Apart from the main system of irrigation, it is curious to notice from these old accounts and miniatures how in many ways the Mughal gardens of the sixteenth century resembled those of Tudor England. These English gardens, alas! have nearly all vanished, their last vestiges swept away by the sham romanticism of the eighteenth century and the zeal of those who followed the traditions of the once-lauded landscape gardener, 'Capability' Brown. One by one the magnificent old gardens of the great houses were destroyed, but a glance at nearly any of the plans shown in Kip's drawings of famous English halls and castles, published in 1707, will prove how much the old English and Indian gardens had in common. Two centuries earlier a still closer affinity can be seen in the garden backgrounds of the illuminations in a Flemish manuscript of the Roman de la Rose. In both styles the garden was confined by high boundary walls, and in both the whole scheme of house and garden, buildings and planting, were treated throughout in definite relation to each other. Towers in the east, and garden houses in the west were an invariable feature marking the corners of the walls. The cistern fountains in the European illuminations might have played in the Garden of Fidelity; the 'pleached allies' and 'proper knots' of English gardens were the vine pergolas and geometrical parterres of the Mughals; while their central baradaris or raised chabutras (platforms) answered the same purpose as the banqueting hall on the 'mound,' without which at one time no English noble's garden was complete.
