The smell I remember. It was sensuous and sweet in the early summer morning but also airy, light, with an almost spicy edge. And it shifted character as I walked past the murmuring fountains and groomed myrtle bushes. But I didn’t pay much attention.
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Eight years ago there were other impressions to attend to, made by the honeycombed ceilings and ornamented stucco, the interweaving geometries on tiles and stone, the views of tall cypresses and corrugated rooftops. The place, in uniting opposites, seemed to insist on a mythical significance as fortress and pleasure garden, a seat of power and a meditative retreat: the Alhambra.
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You would hardly expect the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx to have reproduced the sensations of that 14th-century palace complex in Granada, Spain, in its exhibition opening on Saturday, “Spanish Paradise: Gardens of the Alhambra.” What point could there have been in trying to replicate the heavens depicted on the ceiling of the Hall of Ambassadors, its wooden pieces inlaid with mother-of-pearl stars? Or to imitate the “Escalera del Agua” — the staircase in the palace gardens whose hand rails have carved channels in which currents of water flow, so that as you descend under overhanging trees you feel immersed in a rushing stream?
Any such reproduction would have been doomed to failure, so instead the Botanical Garden has created an exhibition of allusions and images, a three-part homage to the impact of the Alhambra and its gardens. Outdoors, in collaboration with the Poetry Society of America, the Garden mounted 16 panels of nature poems by Federico García Lorca, who was born near Granada and was intoxicated by the Alhambra.
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More here.