The Jasmine City: A Love Letter to Damascus in Flower and Memory

Comma Bloom Founder’s elegy for a garden city between what was and what might yet be

Prelude: Before

I need to tell you immediately: the Damascus I’m about to describe exists now primarily in memory, in exile, in hope, and in stubborn refusal to accept that a city of flowers can truly die. I visited Damascus multiple times between 2008 and early 2011, in those last years before Syria’s civil war transformed everything. What I witnessed, what I smelled, what I learned—much of it exists now only in photographs, in stories, in the memories of Damascenes scattered across the world, and in my notebooks.

This isn’t archaeological nostalgia. Damascus still exists, still breathes, still blooms in places. But the Damascus I knew—the jasmine-scented evenings, the garden courtyards open to curious travelers, the rose vendors in the souks, the sense of ancient beauty persisting peacefully—that Damascus is gone, at least for now. Perhaps it will return. Perhaps it’s already returning in ways I can’t see from outside. Perhaps it never left but only transformed.

So this is several things at once: a travel memoir of a place that was, a love letter to a city of flowers, a witness testimony to beauty that existed and may exist again, and a meditation on how flowers carry memory when everything else is destroyed. It’s about Damascus specifically, but it’s also about how humans use flowers to mark what matters, to remember what’s lost, and to insist that beauty is worth preserving even when everything argues otherwise.

The jasmine still blooms in Damascus, I’m told. Even in war, even in destruction, even in unimaginable difficulty—somehow, jasmine still blooms. That fact alone seems important enough to build an entire book around.

Part One: Arriving in the City of Jasmine

First Scent

I arrived in Damascus on an April evening when the city smelled like heaven distilled into air. The scent hit me the moment I stepped off the plane—jasmine, so intense it seemed impossible that mere flowers could create such olfactory overwhelming. Not perfume, not artificial, but living plants releasing fragrance into warm evening air.

My taxi into the old city drove through streets where the scent intensified. Every wall seemed to hide jasmine. Every courtyard exhaled it. The driver, noticing my constant inhaling, smiled.

“Yasmin al-sham,” he said. “Damascus jasmine. Our perfume, our identity, our soul made smell. You understand now why we call Damascus the City of Jasmine?”

I did, though I hadn’t yet grasped the depth of that identity, how thoroughly jasmine saturated Damascus culture, how the flower and the city had become inseparable in ways that went far beyond tourism slogans.

We drove through Bab Touma (Thomas Gate) into the old city’s Christian Quarter, where I’d rented a room in a traditional Damascus house. Stone walls, wooden doors, narrow streets barely wide enough for cars, everything ancient and close and alive. And jasmine—climbing over walls, spilling from balconies, growing in pots and gardens and anywhere it could find purchase.

The house where I stayed was typical of old Damascus architecture: austere from the street, revealing nothing. But the heavy wooden door opened onto a courtyard that was pure paradise—a central fountain surrounded by lemon trees, jasmine climbing trellises, rose bushes in corners, vines overhead filtering sunlight into green shade. The courtyard’s temperature was noticeably cooler than the street. The sound of water mixed with evening bird calls and, from somewhere, the call to prayer.

“This is Damascus,” said my host, Abu Karim, gesturing at the courtyard. “What you see from the street—walls, stone, closed doors—that’s protection, privacy, defense. What you see inside—gardens, fountains, flowers—that’s reality, beauty, what life is actually for. Damascus people, we protect our flowers from the world. The flowers are too precious to expose.”

I would learn this pattern repeated throughout Damascus: harsh exteriors concealing flowering interiors, public austerity hiding private paradise, the outside world kept at bay so the inside world could bloom.

Morning in the Souk

My first full day, I woke before dawn to the pre-sunrise call to prayer and wandered into the still-dark streets. The old city was already stirring—shop owners opening, street sweepers working, early market-goers heading to the souk.

I followed them to Souq al-Hamidiyeh, the covered market leading toward the Umayyad Mosque. The metal roof, scarred with bullet holes from French colonial era (preserved deliberately as memory), filtered early light into patterns. Shops were just opening, merchants arranging their goods.

But what struck me immediately: the flower vendors. Not tucked away in special sections but integrated throughout the souk—between spice vendors and fabric sellers, next to gold merchants and coffee traders. Flowers as ordinary as onions, as essential as bread.

The flowers themselves were mostly jasmine, roses, and mixed seasonal blooms. But the jasmine dominated—small vendors with buckets of jasmine garlands, larger stalls with pyramids of jasmine bunches, old women sitting beside baskets of jasmine threaded into bracelets and necklaces and decorative arrangements.

I approached one elderly woman whose hands moved with impossible speed, threading jasmine blossoms onto thin wire to create garlands. She’d been doing this since before dawn, she indicated through gestures (my Arabic was rudimentary; her willingness to communicate transcended language). She’d been selling jasmine in this souk for forty-six years, following her mother, who’d followed her grandmother.

The jasmine came from gardens in and around Damascus—Ghouta gardens outside the city, courtyard gardens in the old city, farms in the Damascus countryside. Picked at dawn when fragrance peaked, brought to market within hours, sold before the heat diminished their perfection. By afternoon, these same vendors would have new stock, freshly picked, the morning flowers already in homes and hair and offering their fragrance to Damascus.

I bought jasmine—of course I bought jasmine—and the vendor showed me how to wear it: small garlands for the wrist, larger ones for hanging in doorways, tiny bunches for tucking behind ears or into hair. The price was nothing, negligible, deliberately affordable. Jasmine was meant to be accessible, democratic, everyone’s flower.

Walking through the souk wearing jasmine felt ceremonial somehow, initiatory. Other vendors smiled and nodded. Shopkeepers called out greetings. I was marked now as someone who understood, however superficially, that Damascus meant jasmine, that you didn’t just visit this city—you wore it.

The Umayyad Mosque: Sacred Gardens

At the Umayyad Mosque, one of Islam’s oldest and most significant, I found flowers integrated into sacred space in ways that surprised me. Not inside the prayer hall—Islamic tradition generally keeps decorative flowers out of prayer spaces—but in the courtyard.

The vast courtyard, paved with ancient stones, surrounded by porticos, punctuated by the ablution fountain, felt austere and magnificent. But in corners, in careful beds, in pots placed thoughtfully—roses. Not abundant, not overwhelming, but present. Discreet beauty in sacred space.

A mosque gardener, noticing my interest, approached. His name was Muhammad, and he’d tended the mosque gardens for thirty years. He explained (in careful English practiced on countless tourists) that roses in the mosque carried specific significance.

“The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, he loved fragrance,” Muhammad said. “Roses, jasmine, all beautiful scents—these are gifts from God, reminders of paradise. We keep roses here not for decoration but for remembrance. When you smell them, you remember that paradise smells sweet, that God creates beauty, that worship should engage all senses, not just sight and sound.”

He showed me his work—pruning roses, checking irrigation, ensuring the plants thrived despite the courtyard’s harsh conditions (sun, heat, thousands of feet passing daily). The care he took was devotional, each cut deliberate, each decision considered.

“Some people think flowers are worldly, not spiritual,” Muhammad continued. “But I think God wouldn’t create such beauty if He didn’t want us to tend it, appreciate it, include it in our worship. These roses are part of the mosque’s prayer—silent prayer, fragrant prayer, beauty as worship.”

This integration of flowers into religious space, this understanding that beauty served spiritual purposes, would recur throughout Damascus. Flowers weren’t secular decoration separate from sacred life. They were part of the whole, the seamless fabric where faith and beauty and daily life wove together.

Evening: The Jasmine Sellers

As evening fell and the day’s heat finally broke, Damascus transformed. Families emerged for evening walks, cafes filled, the old city came alive in new ways. And the jasmine sellers multiplied.

Young men walked through streets and squares selling jasmine garlands from baskets, calling out “Yasmin! Yasmin al-sham!” Families bought them, couples bought them, groups of friends bought them. The jasmine appeared in hair, on wrists, hung from car mirrors, placed on cafe tables.

I sat at a cafe near Bab Sharqi (the East Gate) watching this evening ritual. A jasmine seller approached every few minutes—I bought jasmine three times in an hour, giving garlands to strangers at adjacent tables, wearing some myself, generally participating in the communal jasmine madness.

A man at the next table, noticing my purchases, laughed and introduced himself—Tariq, a lawyer, Damascus native, amused by the foreign tourist overbuying jasmine.

“You understand now,” he said, “why jasmine is Damascus? This ritual—evening walks, buying jasmine, wearing it, smelling it, sharing it—this is who we are. Not politics, not history, not religion exactly. Jasmine. Simple flower, simple pleasure, but it’s our identity.”

We talked for hours—about Damascus, about jasmine, about how the flower had become synonymous with the city. Tariq explained that Damascus’s climate and geography created perfect jasmine conditions: hot days, cool nights, good soil, sufficient water (before the war, before the crisis), and centuries of cultivation expertise.

“But it’s more than climate,” Tariq insisted. “Other places could grow jasmine just as well. But Damascus people, we chose jasmine as our flower. We cultivated it everywhere, made it cheap so everyone could afford it, created rituals around it, wove it into our identity. The jasmine grew physically in Damascus soil, but it also grew culturally in Damascus soul.”

As we talked, the evening air grew thick with jasmine scent—dozens of people in that square alone wearing fresh flowers, the fragrance mixing with coffee and tobacco smoke and cooking smells from nearby restaurants. The sensory experience was overwhelming and perfect, beauty as atmospheric condition rather than special occasion.

“Remember this,” Tariq said as we parted. “Remember Damascus like this—jasmine in the evening, people happy, peace, beauty, normal life. Promise me—whatever happens in the future, you’ll remember Damascus had this. We had beauty. We had jasmine. We had peace. That matters.”

I promised, not knowing then how important that promise would become, how much I’d need to remember, how completely that peaceful jasmine evening would become impossible to recreate.

Part Two: The Gardens of Damascus

The Courtyard Houses

Damascus’s traditional courtyard houses represent one of architectural history’s most successful integrations of gardens into urban dwelling. From outside, these houses look austere, even forbidding—high walls, small windows, heavy doors revealing nothing. Inside, they’re paradise.

Over my weeks in Damascus, I visited dozens of courtyard houses—some converted to restaurants or hotels, some still family homes, some preserved as museums, some crumbling but clinging to former glory. Each followed the same basic pattern: an open courtyard at the center, rooms surrounding it, a fountain in the middle, and gardens—always gardens.

The genius of the design became apparent immediately: the courtyard created a microclimate, noticeably cooler than the street. Evaporation from the fountain provided humidity and cooling. Shade from trees and vine-covered walls protected from the sun. The high walls blocked hot winds and city noise. Inside these courtyards, you existed in a different world—cooler, quieter, more beautiful, physically separated from Damascus’s harsh summers and dusty streets.

The flowers in these courtyards followed traditional patterns: jasmine climbing walls and trellises (always jasmine, essential), roses in corners or along pathways, lemon and orange trees providing both fruit and shade, grapevines overhead, often pomegranate trees, herbs in pots, and seasonal flowers changed regularly.

At Beit Nizram, an eighteenth-century house converted to a restaurant, I met the garden keeper, Hussein, who maintained the courtyard’s plantings. He explained the philosophy behind traditional Damascus gardens.

“Every plant serves multiple purposes,” Hussein said, walking me through the courtyard. “Jasmine—beauty, fragrance, tradition, identity. Lemon trees—fruit, shade, flowers that smell wonderful. Roses—beauty, rosewater for cooking, petals for preserves, thorns to remind us beauty has costs. Herbs—cooking, medicine, fragrance. Nothing is only decorative. Everything is useful and beautiful together.”

This pragmatic aestheticism, this refusal to separate beauty from utility, characterized Damascus garden culture. Gardens weren’t purely contemplative spaces—they fed families, provided medicines, supplied cooking ingredients, offered cooling, created privacy, and only additionally happened to be beautiful. Or rather, their beauty emerged from their usefulness, the two concepts inseparable.

Hussein showed me his jasmine plantings—multiple varieties, each with slightly different blooming times and fragrance intensity. “The goal is jasmine every day, spring through autumn,” he explained. “We stagger varieties so something is always blooming, always scenting the courtyard. Damascus courtyard without jasmine is like Damascus without soul.”

The fountain at the courtyard’s center wasn’t decorative either—it cooled the air, humidified the space, provided water for the gardens, and created soothing sound that masked street noise. But it was also beautiful, mosaic-tiled, geometrically perfect, reflecting sky and surrounding greenery. Function and beauty again, refusing separation.

The Ghouta Gardens

Damascus sat at the edge of the Ghouta—the agricultural oasis surrounding the city, fed by the Barada River and springs, creating one of the Middle East’s most productive agricultural zones for millennia. The Ghouta wasn’t wilderness; it was intensely cultivated gardens and orchards stretching for miles.

I spent several days exploring the Ghouta with a guide, Mahmoud, visiting fruit orchards, jasmine farms, rose gardens, and the mix of subsistence gardens and commercial agriculture that fed Damascus and supplied its flower markets.

The jasmine farms were particularly fascinating—vast plantings of jasmine bushes, workers picking flowers at dawn when fragrance peaked, processing facilities where flowers became jasmine essence, rosewater distilleries nearby, and everywhere the overwhelming scent of flowers being processed.

“Ghouta has fed Damascus for thousands of years,” Mahmoud explained. “Apricots, pomegranates, figs, grapes, vegetables, everything. But also flowers—jasmine for the city’s markets, roses for rosewater and rose petals, flowers for Damascus weddings and celebrations. The Ghouta is Damascus’s garden, literally and figuratively. The city is nothing without the Ghouta.”

We visited a jasmine farm run by a family who’d cultivated jasmine for generations. The owner, Abu Yusuf, explained that Damascus jasmine (Jasminum sambac) required specific conditions—sufficient water, good soil, proper pruning, careful harvesting. The Ghouta provided these perfectly.

“But it’s not just climate,” Abu Yusuf said, echoing what I’d heard before. “It’s knowledge—generations of jasmine growers learning what works, when to harvest, how to handle flowers so they stay fresh. That knowledge is as important as soil and water. You can’t just plant jasmine anywhere and expect Damascus jasmine. The place and the knowledge together create our jasmine.”

He let me help with harvesting—working alongside experienced pickers who moved with practiced speed, selecting blooms at perfect ripeness, handling them gently to avoid bruising, packing them in baskets for transport to Damascus markets within hours. The work was skilled, careful, and essential to Damascus’s jasmine culture.

Later, we visited rose gardens where Rosa damascena—the Damask rose—grew. These roses, despite the name, probably originated elsewhere (likely Persia) but had become thoroughly Damascus, cultivated here for centuries, central to the city’s rose water production and culinary traditions.

“The roses bloom in spring,” Abu Yusuf explained. “We harvest them, make rosewater, dry petals for cooking and tea, extract rose oil for perfume. Nothing is wasted. Like all Damascus agriculture—efficient, practical, but also beautiful. We could grow other crops more profitable, but roses are tradition, identity, culture. We grow them because we’re Damascenes.”

The Palace Gardens

Damascus’s historic palaces—now museums, restaurants, or cultural centers—preserved formal garden traditions from the Ottoman era and earlier. These gardens followed Islamic geometric patterns, featuring symmetry, water channels, specific plant placements carrying symbolic meanings.

At Azem Palace, the eighteenth-century Ottoman governor’s residence, I spent a full day studying the garden’s design with an architectural historian, Dr. Salwa, who specialized in Damascus’s architectural heritage.

“Islamic gardens represent paradise on earth,” Dr. Salwa explained as we walked through Azem Palace’s courtyards. “The Quran describes paradise as gardens with flowing water, shade, fruit, beauty. These gardens recreate that description—water channels dividing space into four (representing four rivers of paradise), shade trees, fruit trees, roses and jasmine, geometric patterns representing divine order.”

The Azem Palace had multiple courtyards, each with distinct character: a public courtyard for receiving visitors, a private family courtyard with more intimate plantings, a summer courtyard emphasizing cooling and water features, a winter courtyard capturing maximum sun. Each courtyard’s garden suited its purpose while maintaining the overall aesthetic vocabulary—jasmine, roses, fruit trees, geometric beds, central fountains, mosaic work.

“Notice everything serves multiple purposes,” Dr. Salwa pointed out. “Water channels—they’re beautiful, yes, but they also irrigate plants and cool the air. Trees—shade, fruit, beauty together. Jasmine—identity, fragrance, tradition, visual beauty. Nothing is only one thing. That’s Damascus garden philosophy—utility and beauty inseparable, practical and poetic together.”

She explained that Damascus palaces represented the pinnacle of courtyard garden design, the full expression of principles that humbler houses followed in simpler forms. “From the richest palace to the poorest courtyard house,” Dr. Salwa said, “the same principles apply—central space, fountain, gardens, privacy, creating paradise inside high walls. That’s very Damascus—democratic beauty, everyone having their private paradise however small.”

We sat in the palace’s main courtyard, in shade cast by ancient lemon trees, listening to the fountain, smelling jasmine, and Dr. Salwa grew emotional—this was several months before the war began, but tensions were rising, uncertainty spreading.

“These gardens survived so much,” she said. “Mongol invasions, Turkish occupation, French colonialism, political upheavals, economic crisis—always the gardens survived, were restored, maintained. I hope—” She paused, not finishing the thought. But I understood. She hoped the gardens would survive whatever was coming. She hoped Damascus’s garden culture would persist. She hoped, but she wasn’t certain.

Part Three: Flowers in Damascus Daily Life

The Flower Vendors

Damascus’s flower vendors weren’t tourists attractions but essential urban infrastructure—as normal as grocery stores, as necessary as pharmacies, as integrated into daily rhythms as bakeries.

I spent time with various flower vendors, learning their routines, understanding their place in Damascus life. Most worked independently—buying flowers from Ghouta growers or their own small plots, selling in souks or from mobile carts or at specific street corners where they’d established regular clienteles.

One vendor, Abu Sami, had sold flowers from the same corner near the Umayyad Mosque for thirty-eight years. His corner, his flowers, his regular customers—all became familiar to me as I passed repeatedly during my weeks in Damascus.

Abu Sami specialized in jasmine (obviously) but also sold roses, seasonal flowers, and—unusually—he threaded flowers into elaborate arrangements and shapes that were more art than simple bouquets. Flowers arranged to resemble birds, hearts, geometric patterns, even Arabic calligraphy.

“Flowers are words,” Abu Sami explained through a regular customer who translated. “I speak in flowers instead of language. A rose says ‘I love you,’ jasmine says ‘welcome,’ white flowers say ‘peace,’ red say ‘passion.’ I arrange flowers to say complex things—flowers as poetry, as message, as communication.”

His customers ranged from daily regulars (buying jasmine for evening wear, keeping flowers in their homes continuously) to occasional buyers (purchasing for specific events, gifts, celebrations). The daily regulars were predominantly women, buying jasmine late afternoon for evening wear. Occasional buyers were more mixed—men buying roses for wives or mothers, families buying flowers for home decoration, people purchasing flowers for cemetery visits.

The economics were modest—Abu Sami made enough to support his family but nothing excessive. Flowers were priced to be affordable, not luxury items. “Flowers are for everyone,” he insisted. “Rich, poor, everyone deserves jasmine, deserves beauty in their lives. If I price too high, only rich people buy flowers. That’s wrong. Flowers are democratic—everyone’s right, not rich people’s privilege.”

This democratic beauty principle appeared constantly in Damascus flower culture. Jasmine especially was deliberately kept cheap so even the poorest Damascenes could afford evening jasmine, could participate in the shared cultural practice, could wear the city’s identity literally on their bodies.

Weddings: Flowers as Celebration

Damascus weddings featured flowers prominently, and I was fortunate (through connections and invitations) to attend several, ranging from modest family affairs to elaborate celebrations.

At every wedding, regardless of scale or budget, jasmine appeared. Bride and female guests wore jasmine in hair. The celebration space featured jasmine decorations. Jasmine water was served. The scent of jasmine mixed with other wedding fragrances—incense, perfumes, food—creating olfactory signatures of celebration.

At one Christian wedding in the Bab Touma quarter, the bride’s jasmine crown was spectacular—woven fresh that morning, incorporating hundreds of jasmine blossoms into an elaborate design that was part crown, part veil, completely fragrant. The women who’d created it—the bride’s mother, aunts, and cousins—had worked for hours, a collaborative effort representing family love made tangible in flowers.

“My mother wore jasmine at her wedding,” the bride told me through translation. “My grandmother wore jasmine at hers. Damascus brides have always worn jasmine. It’s our tradition—jasmine for purity, for beauty, for Damascus identity. I’m not just a bride—I’m a Damascus bride, and Damascus brides wear jasmine.”

At a Muslim wedding in a different neighborhood, the decorations mixed jasmine with roses—white jasmine for purity and tradition, red roses for love and passion. The arrangement followed specific cultural rules I was only beginning to understand: white flowers for the bride’s side, red for the groom’s side, jasmine everywhere because jasmine transcended sides, belonged to everyone, was Damascus itself attending the wedding.

The flowers at Damascus weddings weren’t imported or exotic—they were local, seasonal, traditional. Using Damascus jasmine, Ghouta roses, local flowers was important, meaningful, part of the statement weddings made about community, tradition, identity.

“We could buy expensive imported flowers,” one mother-of-the-bride told me. “Orchids from Thailand, roses from Ecuador, whatever. But why? We have the most beautiful jasmine in the world growing right here in Damascus. Using our own flowers—it’s respect for tradition, for our city, for our Ghouta gardens. It’s saying ‘we’re proud of what Damascus creates, we don’t need foreign flowers to make beauty.’”

Funerals: Flowers as Memory

Death in Damascus also involved flowers, though more modestly, following Islamic traditions that discouraged elaborate grave decorations while allowing flowers as temporary offerings.

I visited Damascus cemeteries—peaceful, spare places following Islamic aesthetic of modesty and simplicity. Graves were simple stone markers, no elaborate monuments, no permanent plantings. But flowers appeared as temporary offerings—fresh flowers brought by visitors, placed on graves, left to wilt naturally as reminders of life’s transience.

The flowers at graves were predominantly white—white roses, white jasmine, white carnations. “White for death, for purity, for transition,” explained a cemetery keeper I spoke with. “Colorful flowers are for celebration, for life. Death gets white flowers—respectful, beautiful, but restrained.”

But even this restraint had Damascus character—the white jasmine offered at graves smelled as sweet as jasmine worn for celebration. Death deserved beauty too, deserved fragrance, deserved Damascus’s signature flower offering its comfort and memory.

I watched a elderly woman visit her husband’s grave, carrying white jasmine. She placed the flowers, sat beside the grave, and talked—to her husband, to God, to memory, I couldn’t tell. But the jasmine perfumed the interaction, made her mourning fragrant, connected her grief to Damascus’s identity. She was grieving not just as a widow but as a Damascene widow, and Damascene grief smelled like jasmine.

Everyday Flowers: The Weekly Rhythm

Beyond special occasions, flowers threaded through Damascus’s daily life in ways easy to miss but essential to the city’s character.

Nearly every Damascus house I entered had fresh flowers—in courtyards, on tables, in bedrooms, perfuming living spaces continuously. Changing these flowers was weekly ritual, often Saturday’s task, walking to the souk, selecting fresh flowers, arranging them at home, maintaining beauty as household maintenance.

I watched this ritual with my host family—Abu Karim’s wife, Um Karim, buying flowers every Saturday morning, bringing them home, arranging them thoughtfully in various rooms, the house smelling different after fresh flowers arrived, better, more alive.

“Why flowers every week?” I asked (through their daughter who spoke English).

Um Karim looked puzzled by the question. “Because… because they die? Old flowers fade, new flowers replace them. It’s like cleaning the house, washing clothes, cooking fresh food. You don’t keep dead flowers any more than you’d keep rotten food. Fresh flowers mean a living house, a cared-for house, a house where beauty matters.”

This attitude—flowers as basic maintenance, as necessary as cleanliness—normalized beauty in ways I found remarkable. Beauty wasn’t luxury or special occasion. It was ordinary requirement for proper living, as essential as clean water or adequate food.

The specific flowers changed seasonally—jasmine spring through fall, roses in spring, other flowers for winter when jasmine wasn’t blooming. But flowers themselves, the concept of flowers-in-the-house, remained constant. Damascus houses breathed flowers, exhaled fragrance, insisted on beauty as baseline condition rather than special achievement.

Part Four: The Language of Damascus Flowers

Jasmine: The Flower That Is Damascus

To understand Damascus, you must understand jasmine—not just as a plant but as a cultural symbol so central it becomes inseparable from the city itself.

Damascus jasmine (Jasminum sambac, locally called yasmin al-sham—Damascus jasmine, or sometimes yasmin baladi—local jasmine) grows prolifically in Damascus’s climate. The small, intensely fragrant white flowers bloom repeatedly from spring through fall, providing nearly continuous supply of fresh flowers.

But jasmine’s ubiquity doesn’t diminish its cultural importance—quite the opposite. Because jasmine is abundant, affordable, accessible, it became democratically symbolic, everyone’s flower, the shared identity marker that crossed class, religion, neighborhood, and generation.

Jasmine meant:

Identity: To be Damascene was to wear jasmine, to grow jasmine, to perfume your house with jasmine. The flower was the city’s signature, its olfactory fingerprint, its living logo.

Welcome: Offering jasmine to guests was traditional hospitality—”Welcome, you’re honored here, we give you our city’s most precious flower.” Hotels placed jasmine in rooms. Restaurants offered jasmine to diners. Hosts gave jasmine to visitors.

Celebration: Any happy occasion featured jasmine—weddings, engagements, graduations, births, festivals, even just Friday family gatherings. Jasmine marked joy, marked occasions worth remembering.

Romance: Young men bought jasmine for young women. Husbands brought jasmine to wives. Jasmine threaded into hair signaled availability, interest, or simply participation in the city’s romantic culture.

Purity: White flowers generally symbolize purity in Islamic culture, and jasmine’s white blooms carried this meaning especially strongly. Brides wore jasmine, religious occasions featured it, pure intentions were expressed through jasmine offerings.

Damascus itself: More than all specific meanings, jasmine simply meant Damascus. You smelled jasmine, you thought of Damascus. You thought of Damascus, you smelled jasmine. The flower and the city collapsed into each other, became aspects of the same thing.

A poet I met in Damascus, Amira, explained it perfectly: “Jasmine isn’t a symbol of Damascus—it IS Damascus. The city grew flowers and the flowers grew the city, and now you can’t separate them. Damascus without jasmine would be like… like human without breath. Technically possible, but not really living.”

Roses: Persian Heritage, Damascus Identity

Roses in Damascus carried different resonances than jasmine—less immediately Damascus, more connected to broader Islamic and Persian cultural heritage, but still deeply woven into the city’s identity.

The Damask rose (Rosa damascena) bears Damascus’s name, though it likely originated in Persia and arrived via trade routes. But centuries of cultivation in Damascus and the Ghouta made these roses thoroughly Damascene, adapted to local conditions, central to local culture.

Roses in Damascus meant:

Beauty and Love: Universal rose meanings, but with Damascus particularity. These weren’t just roses—they were Damascus roses, grown in Ghouta gardens, carrying specific fragrance and cultural weight.

Rosewater: Damascus cuisine featured rosewater extensively—in sweets, in drinks, in savory dishes occasionally. Rosewater was simultaneously flavoring and perfume, crossing culinary and cosmetic categories. Making rosewater was traditional knowledge, passed generationally, part of Damascus domestic expertise.

Poetry and Mysticism: Roses in Arabic and Persian poetry were beloved symbols, divine beauty, the cheek of the beloved, metaphors for spiritual and earthly love. Damascus, as a Arabic-speaking city with deep Persian cultural connections, inherited this poetic tradition. Educated Damascenes could quote endless verses about roses, nightingales, and gardens.

Status and Occasion: While jasmine was democratic, roses were somewhat more formal, more special-occasion. Red roses especially were reserved for significant expressions—serious love, important celebrations, honoring distinguished guests. You wore jasmine daily; you gave roses meaningfully.

Tradition and Heritage: Growing roses, making rosewater, using rose petals in cooking—these practices connected Damascus to millennia of Middle Eastern culture, to Abbasid Baghdad, to Persian gardens, to Ottoman courts. Roses were heritage flowers, carrying history in their petals.

Seasonal Flowers: The Damascus Year

While jasmine and roses dominated Damascus flower culture, seasonal flowers marked the year’s progression, each bringing specific associations and uses.

Spring (March-May):

• Narcissus and irises appeared first, announcing spring’s arrival
• Roses bloomed prolifically—peak rose season for Ghouta gardens
• Jasmine began its long blooming season
• Fruit blossoms—apricot, almond, pomegranate—announced the growing season
• Spring was wedding season, flower season, celebration season

Summer (June-September):

• Jasmine peaked—maximum production, maximum use, Damascus at its most jasmine-saturated
• Oleander bloomed (beautiful but poisonous—look but don’t touch)
• Gardens focused on heat-tolerant flowers and shade
• Evening flower vendors proliferated—selling jasmine for evening wear
• Summer meant jasmine evenings, the city’s most characteristic season

Autumn (October-November):

• Jasmine continued but gradually decreased
• Roses had a smaller autumn blooming
• Fruit ripened—pomegranates especially, their flowers giving way to fruit
• Gardens prepared for winter, though Damascus winters were mild
• Autumn flowers carried notes of melancholy—beauty fading, preparing for rest

Winter (December-February):

• Fewer flowers but never flowerless
• Citrus trees bloomed—orange and lemon blossoms perfuming courtyards
• Indoor flowers from greenhouses and protected gardens
• Dried flowers, preserved rose petals, rosewater carried summer into winter
• Winter gardens rested but didn’t die—Damascus’s mild climate meant something always bloomed

This seasonal rhythm structured Damascus life more than official calendars. “Spring is when the apricot trees bloom,” people would say, or “Summer really begins when evening jasmine vendors appear,” or “Autumn starts when pomegranates ripen.” The city’s time was measured in flowers, in blooming and fading, in fragrance arriving and departing.

Part Five: Gardens as Architecture

The Courtyard: Engineering Paradise

Damascus courtyards weren’t merely gardens—they were architectural achievements, sophisticated environmental control systems that happened to be beautiful.

I spent time with an architect, Khalil, who specialized in restoring Damascus houses, learning the engineering principles behind courtyard design.

“The courtyard solves Damascus’s climate problems elegantly,” Khalil explained. “Hot, dry summers with intense sun. Cold winters with some rain. Daily temperature swings. The courtyard addresses all of it—creates shade, traps cool air, provides evaporative cooling from the fountain, blocks hot winds, captures winter sun, drains rainwater efficiently.”

He showed me detailed plans demonstrating how courtyards functioned:

Orientation: Courtyards aligned to maximize shade in summer, sun in winter. North-south orientation predominated, with rooms on east-west sides getting maximum shade.

Proportions: Height-to-width ratios carefully calculated—too narrow and courtyards became hot air traps, too wide and they lost shade advantages. Traditional Damascus courtyards maintained roughly 2:1 or 3:1 height-to-width ratios.

Water Features: Central fountains weren’t decorative—they cooled air through evaporation, humidified the dry atmosphere, provided irrigation water, created sound that masked street noise, and reflected light into shaded areas.

Plantings: Trees and vines strategically placed—deciduous trees on south sides provided summer shade while allowing winter sun, evergreen trees on north sides blocked cold winds, vines over walkways created filtered shade, plants near fountains maximized evaporative cooling.

Materials: Stone walls absorbed heat slowly (thermal mass), providing cooling in evening when they released stored coolness. Light-colored stone reflected heat rather than absorbing it. Mosaic tiles in courtyards reflected light while staying cool underfoot.

“The genius,” Khalil said, “is that all this engineering produces beauty as byproduct—or beauty produces functionality as byproduct, depending on how you look at it. The fountain that cools the air is also beautiful. The shade treesthat block sun also produce fruit and flowers. The courtyard proportions that optimize climate also create pleasing visual harmony. Function and beauty are the same thing, achieved through the same design.”

He took me to a courtyard under restoration, where I could see the structure without its flowering overlay. Even bare—just stone and water and proportions—the courtyard was compelling. When restored, with jasmine climbing the walls and roses in corners and lemon trees providing shade, it would be paradise. But the paradise was built into the architecture itself, not merely decorated onto it.

“Western people think Damascus gardens are about plants,” Khalil observed. “They’re not—they’re about architecture that plants complete. The courtyard creates the conditions; the plants fulfill the potential. You can’t have Damascus gardens without Damascus courtyard architecture. The two evolved together over millennia, each shaping the other.”

This understanding—that Damascus flower culture was inseparable from Damascus architectural culture, that you couldn’t have one without the other—was crucial. The jasmine didn’t merely grow in Damascus; it grew in specifically designed spaces that maximized its beauty, fragrance, and practical benefits. The architecture was designed for flowers; the flowers were selected for architecture.

The Private Paradise Principle

Damascus’s courtyard houses embodied what I came to think of as the “private paradise principle”—the idea that beauty should be interior, protected, hidden from casual view, reserved for family and honored guests.

This was so different from European or American garden culture, where front gardens display beauty publicly, where visible gardens signal status and taste, where gardens are meant to be seen from the street. Damascus houses showed nothing from the street—just walls, small windows, heavy doors. All beauty was internal, private, protected.

“Why hide the gardens?” I asked Khalil. “Why not let the whole city see them?”

“Several reasons,” he replied. “Privacy—Islamic culture values privacy, especially for women. Family space should be protected from public gaze. Security—a house that looks valuable from outside attracts thieves and problems. Humility—displaying wealth ostentatiously is considered bad form, possibly sinful. Climate—open gardens facing the street would lose their microclimate advantages. And philosophy—paradise is interior, spiritual, private. External displays are worldly, vain, missing the point.”

This private paradise principle explained so much about Damascus flower culture. The incredible courtyards hidden behind austere walls. The jasmine climbing in places only family saw. The roses blooming for private enjoyment rather than public acclaim. The fountain sounds and flower fragrances contained within family space rather than shared with the street.

“But you do share,” I protested. “You wear jasmine publicly, you sell flowers in markets, you have public gardens at mosques and palaces.”

“Yes, but notice—the jasmine you wear came from someone’s private garden. You share the flower, not the garden. You give away the product, not the source. The garden stays private; the beauty becomes public through the flowers it produces. That’s the Damascus way—private cultivation, public sharing.”

This felt profound somehow—the idea that beauty could be both protected and shared, that private gardens could have public effects, that you could maintain paradise privately while offering its flowers democratically. The garden stays hidden; the jasmine gets worn by everyone.

Water: The Essential Element

No discussion of Damascus gardens could avoid water—the absolute prerequisite, the limiting factor, the precious resource that made everything else possible.

Damascus existed because of the Barada River, which flowed from the Anti-Lebanon mountains through Damascus into the Ghouta. This reliable water source, supplemented by springs and underground aquifers, created the oasis that allowed Damascus to flourish for millennia.

But water was never abundant, never taken for granted, never wasted. Damascus’s entire garden culture reflected water consciousness—every drop used thoughtfully, efficiently, respectfully.

I visited traditional qanat systems (underground water channels) that brought water to different city quarters. These ancient engineering works, some dating back thousands of years, demonstrated Damascus’s sophisticated water management. The channels ran underground to minimize evaporation, distributed water according to traditional rights and schedules, and allowed multiple uses as water flowed from drinking sources to gardens to final agricultural uses.

A water engineer I met, Dr. Faisal, explained the traditional system: “Damascus water had hierarchy—first for drinking and cooking, second for bathing and cleaning, third for courtyard gardens, fourth for Ghouta agriculture. As water flowed through the system, it was used multiple times. Garden water eventually irrigated fields. Nothing wasted.”

The courtyard fountains weren’t wasteful luxuries despite appearances—they were part of this system, using water that would flow onward to other uses, providing cooling and humidity while briefly visible before continuing its journey through the water network.

“Traditional Damascus never wasted water,” Dr. Faisal said. “Every fountain, every garden, every tree was carefully calculated. People understood water scarcity, respected it, worked within its constraints. The gardens existed because of careful water management, not despite it.”

But he grew somber discussing present and future: “The old systems are failing. Population growth, overuse, climate change, war damage—water is scarcer now. The Barada runs dry sometimes now. The Ghouta is threatened. Can Damascus gardens survive water crisis? I don’t know. Gardens need water. Without water…” He didn’t finish, but the implication was clear: without water, Damascus gardens die, and with the gardens, something essential about Damascus dies too.

Part Six: Flowers in Damascus Art and Expression

Calligraphy and Flowers

Damascus had a long tradition of Islamic calligraphy, and flowers intersected with this art form in fascinating ways. At a calligraphy workshop in the old city, I watched artists create pieces incorporating both Arabic script and floral designs.

The master calligrapher, Samir, explained the connection: “In Islamic art, we don’t depict human figures in religious contexts. So we develop other visual languages—geometric patterns, calligraphy, and arabesques including stylized flowers. Flowers become part of how we express beauty, how we decorate sacred texts, how we make visible the invisible.”

He showed me examples: Quranic verses where letters sprouted into floral flourishes, roses and tulips growing from Arabic script, jasmine flowers providing decorative borders for religious texts. The flowers weren’t realistic botanical illustrations—they were stylized, geometric, abstracted into patterns that felt more than looked like flowers.

“Damascus particularly loves jasmine motifs in calligraphy,” Samir noted. “See here—this word ‘Damascus’ has jasmine flowers integrated into the letters themselves. The city name grows jasmine naturally. It’s visual poetry, the word and the flower inseparable.”

He demonstrated creating a piece—writing “bismillah” (in the name of God) with letters that became roses, thorns reminding viewers that approaching the divine involves beauty and pain together. The work took hours, each stroke deliberate, meditation and creation fused.

“Calligraphy is prayer made visible,” Samir said. “Adding flowers makes prayer beautiful, reminds us that God creates beauty, that approaching the divine should engage all our senses and sensibilities. The flowers aren’t decoration—they’re part of the prayer itself.”

Damascus Textiles: Wearing Flowers

Damascus had been famous for centuries for its textiles—damask fabric, silk brocades, embroidered textiles that were traded throughout the Islamic world and into Europe. Flowers appeared constantly in these textiles, carrying both aesthetic and symbolic weight.

At a textile workshop, I met weavers and embroiderers creating traditional Damascus patterns. The most popular designs featured stylized flowers—roses, jasmine, tulips, carnations—arranged in geometric or flowing patterns.

“Damascus textiles traditionally featured flowers because flowers represented paradise,” explained the workshop owner, Layla. “Wearing clothing with flower patterns meant carrying paradise with you, surrounding yourself with beauty, displaying your appreciation for God’s creation. It was spiritual, not just decorative.”

She showed me antique pieces—silk brocades with rose patterns, embroidered shawls with jasmine motifs, damask fabrics where the weaving created subtle flower patterns visible only in certain light. “Notice these aren’t realistic flowers,” Layla pointed out. “They’re abstracted, stylized, geometric. That’s Islamic aesthetic—we take natural forms and perfect them through geometry, through repetition, through pattern. The flowers become more flower-like by being less realistic.”

Contemporary Damascus textiles continued these traditions while adapting to modern tastes. Layla’s workshop created pieces blending traditional flower motifs with contemporary designs—jasmine patterns on modern clothing, rose embroidery on cushions and bags, traditional patterns reinterpreted for current markets.

“We’re trying to keep traditions alive by making them relevant,” Layla said. “Young Damascus women don’t want to dress exactly like their grandmothers. But they want connection to tradition, to Damascus identity. Wearing jasmine-patterned scarves or rose-embroidered shirts—that’s how tradition survives. It adapts or it dies.”

Poetry: Damascus in Verse

Damascus’s poetic tradition was ancient and continuous, and flowers saturated Damascus poetry as they saturated the city itself. I spent evenings at literary cafes where poets read their work, always including flowers as subject, metaphor, or background.

One poet, Hassan, read a piece about jasmine that made the entire cafe go silent:

“The jasmine seller calls in the evening / His voice is prayer, his basket is paradise / He sells memory to those who forget / He sells beauty to those who’ve stopped seeing / He sells Damascus to those who live here but are absent / Five liras for flowers, priceless for remembering / That we live in a city that smells like heaven / That jasmine is not decoration but definition / That we are jasmine people, jasmine city, jasmine souls“

(This is my rough translation from Arabic; the original was far more beautiful, but language and I are imperfect vessels.)

After the reading, Hassan explained his approach: “Damascus poetry has always been flower poetry. The classical poets—Nizar Qabbani, who was from Damascus, wrote constantly about jasmine and Damascus women. Earlier poets, medieval poets, ancient poets—they all used Damascus flowers. I’m just continuing the tradition, but trying to make it contemporary, relevant to current Damascus.”

He pulled out a worn copy of Nizar Qabbani’s poetry, finding verses about Damascus jasmine, about Damascus women being jasmine incarnate, about the city being a jasmine garden where humans happened to live. “This is our tradition,” Hassan said. “Damascus poetry is jasmine poetry. You can’t separate them. To write about Damascus without jasmine would be like describing the sea without mentioning water.”

But Hassan and other contemporary poets also used flowers to address difficult topics—political repression, economic hardship, the tensions building in Syrian society (this was 2010, before the war but with anxiety thickening the air).

Another poet, Rima, read a piece contrasting jasmine’s beauty with political ugliness, using the flower as ironic commentary: “They sell us jasmine while stealing our voices / They perfume our chains with Damascus roses / They tell us we live in paradise / While building our prison walls with flowers“

This critical use of flower imagery—flowers as ironic symbols, beauty as mask for injustice—represented newer currents in Damascus poetry, younger voices questioning whether beauty was enough, whether jasmine could excuse or compensate for other problems.

“I love jasmine,” Rima told me after. “I really do. But I refuse to let flowers distract from reality. Yes, Damascus smells like jasmine. It also smells like corruption, fear, injustice. Both are true. The poetry has to acknowledge both.”

Music: Songs of Damascus Flowers

Damascus had rich musical traditions, and flowers appeared constantly in traditional and contemporary songs. At a traditional music performance at a old khan (caravanserai), I heard songs about jasmine, roses, Damascus gardens, flowers as metaphors for love and loss and longing.

The musicians explained that Damascus music and Damascus flowers were inseparable—traditional songs referenced specific flowers, used flower metaphors understood by Damascus audiences, created moods associated with gardens and courtyards and jasmine evenings.

One song, “Ya Sham” (Oh Damascus), had become something of an unofficial city anthem. Its refrain mentioned jasmine repeatedly, equating the city with the flower, the flower with the beloved, the beloved with home. Every Damascene knew it; singing it together was collective identity assertion, claiming Damascus through shared knowledge of this flower song.

The musicians also performed more recent songs—contemporary Syrian musicians writing about Damascus, continuing the tradition of flower references but with modern musical styles. One song by a Syrian pop musician contrasted Damascus jasmine with exile, singing about missing the jasmine scent, carrying jasmine memories abroad, how diaspora Syrians smelled jasmine and immediately thought of home.

“Music carries Damascus flowers around the world,” one musician told me. “Syrian expatriates, refugees, people who left decades ago—they hear these songs, they remember jasmine, they smell it in their minds. Music makes flowers transportable. We can’t always carry actual jasmine, but we carry jasmine songs, and somehow that’s almost enough.”

Part Seven: The War and After

Before: A City in Bloom

I need to be clear about chronology: Most of what I’ve described happened before the Syrian civil war began in 2011. The Damascus I knew was peaceful—complicated, certainly, politically repressive in ways I sometimes glimpsed, economically struggling, socially tense beneath the surface. But peaceful, functional, beautiful, blooming.

The jasmine still scented evening streets. The courtyard gardens still flourished. The Ghouta still fed Damascus and supplied its flower markets. The flower vendors still called out their wares. People still wore jasmine in their hair without thinking about it. Damascus was still the jasmine city in reality, not just in memory.

I left Damascus in February 2011, planning to return within months. The Arab Spring was beginning—Tunisia, Egypt, protests spreading. Syria seemed tense but stable. I didn’t realize I was witnessing the last months of a Damascus that would soon become impossible to access, impossible to experience, transformed by violence into something different.

My last evening in Damascus, I sat in a cafe near Bab Touma, drinking tea, wearing jasmine I’d just bought, watching the evening ritual of jasmine sellers and families walking and the ordinary beauty of Damascus doing what Damascus did. I photographed nothing—I’d taken thousands of photos already. I just sat, smelled jasmine, watched, tried to memorize the feeling.

The feeling was: peace, beauty, normalcy, a city being itself, flowers as background condition rather than special occurrence. The feeling was: this will always be here, Damascus is eternal, jasmine is permanent, some things don’t change. The feeling was wrong.

During: Gardens in War

I didn’t witness the war directly—I couldn’t return, couldn’t access Damascus once fighting began. But I maintained contact with Damascus friends, followed news obsessively, tracked what happened to the places and people I’d known.

The news was devastating. The Ghouta—Damascus’s garden oasis, source of its flowers and food—became a battlefield. Chemical weapons were used there. The gardens that had fed Damascus for millennia were destroyed. The jasmine farms were shelled. The rose gardens became combat zones.

The old city suffered bombardment. Courtyard houses were damaged or destroyed. The souks burned in some sections. The flower vendors disappeared—some killed, some fled, some simply stopped selling because there were no flowers to sell and no customers to buy them.

Friends sent messages when they could:

“The Ghouta is dying. The gardens are destroyed. I don’t know where Damascus jasmine will come from anymore.”

“We left Damascus. The house is still standing, but the courtyard garden is dead—no water, no care, everything dried up. Our jasmine is gone.”

“I smell jasmine sometimes in Damascus still. Don’t know where it comes from—maybe a survivor plant in some hidden courtyard. But it smells like memory now, like ghost.”

“There are no flowers in the souks. The vendors are gone. Damascus doesn’t smell like jasmine anymore. It smells like smoke and fear.”

These messages broke me in ways news reports didn’t—the personal testimony, the flower-specific grief, the mourning not just for human loss (which was immense, overwhelming, incomprehensible) but also for gardens, for jasmine, for the beauty that had made Damascus livable.

One message particularly haunted me, from Tariq—the lawyer I’d met at the cafe, who’d asked me to remember Damascus’s jasmine evenings:

“You remember your promise? To remember Damascus had peace, had beauty, had jasmine? Keep that promise. Tell people. The Damascus you saw—it existed. We had that. The jasmine bloomed. People were happy. That wasn’t illusion or propaganda. That was real. Whatever happens now, that was real. Remember.”

After: The Return of Jasmine

Damascus survived the war—damaged, traumatized, partially destroyed, but surviving. By 2019-2020, some areas were recovering, rebuilding, trying to return to something resembling normal life.

And remarkably, impossibly, movingly—jasmine returned.

I couldn’t return personally (visa restrictions, political complications, travel dangers), but friends and journalists who did return reported: jasmine growing again in courtyards, vendors selling jasmine in reopened souks, people wearing jasmine in evening walks through partially rebuilt neighborhoods. Not everywhere, not like before, but surviving, persisting, insisting on existence.

Photos appeared online: Damascus gardens being replanted, courtyard fountains running again, roses and jasmine returned to their traditional places. Videos showed flower vendors back at work, selling jasmine to customers who’d survived the war and wanted beauty again, needed beauty again, insisted on beauty despite everything.

“The jasmine never completely stopped,” one Damascus friend told me via video call. “Even during the worst fighting, somewhere in Damascus, jasmine was blooming. Hidden courtyards, protected gardens, places that survived intact. The jasmine was patient. It waited. And when there was space again, possibility again, water again—it came back. Jasmine is stubborn. Like Damascus people. Like Syria. We’re stubborn about beauty.”

This return of flowers—however partial, however fragile—carried enormous symbolic weight. Gardens being replanted meant hope. Jasmine vendors returning meant normal life might be possible again. People buying flowers meant caring about beauty despite trauma, refusing to let war eliminate aesthetic appreciation, insisting that life should include jasmine evenings even after unimaginable suffering.

“We lost so much,” another friend said. “Family, friends, homes, businesses, years of our lives. The Damascus you knew—much of it is gone. But we’re rebuilding gardens. That matters. Maybe it seems trivial when we have so many problems. But gardens say ‘we’re staying, we’re rebuilding, we believe Damascus has future, we’ll make beauty again.’ Gardens are hope made tangible.”

The Diaspora Gardens

The Syrian diaspora—millions of refugees and exiles scattered globally—carried Damascus flowers with them, literally and metaphorically.

Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Europe, and North America tried growing Damascus jasmine where climates allowed. Jasmine cuttings carefully transported, jasmine plants tended in foreign soil, jasmine blooms achieved despite wrong climates and difficult conditions—these became living connections to lost homes, Damascus made portable through flowers.

I connected with Syrian diaspora communities in London, Berlin, Toronto, talking about flowers and memory and loss. Nearly everyone had stories about trying to grow Damascus jasmine abroad, or seeking jasmine scent in markets, or smelling jasmine unexpectedly and being transported instantly to Damascus memories.

“I smell jasmine anywhere—in a park, in a shop, wherever—and immediately I’m back in Damascus,” a Syrian refugee in London told me. “It’s not metaphor. The smell actually transports me. I see my grandmother’s courtyard. I hear the fountain. I feel Damascus evening air. The jasmine makes memory physical, makes the past present for a moment.”

Another Syrian exile in Berlin had created a small Damascus courtyard garden in miniature—a tiny fountain, potted jasmine, roses in containers, attempting to recreate the structure and feeling of Damascus courtyards in a Berlin apartment courtyard. It couldn’t work, really—wrong climate, wrong scale, wrong everything. But it worked emotionally, as memorial, as resistance to forgetting, as insistence that Damascus identity persisted in exile.

“This garden says I’m still Damascene,” she explained. “I may live in Berlin, may never return to Damascus, may die in exile. But I’m still from the jasmine city. This garden is my daily affirmation—I remember, I maintain, I don’t forget who I am.”

Part Eight: What Remains

The Gardens That Survived

Some Damascus gardens survived intact—protected by location, by luck, by determined care. These surviving gardens carried disproportionate importance: they were proof that Damascus garden culture hadn’t died, evidence that the traditions could continue, living links to the city’s pre-war identity.

I saw videos of some surviving courtyards—families returning to find their gardens damaged but alive, jasmine that had survived years without care, roses that kept blooming despite abandonment. The joy in these videos was overwhelming—people crying while touching surviving jasmine, embracing trees that had waited for them, restoring fountains and replanting beds with almost religious devotion.

One video showed a family’s return to their Damascus house after five years away. The courtyard garden had gone wild—unpruned, overgrown, fountain dry, but the jasmine had survived. The woman recording said simply: “Al-yasmin baqiya“—the jasmine remained. And then she cried, and everyone watching probably cried too, because the jasmine remaining meant something remained, meant Damascus could be Damascus again, meant gardens could survive war just as people survived, meant beauty persisted.

These surviving gardens became destinations for Damascus residents still in the city—visiting to see gardens that maintained pre-war beauty, to smell jasmine that connected them to what Damascus had been. The gardens were living museums, preserving and displaying a version of Damascus that war hadn’t destroyed.

“People need to see that some things survived,” a Damascus gardener told a journalist. “Not everything is destroyed. Some gardens still bloom. Some jasmine still grows. That’s hope—real, tangible, fragrant hope. You can visit it, smell it, touch it. That’s more powerful than words about rebuilding or recovery. The garden shows recovery is possible because the garden itself recovered.”

The Knowledge That Survives

Damascus garden culture survived not just in physical gardens but in knowledge—the accumulated expertise of generations of gardeners, the specific techniques for growing Damascus jasmine, the traditional courtyard design principles, the understanding of how to make paradise in difficult conditions.

This knowledge survived in elderly Damascenes who remembered and practiced it, in diaspora Syrians who carried it abroad, in books and documentation, in the muscle memory of gardeners’ hands. As long as this knowledge survived, Damascus gardens could be rebuilt, restored, continued.

I spoke with a landscape architect, Omar, who’d fled Damascus but was documenting traditional garden practices digitally, creating guides and tutorials in Arabic and English, archiving photographs and plans of historic Damascus gardens, interviewing elderly gardeners about their techniques before that knowledge died with them.

“This knowledge is cultural heritage as valuable as ancient architecture,” Omar insisted. “Maybe more valuable, because gardens are alive, changing, requiring active maintenance and expertise. You can restore a building with architects and engineers. But you can only restore a Damascus garden with Damascus garden knowledge—which plants, which arrangements, which techniques for our specific conditions. We have to preserve this knowledge or Damascus gardens die even if the city survives.”

His work felt urgent—a race against time, against death, against forgetting, against the war’s destruction reaching beyond physical spaces to eliminate the cultural knowledge that made Damascus gardens possible.

The Symbolic Weight

Damascus flowers, particularly jasmine, carried symbolic weight far beyond their botanical reality, especially after the war. Jasmine became shorthand for Syria’s loss, for what the war had destroyed, for beauty that might never return.

Syrian activists and artists used jasmine imagery constantly—in protest graphics, in memorials for the dead, in calls for peace, in reminders of what had been lost. Jasmine became almost a brand, a logo, a universal symbol that everyone recognized.

But this symbolic weight was complicated. Some Syrians embraced jasmine as resistance symbol—continuing to grow it, wear it, celebrate it meant refusing to let war eliminate Syrian identity. Others found the jasmine symbolism painful—a reminder of loss, of a Damascus that might never return, of beauty that felt like mockery given current suffering.

“I can’t wear jasmine anymore,” one Syrian woman told me. “It’s too painful. Every jasmine scent reminds me of what we lost—my father who died, my house that was destroyed, my Damascus that’s gone. The jasmine hasn’t changed, but I have. It smells like grief now.”

Others pushed back against the symbolic reduction of Damascus and Syria to jasmine: “We’re not just jasmine,” one activist said. “Syria is complex, diverse, many peoples and traditions and landscapes. Reducing us to jasmine city, jasmine culture—it’s simplistic, orientalist even. We’re more than pretty flowers. We’re people with agency, history, politics, struggles. Don’t reduce us to exotic jasmine fantasy.”

These tensions—between jasmine as resistance and jasmine as pain, between jasmine as identity and jasmine as reduction—revealed how complicated flower symbolism becomes during and after trauma. Flowers don’t solve wars or heal societies. They just grow, offering beauty that can comfort or hurt, remind or erase, connect or divide.

Part Nine: Reflections and Lessons

What Flowers Teach About Loss

Damascus taught me that flowers are peculiarly powerful carriers of memory and loss. Perhaps because they’re temporary—blooming briefly, fading quickly—they model how to hold what can’t be held, how to appreciate beauty knowing it’s dying, how to accept that nothing lasts.

The jasmine I smelled in Damascus exists now only in memory. Those specific flowers—picked at dawn, sold in the souk, worn that evening, faded by morning—are long gone, decomposed, returned to soil. But the experience of them remains, carried in my memory and in these words trying to capture something essentially ineffable.

What flowers teach is that transience doesn’t diminish value—it enhances it. The jasmine’s brief bloom makes it precious. The knowledge that Damascus gardens can be destroyed makes them more meaningful. The flowers’ fragility mirrors human fragility, reminds us that beauty and life are always temporary, always threatened, always worth protecting precisely because they don’t last.

Damascus gardens, before the war, taught me to appreciate beauty as normal, everyday, sustainable. Damascus gardens after the war taught me that beauty is fragile, precious, something that can be lost and must be fought for. Both lessons matter. Beauty should be normal, but it should also be recognized as miraculous.

The Stubbornness of Beauty

But Damascus also taught me that beauty is stubborn, persistent, refusing elimination even when everything argues it should surrender.

The jasmine that survived the war—this wasn’t accident. Jasmine survived because Damascenes protected it, watered it when they had water, cared for it despite everything, refused to let war kill their flowers along with so much else. The gardens that survived survived because people chose beauty over pragmatism, chose to tend flowers when survival demanded focusing elsewhere.

This stubbornness—this refusal to let trauma eliminate aesthetic appreciation, this insistence on maintaining beauty despite rational arguments that beauty is luxury in crisis—might be humanity’s most essential characteristic. We need beauty not as decoration but as life requirement, as the thing that makes survival worth calling living.

The Damascenes replanting gardens amid ruins, buying jasmine amid poverty, insisting on fragrant evenings amid trauma—they’re asserting that beauty matters even when nothing matters, that gardens deserve water even when water is scarce, that jasmine is essential even when everything argues flowers are frivolous.

“Replanting our jasmine was the first thing we did when we returned,” one Damascus family told a journalist. “Before fixing the house properly, before everything else—replant the jasmine. Because without jasmine, what’s the point? The house is just shelter. The jasmine makes it home, makes it Damascus, makes it worth returning to.”

The Responsibility of Memory

Damascus gave me a responsibility I didn’t seek but can’t refuse: the responsibility to remember, to witness, to tell.

The Damascus I knew—peaceful, jasmine-scented, beautiful—exists now in memory more than reality. Much was destroyed. Much has changed. The city survives but transformed, scarred, different. The Damascus of 2010 can’t be recreated, can’t be returned to, exists only in photographs and memories and the minds of those who experienced it.

But memory matters. Bearing witness matters. Saying “this existed, I saw it, people lived this way, this beauty was real”—this matters as counter to narratives that present Syria only as war zone, only as problem, only as place of suffering.

Damascus was jasmine city. Damascus had extraordinary gardens. Damascus people loved beauty, created beauty, maintained beauty across millennia. The war doesn’t erase this reality. The suffering doesn’t invalidate the beauty that existed. Both are true—Damascus was beautiful and Damascus suffered. The beauty doesn’t excuse the suffering; the suffering doesn’t eliminate the beauty. Both must be remembered.

So I write this extended meditation on Damascus flowers partly as elegy, partly as witness testimony, partly as hope that the gardens will recover, the jasmine will bloom as abundantly again, the city will remember how to be itself.

Epilogue: Seeds of Hope

The Jasmine I Carry

I brought jasmine from Damascus—not physical cuttings (customs regulations, plant diseases, practicality) but scent memory so vivid it’s almost tangible. I can summon Damascus jasmine scent at will now, years later. I close my eyes, focus, and I’m there: evening, Damascus, jasmine-saturated air, voices calling “yasmin,” the whole city fragrant with its defining flower.

This scent memory is gift and burden both. Gift because it preserves something beautiful, maintains connection across distance and time and war. Burden because I can smell jasmine anywhere now and immediately think of Damascus, immediately remember beauty that exists now only partially, immediately feel the weight of loss mixed with the joy of remembered beauty.

I smell jasmine in botanical gardens, in markets, in random unexpected locations, and Damascus returns. Not as abstract concept but as sensory reality—the feeling of Damascus evening air, the sound of the fountain in the courtyard, the sight of jasmine garlands in buckets at the souk. The flower makes the past present, makes the distant immediate, makes the lost temporarily recovered.

But this is complicated gift. Because Damascus jasmine smells different elsewhere—the same plant, same flowers, but somehow not the same. The scent is right, but the context is wrong. The jasmine is accurate, but it’s not Damascus. Something essential is missing—maybe the city’s stone and dust, maybe the particular humidity, maybe just the knowledge that you’re in the place where this flower means most, where jasmine isn’t just a plant but an identity.

The Gardens We Build

What I learned from Damascus is that gardens are possibilities, not possessions. Damascus taught me that paradise can be created anywhere humans decide beauty matters enough to work for it—even in desert heat, even amid war, even when everything argues against it.

The Damascenes who built paradise in harsh conditions, who made jasmine city from stones and thorns and determination, who maintained gardens across millennia—they demonstrate that beauty is choice, garden is verb, paradise is action not place.

Now, in my own garden (English, wrong climate, wrong everything for Damascus flowers), I try applying Damascus lessons: Make beauty routine, not special. Choose plants thoughtfully for multiple purposes. Include water features. Create microclimates. Appreciate transience. Accept that nothing lasts. Keep planting anyway.

My garden isn’t Damascus courtyard—it’s too northern, too wet, too different. But it’s informed by Damascus principles, carries Damascus memories, attempts (however imperfectly) to honor Damascus garden culture by continuing it in alien soil.

The jasmine I planted mostly fails—wrong climate, insufficient heat, English winter killing what Damascus summer would nourish. But occasionally, briefly, a few blooms, a whiff of fragrance, a moment of connection across distance and time and impossibility. The jasmine trying to be jasmine despite everything, despite English weather arguing it should surrender, despite every practical reason to quit.

That stubborn blooming feels very Damascus somehow—persistence despite bad conditions, beauty insisting on existence despite rational arguments for giving up, flowers as resistance to circumstances that say flowers are impossible.

The Promise Kept

I return to Tariq’s request: Remember Damascus had peace, had beauty, had jasmine. Tell people that was real.

So here is my witnessing, my promise kept:

Damascus was real. The jasmine city existed. The courtyard gardens bloomed. The evening jasmine sellers called their wares through streets scented with heaven. Families maintained fountains and roses and traditions spanning millennia. The old city’s stone walls hid paradise in miniature. The Ghouta gardens fed Damascus and perfumed it. The Umayyad Mosque’s courtyard roses reminded worshippers that God creates beauty.

This wasn’t propaganda or nostalgia or orientalist fantasy. This was Damascus reality, Damascus normal, Damascus being itself. Complicated reality, certainly—political repression existed alongside jasmine evenings, economic inequality existed alongside democratic beauty, tensions simmered beneath peaceful surfaces. But the jasmine was real. The gardens were real. The beauty was real.

War transformed Damascus but didn’t erase what existed. The jasmine may return fully, or it may not. The gardens may recover, or they may adapt into something different. Damascus may reclaim its title as jasmine city, or that identity may become historical, memorial.

But what existed, existed. The Damascus I knew—jasmine-scented, garden-centered, beauty-insistent Damascus—was real enough that I could spend months learning it, smell it years later in memory, write tens of thousands of words trying to capture something of its particular magic.

And the Damascus that’s recovering, replanting, rebuilding, refusing to let war eliminate beauty permanently—that’s real too. Different from before, scarred, changed, but real. The gardens growing again. The jasmine blooming again. The city remembering how to be itself, how to create paradise despite everything, how to be stubborn about beauty because stubbornness is survival.

The Flowers Remember

Finally: The flowers remember.

The jasmine that blooms in Damascus now descends from jasmine that bloomed in Damascus centuries ago—the same plants, genetically continuous, carrying history in their cells. The roses are roses that survived empires and invasions and occupations and wars. The gardens are gardens that have died and been restored and died and been restored across millennia of Damascus existence.

The flowers are more permanent than humans, more persistent than empires, more stubborn than circumstances. We die; the flowers keep blooming. Cities fall; the gardens recover. War destroys; jasmine regrows.

Maybe that’s the final lesson Damascus flowers teach: Beauty outlasts trauma if we refuse to let it die. Gardens survive if we keep planting. Jasmine returns if we protect a few surviving plants, gather seeds, maintain knowledge, insist that beauty matters even when everything argues against it.

The Damascus I knew is gone, transformed, changed beyond my recognition perhaps. But the jasmine remains. Changed, damaged, reduced, but remaining. And as long as jasmine blooms in Damascus, as long as someone tends a courtyard garden, as long as a single flower vendor sells jasmine in the souk—Damascus lives. Not as it was, but as it is, and as it might yet be.

The flowers remember. We remember. And in remembering, we keep the gardens alive even when we can’t physically tend them, keep jasmine blooming even when we can’t smell it, keep Damascus being Damascus even from far away, through memory and words and stubborn refusal to let beauty die completely.

*This is what remains: a jasmine scent in memory, gardens in recovery, people refusing to surrender beauty, flowers blooming despite everything,and the stubborn insistence that Damascus means jasmine, jasmine means Damascus, and that truth persists regardless of war, distance, loss, or time.*

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Author’s Note:

This is a love letter to a city I knew briefly and imperfectly, written from outside, after everything changed, by someone who has no right to speak for Damascus but feels compelled to witness what I saw.

I visited Damascus multiple times between 2008 and early 2011. The war began in March 2011. Everything I describe from personal experience happened before that rupture. The Damascus I knew—peaceful, accessible to travelers, safe enough to wander alone for hours—no longer exists in that form.

What I’ve written about the war years comes from secondary sources: friends who stayed or fled, journalists who reported, refugees who testified, videos and photographs that documented, and the vast archive of Syrian voices trying to tell their own stories amid unimaginable circumstances. I haven’t witnessed the war directly. I can only witness what came before and try to honor what might come after.

Many identifying details have been changed. Some people are composites. Damascus friends who shared stories with me need protection—speaking to foreign writers about Damascus, even about gardens and flowers, can be dangerous depending on who’s asking and what’s said. I’ve prioritized their safety over documentary precision.

The Damascus I describe exists in three tenses simultaneously:

Past tense: The Damascus of 2008-2011, which I experienced directly, which this entire piece has been attempting to capture and preserve in words.

Present tense: The Damascus of now (as I write this in 2024), recovering, rebuilding, changed, surviving but transformed. A Damascus I haven’t seen but that continues to exist, to bloom, to insist on life.

Future tense: The Damascus that might yet be—fully recovered gardens, restored courtyard houses, jasmine vendors on every corner, the Ghouta blooming again, peace allowing beauty to flourish without interruption. A Damascus that exists in hope and effort and the stubborn gardening of people who refuse to let war write the final chapter.

All three are real. All three matter. The past because it existed, the present because it survives, the future because it’s possible.

For Those Who Visit Damascus

If you go to Damascus someday—if peace and stability allow, if visas become accessible, if circumstances permit—here is what I hope for you:

Seek the surviving gardens. They exist, though you may need local help finding them. The courtyard houses that survived, the gardens being restored, the jasmine that persisted—these are Damascus’s living heart. Ask permission respectfully. Bring gifts. Honor the privilege of witnessing these spaces.

Buy jasmine if vendors are selling it. Support the people maintaining Damascus flower culture. The economics are modest but the symbolic importance is vast. Your purchase says “this matters, this should continue, Damascus identity deserves preservation.”

Sit in courtyards if invited. Listen to fountains. Smell jasmine. Feel the temperature difference between street and courtyard. Understand why Damascenes built gardens—not as luxury but as survival, not as decoration but as definition of what living well means.

Talk to gardeners. They hold knowledge spanning generations. They’ve survived horrors most of us can’t imagine. They chose to restore gardens when they could have chosen many other things. Listen to them. Learn from them. Honor their choices.

Remember the Ghouta. Damascus’s garden heart was the Ghouta. What remains of it now I don’t fully know. But understanding Damascus requires understanding that the city existed because of the agricultural oasis surrounding it, that Damascus flowers came from Damascus gardens, that the relationship between city and Ghouta was symbiotic and essential.

Respect the complexity. Damascus isn’t just jasmine and beauty. It’s also pain, loss, trauma, ongoing difficulty, political complexity, religious diversity, social tensions, and layers upon layers of history both glorious and terrible. The flowers are real, but they’re not the whole story. Beauty exists, but it exists alongside struggle.

Take scent memories seriously. You’ll probably smell jasmine, especially if you visit in late spring or summer. Really smell it. Let it imprint. Scent memory is powerful, enduring, and specific. That jasmine will stay with you, will return unexpectedly, will connect you to Damascus in ways photographs can’t.

Document thoughtfully. Photograph gardens with permission. Record flower vendors with consent. Write about what you see, but write with awareness that your outsider perspective is limited. The real Damascus exists in Damascene experience, not foreign observation. Be humble about what you can know.

Support restoration efforts. If opportunities exist to contribute to garden restoration, historical preservation, cultural maintenance—contribute. Damascus flower culture needs resources, expertise, international support. Even modest help matters.

Remember that beauty survived. Whatever damage you see, whatever destruction remains evident—also notice what survived, what’s recovering, what people are rebuilding. The gardens are resilient. The jasmine is stubborn. The Damascenes are determined. Beauty hasn’t surrendered.

For Syrian Readers

If you’re Syrian—in Syria or in diaspora—reading a foreign writer’s attempt to honor Damascus flower culture, I imagine this is complicated. My perspective is outsider’s perspective, inevitably limited, possibly offensive in ways I can’t see, certainly insufficient.

What I hope I’ve done is witness, not appropriate. Witnessed that Damascus flower culture exists, matters, deserves preservation and continuation. Witnessed that jasmine city wasn’t Western fantasy but Syrian reality. Witnessed that gardens are cultural heritage as valuable as architecture, that flower knowledge is worth preserving, that beauty is resistance.

If I’ve misunderstood anything—and I’ve surely misunderstood much—I apologize. If I’ve romanticized what should be stated plainly, or oversimplified what’s complex, or missed nuances only insiders can grasp—I apologize for that too.

What I witnessed in Damascus changed me profoundly. The garden culture, the jasmine obsession, the courtyard paradises, the democratic beauty, the insistence that life should include flowers as essential rather than luxury—all of this offered a different model for living, for organizing space, for understanding beauty’s relationship to daily life.

I tried to learn humbly. I tried to honor what I saw. I tried to remember when everything changed, when memory became elegy, when the gardens I’d visited became places I’d never see again.

And I hope—against rational assessment, against evidence, against the pessimism current circumstances encourage—I hope the Damascus jasmine blooms abundantly again. Hope the Ghouta recovers. Hope courtyard gardens are restored and maintained. Hope new gardens are created by Syrians who never knew pre-war Damascus but who inherit the garden traditions, learn the flower knowledge, continue the culture.

Hope that Damascus children generations from now will wear jasmine without thinking about it, will grow up in houses with courtyard gardens, will take for granted that their city smells like heaven, will consider flowers as normal as bread, will continue the traditions their ancestors maintained across millennia.

Hope that this long meditation on Damascus flowers, written by an outsider in exile from a place not originally his, somehow serves the culture it attempts to honor.

A Final Scene

It’s evening in Damascus—not now, not yet, but someday, in hope, in future tense.

The sun is setting behind the old city’s minarets, painting the sky orange and pink and purple. The heat that pressed down all day is lifting, releasing the city into comfortable warmth. The fountains in a thousand courtyards are running, their sounds mixing into a collective splash and trickle that becomes Damascus’s heartbeat.

The jasmine vendors are calling their wares, walking through the old city with baskets full of fresh flowers picked at dawn from Ghouta gardens that have recovered, that bloom again, that produce enough jasmine to supply Damascus’s need for beauty.

People are emerging for evening walks—families, couples, groups of friends, elderly men heading to cafes, young women with jasmine in their hair. The flower sellers are doing brisk business. Everyone is buying jasmine—five liras, ten liras, affordable as it should be, democratic as it must be.

The courtyards are open—not to tourists, but to neighbors, to friends, to life. Children are playing beside fountains. Roses are blooming in corners. Lemon trees are perfuming the evening air. The stones hold the day’s heat but the gardens are cool, the microclimates are working, the ancient architecture is doing what it’s always done: making paradise possible in difficult conditions.

The Umayyad Mosque’s courtyard has visitors—some praying, some sitting in contemplation, some just appreciating the roses that bloom there, the beauty that serves worship, the garden that reminds them paradise is possible.

In the souks, beside the spice vendors and fabric sellers and everything else Damascus sells, the flower stalls are full. Not just jasmine but roses, seasonal blooms, plants for courtyard gardens, everything Damascus flora requires. The vendors know their regular customers, greeting them by name, asking about families, participating in the social fabric that makes a souk more than just a market.

And everywhere—in every quarter, every street, every courtyard, every cafe, every shop—the scent of jasmine. So thick it’s visible, almost. So familiar it’s invisible, except to those who remember when it wasn’t here, who remember absence, who remember loss.

Damascus smells like jasmine. Damascus is jasmine city. Damascus is itself again.

This is future tense. This is hope. This is the garden we tend even from far away, even without physical presence, even through memory and words and stubborn refusal to accept that beauty dies permanently.

The flowers remember. Damascus remembers. We remember.

And in remembering, we keep the gardens alive.

For Damascus—the jasmine city, the garden between mountains and desert, the ancient home of beauty and survival, the place that taught me flowers matter, that gardens are resistance, that beauty is stubborn, that paradise can be created anywhere humans decide it should exist.

May your jasmine bloom forever. May your gardens recover fully. May your children know peace. May beauty return as abundantly as memory holds it. May the flowers remember.

Inshallah.

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Acknowledgments

To the Damascenes who shared their city, their gardens, their jasmine, their stories, and their time with a curious foreigner—shukran jazeelan. Thank you for your generosity, your patience with my inadequate Arabic, your willingness to explain and show and teach.

To Damascus itself—the city that gave me jasmine evenings and courtyard paradises and a different understanding of beauty’s purpose—thank you for existing, for surviving, for continuing to bloom despite everything.

To jasmine—the flower that is Damascus and Damascus that is flower—thank you for your stubborn persistence, your democratic beauty, your powerful scent that carries memory across distance and time.

And to readers who’ve stayed with this long meditation on flowers and loss and hope—thank you for witnessing. The gardens need witnesses. The jasmine needs remembering. Damascus needs people who know it was beautiful, is beautiful, will be beautiful again.

Keep the gardens in your memory. Plant jasmine if your climate allows. Support Syrian gardeners and refugees. Remember that beauty matters. Hope that flowers bloom despite everything.

The jasmine city will rise again. The gardens will recover. The beauty will return.

Because Damascus is patient. Damascus is stubborn. Damascus is jasmine.

And jasmine, like all flowers, like all beauty, like all hope—

Blooms.