Feroz Shah's Gardens [also known as the garden of Firuz Shah Tughlaq Firoz Shah Tughluq]
The Afghans and Pathans showed themselves magnificent builders, as their massive forts and mosques attest. Some of the grandest and most beautiful buildings in India belong to this period, but their surrounding gardens have nearly all disappeared. Those were troublous times; kings rose and fell with astonishing rapidity, dynasties were no sooner founded than they became extinct, and internecine wars and quarrels left little of the peace and leisure garden-craft demands. Still the comparatively long reign of Feroz Shah from 1351 to 1388 proved more peaceful than those of his predecessors, and a tradition survives of the hundred gardens that he built round Delhi-or rather round Ferozabad, as the Delhi of his day was named. Of all the hundred gardens, to-day not one is left. All their fountains, tanks, and terraces are gone, merged into the sandy plains that sweep up to the ruined walls of the city the gardens once surrounded; but throughout Northern India there remain many old canals dating from the time of Feroz Tughluk. Nearly two centuries later, in the year 1526, Mahomet
Babar made his final conquest of Northern India, and fixing on Agra as his capital, commenced among other buildings the construction of the
Ram Bagh on the banks of the Jumna, the earliest Mughal garden, as far as I know, still existing in India.
In Persia and Turkestan the art of building irrigated gardens was at that time very fully developed, and had behind it an ancient history and long unbroken traditions.
