks like dead ground is a sign. When you bring flowers into your home for Eid, or cut jasmine from your garden for the morning of the festival, or smell the myrtle in the Mawlid street, you are not simply making the occasion pleasant. You are paying attention to the signs. You are doing what the tradition asks you to do with the created world: observe it, appreciate it, give thanks for it.”
This is the argument that runs through all the guides in this series, from the Easter lilies of Oregon to the Diwali marigolds of Ahmedabad to the Ching Ming chrysanthemums of Guangzhou to the myrtle of the Jewish sukkah and the rose water of the Eid table. Each tradition — in its specific plants, its specific occasions, its specific uses of specific flowers at specific times of year — is making a version of the same claim: that the natural world and the sacred world are not separate territories with a border between them. The flowers of the festivals are not decorations placed on top of a meaning that already exists. They are the meaning, made visible, made fragrant, made available to the senses that human beings actually have.
Fatima al-Rashidi presses another jasmine sprig into the hand of a child at her gate, wishes her Eid Mubarak, and goes back to the kitchen. The jasmine is nearly finished. She will cut more this afternoon, from the other side of the wall where the sun reaches later and the flowers will be fresher. There is still the second and third day of Eid to come. The garden has enough.
Hayden Blest recommends
Kelaa M’Gouna Rose Festival, Dadès Valley, Morocco — held annually in May at the height of the Rosa damascena harvest, the festival includes tours of the distillation facilities, markets selling fresh roses and rose products, and access to the rose fields during harvest. The Dadès Valley is most accessible via Ouarzazate; accommodation in Kelaa M’Gouna should be booked several months in advance for the festival week. tourisme-kelaadesmouna.com
Mawlid in Fez, Morocco — the Mawlid celebrations in the medina of Fez are among the most elaborate in the Islamic world, the narrow streets of the old city hung with myrtle and lit with candles for several nights around the festival date. The Fez Festival Bureau publishes the programme several weeks in advance; the most concentrated celebrations are in the streets surrounding the Qarawiyyin mosque. fez.ma
Al-Ahsa Oasis, Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia — the UNESCO-listed date palm oasis is open to visitors year-round; the late summer and autumn harvest season, when the dates are ripening, is the most visually spectacular period. Guided tours of the oasis and its traditional falaj irrigation system can be arranged through the Al-Ahsa Tourism Authority. visitalahsa.com
Sojat Henna Market, Rajasthan, India — the henna trading centre of Sojat City operates year-round but reaches its highest activity in the months before Eid, when orders from across the Middle East and the global Muslim diaspora are fulfilled. The market itself is visible to visitors, though wholesale trade is not open to retail buyers; the agricultural fields outside Sojat can be visited with a local guide during the growing season.