Moonlight Gardens and Deeg Palace

CHAPTER XI MOONLIGHT GARDENS, AND THE PALACE OF DEEG

Sois content des fleurs, des fruits, meme-des feuilles, Si dans ton jardin a toi tu les cueilles. EDMOND ROSTAND

The Indian Buddhists were great gardeners, and evidence of their skill may yet be seen in places like the 'Lanoli Grove' beyond Khandalla on the railway line between Bombay and Poona, which is full of rare trees and flowering shrubs found nowhere else in Western India. The spot was at one time a Buddhist shrine, and the foreign trees are without doubt survivals of an ancient temple enclosure or grove. Sir George Birdwood tells me of another such place at Chembur on the island of Trombay opposite Salsette, where he found near some ruins, said to be of a Buddhist site, a solitary white pangri tree (Erythrina indica) from which he took many cuttings, distributing them among friends in different parts of India. Of all Hindu sects the Jains are the nearest to the Buddhists of ancient India in their keen sense of the universal indwelling soul of things; and the Jains and Vaeshnavas, more than other Hindus, set store by their gardens. Nearly all the bankers and rich merchants of Western India belong to one or the other of these divisions of Hinduism. It cannot be said that they are now strict in laying out their actual gardens in accordance with their paradisiacal ideal of them, and so long as their garden is a paradise to their soul and their spiritual eye, they are not so particular as were the Mughals about its being truly 'four square.' In the same way, when the Hindu princes and wealthy merchants build their great mansions and palaces with their numerous arched openings, they delight to call them 'the chaurasi,' a name derived from the number eighty-four, a multiple of twelve (the number of the signs of the zodiac) by seven (the number of the planets); but the particular palace may have only fifty or sixty openings in reality. This number, eighty-four, is a most sacred one with Hindus and Buddhists alike, so much so that, to quote Sir George Birdwood again: 'If a man live to eighty-four he is by that fact alone constituted a saint, however big a blackguard he may have been-or still prefer to be.' [Note: the 'Lanoli Grove' is likely to be near the Karla and Bhaja Caves, east of Khandala and Lonavla (Lonavala )]