Water, as the Origin of Beauty in Persian Garden

Dating back to several thousand years ago, the Iranian garden is the outcome of the culture and thought of Iranians and has definite links with the ritual and religious beliefs of the country both before and after the emergence of Islam. Iranian garden is composed of almost static artificial and natural elements including fruitful and decorative plants, palace, stream, pool, fountain, terraces and encircling wall and street. The combination of these elements in space is in a way that a created main axis called ‘the garden street’ leads to the palace and shapes a framed landscape for the visitor when the stream flows through that and by linear implantation of trees on both sides. This way, the other mentioned elements have shaped the Iranian gardens of different regions of Iran covering a wider area than the current borders of the country, with more or less the same system. The subject of debate in this research is the investigation of the flimsy evidence that the constituent elements of Iranian garden in various temporal, geographical, cultural and ritual contexts, do not experience the equal effects and some of which remain rather fixed in any circumstances and some, like water, are so unstable that are specific to each garden on which the aesthetics of Iranian garden is based. This hypothesis has been evaluated in the framework of John Dewey’s valuation theory.