Roses of Persia, Jasmine of Damascus: A Journey Through Western Asia’s Flower Traditions

Comma Bloom founder’s meditation on flowers, faith, and memory across lands where gardens meant paradise

Prologue: The Rose That Speaks

I arrived in Shiraz on a spring morning when the city smelled like heaven—or what paradise was supposed to smell like, according to every Persian poet who’d ever put pen to paper. The scent came from roses, millions of them, blooming in gardens throughout the city, their fragrance so thick in the air it felt almost visible, like you could reach out and touch the smell itself.

My taxi driver, noticing my distraction as I inhaled deeply, smiled. “You smell our city’s soul,” he said in careful English. “Shiraz is roses. Roses are Shiraz. Same thing, different words.”

He drove me through streets where roses climbed over walls, where vendors sold rosewater from copper vessels, where the morning light caught pink petals on sidewalks. “Hafez wrote about these roses,” he continued. “Sa’adi too. The roses they saw, and the roses you see now—maybe not the same plants, but the same… feeling? The same love?”

That idea—that flowers could carry feeling across centuries, that gardens could transmit memory from the past to the present, that scent could be a form of inheritance—would guide my journey through Western Asia. I would spend nearly a year traveling through Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of Syria (in better times, in memory now), Yemen (in fragments, in stories), and the Arabian Peninsula, learning how flowers function in cultures where a garden is called jannah—the same word as paradise.

This isn’t a botanical survey or a horticultural guide. It’s a travelogue through lands where flowers have been central to poetry, spirituality, trade, identity, and daily life for millennia. Where roses aren’t just roses but living metaphors for divine love, earthly beauty, and the beloved’s cheek. Where a garden isn’t merely a garden but a preview of heaven, a refuge from harsh landscapes, an assertion that beauty can exist anywhere humans will it to exist.

I would learn that Western Asian flower culture is impossible to separate from poetry, impossible to understand without Islam and Sufism, impossible to appreciate without grasping how precious water is, and impossible to fully access as an outsider. But I would try anyway, and in trying, I would find something I hadn’t expected: that flowers here aren’t separate from life but woven into the deepest questions humans ask about love, death, God, and meaning.

Part One: The Rose Gardens of Persia

Shiraz: City of Roses and Poets

I spent my first week in Shiraz visiting gardens—not tourist destinations, though many welcomed visitors, but working gardens where roses had been cultivated for centuries, where rosewater production continued as it had for generations, where the intersection of beauty and utility was assumed rather than questioned.

At the Narenjestan Garden, a Qajar-era estate with geometric pathways and a central pool, I met Reza, an elderly gardener who’d tended roses there for forty years. He spoke no English, but my translator helped us talk while Reza pruned and tied and generally fussed over his charges with the attention a parent gives troublesome children.

“These roses,” he said, gesturing at bushes heavy with pink blooms, “they are gol-e mohammadi—Mohammadi roses, named for the Prophet. They came here centuries ago from Damascus. Or maybe they were always here. Stories change.” He cut a bloom and held it to my face. “Smell. Not just sweet—also complex, yes? Like poetry. Simple words, deep meaning.”

Reza explained that roses in Persian culture carried layers of significance I was only beginning to grasp. In Sufi poetry, the rose represented divine beauty, the beloved (human and divine), spiritual enlightenment, the fleeting nature of earthly existence, and the blood of martyrs. The nightingale’s love for the rose was the soul’s longing for God. The rose garden was heaven on earth. Rose thorns represented the pain of separation from the divine.

“But also,” Reza said pragmatically, “they are flowers. Beautiful flowers that smell good and make excellent rosewater. Persians are not only mystics—we are also practical people who like to make money from our roses.” He smiled. “Both things can be true.”

This doubled vision—roses as spiritual symbols and commercial products, as poetry and pragmatism—would recur constantly. Nothing was only one thing. Everything meant more than it appeared to mean.

The Rosewater Distilleries

Outside Kashan, I visited rosewater distilleries during the harvest season. At dawn, I joined workers picking gol-e mohammadi roses, their hands moving quickly through bushes to gather blooms at peak fragrance.

The distillation process was ancient—copper stills heated over wood fires, rose petals and water boiling together, steam condensed into precious rosewater (golab) that would flavor sweets, perfume mosques, be sprinkled on guests, and generally permeate Iranian life.

“This is not just product,” explained Hassan, whose family had distilled rosewater for six generations. “This is tradition, identity, connection to past. When you taste Persian food with rosewater, you taste history. When you smell it, you smell Iran.”

He let me stand near the still as the first drops of rosewater emerged—clear, intensely fragrant, containing somehow the entire experience of walking through rose gardens on spring mornings. The workers joked and sang as they worked, traditional songs about roses and nightingales and love.

But Hassan also talked about challenges: competition from synthetic rose essence (cheaper, more consistent), younger generations uninterested in continuing the work, water shortages threatening rose cultivation, economic sanctions making export difficult. “The roses still bloom,” he said. “But for how long? And for whom?”

Later, sitting in his courtyard drinking tea flavored with rosewater, Hassan became philosophical: “You know why Persians love roses so much? Because they bloom in spring but die quickly. Because they are beautiful but have thorns. Because they smell like paradise but grow in this difficult land. They are like us—finding beauty in hardship, offering sweetness despite thorns, blooming briefly but intensely. The rose is the Persian soul in flower form.”

Hafez’s Garden: Poetry and Petals

At the tomb of Hafez, Shiraz’s beloved poet, I watched pilgrims touch the marble tomb, recite verses, and place rose petals on the monument. The surrounding garden was itself a kind of poem—geometric pathways, a central pool reflecting the mausoleum, roses blooming everywhere.

I met a young woman, Maryam, a literature student from Tehran, sitting on a bench reading Hafez’s Divan. We talked about how Hafez used flower imagery—the rose as the beloved, the tulip as the martyr’s blood, the jasmine as spiritual purity, the narcissus as the beloved’s eyes.

“Western people, they think Hafez is writing about women and wine,” Maryam said. “Sometimes yes, but also no. He writes in code—the beloved is God, the tavern is spiritual seeking, the wine is divine love, the roses are beauty that reveals the divine. Or maybe sometimes they are just roses. The genius is you can read it both ways.”

She read me a verse in Persian, then translated: “I am a bird of the heavenly garden; I do not belong to this world. For a few days they have made a cage of my body.” She gestured at the roses around us. “The garden—bagh—is paradise, heaven, where we truly belong. These roses are memories of that garden, promises that it exists. When Hafez writes about roses, he writes about the garden we lost and long to return to.”

This theological framework—the garden as paradise lost and promised—was essential to understanding flower culture here. Gardens weren’t merely beautiful; they were jannah, heaven, a preview and reminder of what awaited the faithful. Flowers weren’t decoration; they were evidence that paradise was real.

The Golestan Palace: Imperial Flowers

In Tehran, I spent days at Golestan Palace, the Qajar dynasty’s residence, where flowers appeared everywhere: in tile work, miniature paintings, garden design, architectural details. The Mirror Hall’s ceiling bloomed with painted flowers. The marble throne showed carved roses. The palace gardens featured geometric beds filled with seasonal blooms.

A curator, Dr. Rahimi, walked me through the palace explaining floral symbolism in Persian royal culture. “Flowers showed power,” she said. “A king who could maintain gardens in this climate—bringing water, hiring gardeners, displaying rare flowers—showed he could command nature itself. The garden was a statement: I am powerful enough to create paradise on earth.”

She showed me miniature paintings where rulers sat in idealized gardens, surrounded by impossible arrays of flowers blooming simultaneously—roses, tulips, irises, poppies, all together, all perfect. “Like Dutch flower paintings,” I noted.

“Yes! But older,” Dr. Rahimi said with slight competitive pride. “This tradition of impossible flower arrangements—we did it first. Maybe the Dutch learned from Persian miniatures brought back by traders. Or maybe humans everywhere want to imagine perfect gardens that can’t exist.”

But the flowers also carried specific meanings in the Persian court. Red tulips symbolized martyrdom and sacrifice—Ottoman influence bleeding into Persian culture. White jasmine represented purity and paradise. Roses, always roses, represented everything from earthly love to divine beauty to the perfection of the ruler himself.

“The Qajars loved flowers maybe too much,” Dr. Rahimi said. “While the empire weakened, while foreign powers took advantage, while modernization happened slowly, the shahs painted flowers and built gardens. Beauty as distraction? Or beauty as the point, even when power fades? I’m not sure.”

Part Two: Ottoman Gardens and Turkish Roses

Istanbul: Where Roses Cross Continents

Crossing from Iran into Turkey felt like entering a different register of flower culture—related but distinct, sharing roots but growing in different directions. In Istanbul, that city straddling continents, flowers straddled cultures too.

At the Topkapi Palace, I wandered through the fourth courtyard’s tulip gardens. Tulips here had different resonance than in Holland—these were the tulips that had traveled to Europe in the sixteenth century, that had triggered tulipmania, that the Ottomans had cultivated with obsessive attention.

“The Tulip Era,” explained my guide, Ayşe, referring to the early eighteenth century when Sultan Ahmed III elevated tulip cultivation to imperial obsession. “We had tulip competitions, festivals, gardens filled with specific varieties. The sultan’s gardeners developed hundreds of tulip types. It was… decadent maybe, but also beautiful. An empire in decline producing perfect flowers.”

But Ayşe pointed out that tulips in Ottoman culture carried different meanings than in Persia. “Tulips represented paradise, yes, but also earthly power and beauty. The flower’s shape—like the calligraphy for Allah—made it spiritually significant. Red tulips especially, they symbolized blood, martyrdom, the price of faith. You still see tulip motifs everywhere in Turkey—on tiles, fabrics, logos. It’s Ottoman heritage, Islamic symbolism, and national identity all in one flower.”

The Spice Bazaar: Roses You Can Taste

At Istanbul’s Egyptian Bazaar (the Spice Bazaar), I spent hours talking to vendors selling dried rose petals, rosewater, rose-flavored lokum (Turkish delight), and countless other rose products. The sensory overload was extraordinary—the smell of roses mixing with spices, coffee, dried herbs, competing perfumes.

One vendor, Mehmet, whose family had sold roses and rose products for four generations, gave me an impromptu education in edible flowers. “Turkish cuisine without roses? Impossible,” he said, letting me taste lokum infused with rose. “We put rose in desserts, drinks, some savory dishes. It’s our flavor, our identity. Arab countries do this too, but Turkish rose is different—less intense maybe, more subtle.”

He explained that Turkish rose petals came primarily from the Isparta region, Turkey’s “rose capital,” where Rosa damascena had been cultivated since Ottoman times. “Isparta roses—they make oil for perfume, petals for cooking, rosewater for everything. That whole region smells like roses in spring. It’s like heaven visited earth and decided to stay.”

But Mehmet also talked about changing markets. “Young Turks, they want international flavors—chocolate, vanilla, coffee. Rose seems old-fashioned to them. Tourism keeps rose business alive, but will my children want to continue? I don’t know. Maybe rose is becoming museum culture, not living culture.”

This tension between tradition and modernity appeared constantly in Turkey—a society simultaneously looking to Europe and remembering its Ottoman-Islamic heritage, trying to be both at once, with flowers caught in the middle.

A Turkish Bath: Roses and Ritual

At a historic hamam (bathhouse) in Istanbul, I experienced the Ottoman tradition of rose-scented bathing rituals. After the scrubbing and steaming, the attendant splashed rosewater over me, and the entire space filled with rose fragrance mixing with steam.

“Ottoman sultans, they bathed in rosewater,” the attendant told me. “Probably not true for all sultans, but the story matters. Roses as luxury, as cleanliness, as connection between body and spirit. We wash away dirt, but also bad energy, bad thoughts. The roses purify body and soul together.”

This ritual use of roses—in bathing, in welcome ceremonies (splashing rosewater on guests), in mosques (perfuming prayer spaces), in celebration and mourning—showed how deeply embedded flowers were in daily life. They weren’t special occasion items but basic elements of proper living.

Later, drinking apple tea in the hamam cooling room, wrapped in towels and smelling like roses, I talked with other bathers—Turkish women from various backgrounds. They had complicated feelings about these traditions.

“It’s beautiful,” one woman said. “I love these old customs. But sometimes it feels like performance, like we’re doing it for tourists or for nostalgia, not because it’s real to us. My grandmother, she used rosewater naturally, automatically. For me, it’s a choice, a conscious decision to maintain tradition. That’s different.”

Another disagreed: “Traditions stay alive by choosing them each generation. If we only did what comes naturally, we’d lose everything. Choosing to splash rosewater on guests, choosing to perfume our baths with roses—that’s how traditions survive modernity.”

The Whirling Dervishes: Roses and Mysticism

In Konya, the city of Rumi, I attended a Sema ceremony—the whirling meditation of Sufi dervishes. At the ceremony’s end, as the dervishes stopped spinning, attendants scattered rose petals on them, the petals falling like blessings or snow.

I met afterward with Hasan, one of the dervishes, who explained the symbolism: “The rose is the soul opening to God. The spinning is seeking the divine. The rose petals falling are God’s grace descending. Everything is symbolic, but also real. The roses are actual roses, but they carry meaning beyond themselves.”

He quoted Rumi extensively—Rumi, whose tomb was surrounded by rose gardens, who wrote endlessly about flowers, nightingales, and spiritual longing. “In the Spring, when roses bloom, their fragrance disperses to the East and West. So too the breath of the rose of Spiritual Direction disperses its scent to all humanity.”

“For Sufis,” Hasan explained, “flowers are not decoration. They are teachers. The rose teaches us about opening to divine love. The thorns teach us that love involves pain. The brief bloom teaches us about life’s transience. The fragrance teaches us that beauty spreads beyond its source. Everything in nature is a lesson from God.”

This mystical flower interpretation saturated Western Asian culture in ways that surprised me. It wasn’t fringe belief but mainstream understanding—flowers as spiritual technology, tools for approaching the divine, physical manifestations of metaphysical realities.

Part Three: The Levant—Gardens in Contested Lands

Damascus: The City of Jasmine

In Damascus, before the war transformed everything (I traveled in 2009; what I describe exists now only in memory and hope), jasmine was everywhere. The city had been called “City of Jasmine” for centuries, and the name fit—jasmine climbed walls, perfumed courtyards, was sold in markets, worn in hair, used to scent tea.

I stayed in the old city with a family who maintained a traditional Damascus courtyard house. At night, sitting in their courtyard fountain providing evaporative cooling, the smell of jasmine was so intense it felt hallucinogenic.

“Damascus jasmine—yasmin al-sham—it’s our identity,” explained my host, Omar. “You say Damascus, people think jasmine. You smell jasmine, people think Damascus. They’re the same thing.”

He explained that jasmine in Syrian culture represented purity, love, hospitality, and the city itself. Giving jasmine flowers was declaring affection—romantic or friendly. Jasmine tea was offered to guests as welcome. Women wore jasmine in their hair for special occasions. The fragrance was Damascus distilled into scent.

But jasmine also carried political weight. Omar told me about protests in earlier decades where women wore jasmine to declare peaceful intent, where jasmine became symbol of civil society resisting authoritarianism. “Flowers are never just flowers here,” he said. “They’re always also statements.”

In the souk, I met jasmine sellers threading flowers into garlands and small bouquets. The work required speed—jasmine wilts quickly, especially in Damascus heat. Women bought them for their daughters, men bought them for wives or mothers, families bought them for their homes. The price was nominal—jasmine was meant to be accessible, democratic, everyone’s flower.

Beirut: Roses and Reconstruction

Beirut in 2010 was a city rebuilding itself after decades of war, and flowers played an unexpected role in that reconstruction. Along the rebuilt Corniche, along Hamra Street, in newly restored neighborhoods, flower vendors appeared selling roses, jasmine, and mixed bouquets.

“After war, people need beauty,” explained Samir, a rose vendor near the AUB campus. “Not just need—hungry for it. Flowers say ‘life continues, beauty survives, we’re still human.’ Selling flowers in Beirut now, it’s not just business. It’s hope.”

Samir’s own story was harrowing—displaced multiple times during civil war, family members killed or dispersed, years of survival without stability. He’d started selling flowers five years earlier, after the 2005 Cedar Revolution, when he decided Lebanon needed beauty as much as politics.

“The cedar tree is our symbol—on our flag, our identity,” he said. “But cedars are rare now, endangered. Roses—roses grow anywhere if you try hard enough. Maybe roses should be our real symbol. Survival, adaptation, beauty despite thorns, blooming in difficult soil.”

I noticed his roses were exclusively Lebanese-grown, purchased from growers in the Bekaa Valley. “We could import cheaper roses from Kenya, Ecuador,” Samir said. “But I sell Lebanese roses only. It matters. Supporting Lebanese growers, keeping Lebanese flowers in Lebanese hands—it’s political, even though it’s just flowers.”

At a cafe in Achrafieh, I talked with a landscape architect, Layla, who was working on planting projects in Beirut’s reconstructed downtown. Her goal was creating public gardens that referenced traditional Lebanese garden design while serving modern urban needs.

“Lebanese gardens traditionally meant courtyard gardens—private, family-centered, hidden from the street,” she explained. “But now we need public gardens, shared space, democratic beauty. How do you do that while honoring tradition? I’m figuring it out as I go.”

She showed me plans featuring roses, jasmine, fruit trees, and native Lebanese flowers that had nearly disappeared under development pressure. “Every flower is a choice,” Layla said. “Plant roses—Ottoman heritage, Islamic garden tradition, familiar beauty. Plant native flowers—environmental statement, reclaiming indigenous landscape. Both matter. We need both.”

Jordan: Desert Flowers and Bedouin Traditions

In Jordan, flower culture differed dramatically from the Levantine cities—here, water scarcity made gardens precious, and desert flowers carried their own symbolism.

At a Bedouin camp near Wadi Rum, I learned about desert flowers—short-lived blooms appearing after rare rains, celebrated with disproportionate joy. A guide, Mohammed, showed me dried flowers collected from a spring bloom months earlier.

“When the desert flowers,” he said, “it’s a miracle. Bare rock and sand suddenly covered in color—red, yellow, purple. It lasts maybe two weeks, then gone for maybe years. But we remember. We tell stories about springs when the desert bloomed. It’s how we mark time.”

These desert flowers—rockroses, poppies, irises, species with no English names—weren’t cultivated or bought or sold. They simply appeared when conditions allowed, then vanished until the next unlikely convergence of temperature and rainfall and timing.

“City people, they buy flowers at markets,” Mohammed said with slight disdain. “Desert people, we wait for flowers to give themselves. You can’t force flowers in the desert. You can only hope and remember.”

But even Bedouins had garden culture—cultivated flowers appeared around permanent settlements, in oases, at sites with reliable water. The contrast between desert wildflowers (rare, miraculous, wild) and garden flowers (maintained, reliable, controlled) paralleled the contrast between nomadic and settled life.

In Amman, I visited the city’s modest but carefully maintained public gardens. Here, flower culture felt imported, borrowed from Palestinian traditions and Levantine influences, adapted to Jordan’s specific conditions and identities.

A gardener, Tariq, explained the challenges: limited water, harsh sun, political instability affecting tourism and funding. “But we still plant roses,” he said. “We still create gardens. Because what’s the alternative? Giving up on beauty? That’s letting the desert win not just the land but our souls.”

Part Four: The Arabian Peninsula—Luxury and Tradition

Dubai: Buying Paradise

Dubai represented the extreme end of Western Asian flower culture—flowers as luxury statement, as evidence of wealth, as triumph over nature through sheer expenditure.

At the Dubai Miracle Garden, I walked through a surreal landscape of flowers arranged in massive displays: hearts, castles, an airplane covered entirely in petunias. The quantities were staggering—over 150 million flowers, replaced seasonally, all requiring constant irrigation in one of earth’s hottest, driest climates.

It was impressive and appalling in equal measure. The environmental cost of maintaining such displays in the desert seemed almost obscene. Yet visitors loved it—selfie opportunities everywhere, families delighted by the floral excess, tourists marveling at the audacity.

“Dubai does everything big,” my Emirati guide, Rashid, said with evident pride mixed with slight embarrassment. “The tallest building, the biggest mall, the most flowers. It’s showing the world we can do anything. Does it need to exist? Maybe not. But it shows we have power, money, vision.”

At Dubai’s flower markets, vendors sold imported roses, orchids, and elaborate arrangements at prices that would shock markets elsewhere in Western Asia. The clientele was wealthy locals, expatriates, hotels and event planners buying in bulk.

“Flowers here are status,” explained an Indian flower seller who’d worked in Dubai for fifteen years. “You give big arrangement, expensive flowers, you show respect, show you spent money on the gift. It’s not about the flowers themselves—it’s about the cost. Very different from my village in Kerala, where people grow their own flowers for festivals.”

Saudi Arabia: Roses in the Kingdom

Gaining access to flower culture in Saudi Arabia was challenging for a Western traveler, but through careful contacts and persistence, I managed conversations with several people involved in Saudi flower cultivation and trade.

The Kingdom was investing heavily in flower production—greenhouses in Riyadh’s outskirts, flower farms near Jeddah, government-subsidized projects trying to develop domestic flower industry. The goal was reducing dependence on imports and creating employment.

But flowers in Saudi culture carried specific Islamic sensibilities. A florist in Jeddah, Ahmed, explained: “We can’t show romantic imagery—no pictures of couples, no Valentine’s marketing with hearts and romance. But people still want to express love, give beautiful gifts. So flowers become more important—they express feelings without violating conservative values.”

Roses dominated the market—culturally acceptable, scripturally approved, practically useful. The Prophet Muhammad was reported to have loved fragrance, to have worn rose perfume, making roses particularly appropriate in Saudi Islamic culture.

Women I spoke with (with appropriate intermediaries and settings) explained how flowers functioned in heavily gender-segregated society. Women’s spaces—homes, women’s sections of weddings, private gatherings—featured elaborate flower decorations invisible to men. “Our beauty is for ourselves and other women,” one woman explained. “We decorate elaborately, use flowers extensively, but privately. It’s our world.”

The contrast with Dubai was sharp—both Gulf societies, both wealthy from oil, but with completely different flower cultures reflecting different social values and religious interpretations.

Oman: Frankincense and Roses

Oman offered a different Gulf perspective—more traditional, less ostentatious, with flower culture connected to deep historical trade routes.

In Salalah, famous for frankincense, I learned how flowers intersected with Oman’s incense trade. Roses weren’t just beautiful or fragrant—they were commodities, like frankincense, that could be distilled, dried, traded, exported.

“Oman has been trading in scent for thousands of years,” explained a merchant in Salalah’s traditional souk. “Frankincense, myrrh, rose oil, jasmine essence. We understand that scent carries value, crosses borders, survives journeys. Flowers are part of that tradition—beauty that becomes trade good.”

The Omani relationship with flowers felt more integrated, less conflicted than elsewhere on the Peninsula. Gardens featured native drought-tolerant flowers alongside imported roses. Public spaces used flowers moderately, tastefully, without Dubai’s excess but without Saudi austerity either.

“We’re trying to be ourselves,” said Fatima, a landscape architect working in Muscat. “Not copying Dubai’s luxury, not copying Saudi conservatism, not copying Western models. Using flowers in ways that make sense for Omani climate, culture, identity. It’s a balance.”

Part Five: Yemen—Gardens in Memory

Sanaa: The Disappeared Gardens

I visited Yemen in 2011, months before the civil war would destroy so much. What I saw exists now primarily in memory, photographs, and hope.

Sanaa’s old city featured spectacular traditional houses with gardens hidden inside—courtyard gardens with roses, jasmine, qat plants (complicated topic), and fountains providing cooling and beauty. From the street, these houses looked austere. Inside, they were green paradises.

A guide, Ali, showed me several traditional houses whose owners allowed visitors. The contrasts were stunning—harsh, arid mountains surrounding the city, brutal sun and heat, then these hidden gardens where water, carefully managed, created luxuriant beauty.

“In Yemen, a garden is a secret,” Ali explained. “You don’t display it to everyone. It’s for family, for honored guests, for private life. The garden is what you protect and preserve even when everything outside is difficult.”

This privacy principle resonated throughout Yemeni flower culture. Flowers weren’t public displays but intimate experiences. Women tended gardens largely invisible to non-family men. Flowers appeared at weddings and celebrations in family settings, not in public spaces.

The flowers themselves were adapted to Yemeni conditions—roses that tolerated heat and drought, jasmine that thrived in courtyard microclimates, herbs that served multiple purposes. Every flower had to justify its water use through beauty or utility or (ideally) both.

The Last Garden

The most memorable garden I visited in Yemen was one whose location and owner I’ll keep private. An elderly woman—I’ll call her Fatima though that wasn’t her name—maintained a traditional Sanaa courtyard garden that her family had tended for generations.

She spoke through translation, showing me roses her grandmother had planted, jasmine that had survived decades, a ancient pomegranate tree that still fruited. The garden was small—maybe 20 square meters—but intensely cultivated, every centimeter used thoughtfully.

“This garden is my life,” Fatima said simply. “When my husband died, I had this. When my sons left for work, I had this. When there was violence in the streets, I had this. The garden doesn’t stop because of politics or war or death. The roses still bloom. The jasmine still smells sweet. That’s… important. You understand?”

I did understand, or thought I did. In a country facing increasing instability, increasing hardship, where the future looked darker each year, this small garden represented continuity, persistence, the possibility of beauty despite everything.

When I left Yemen weeks later, I photographed that garden extensively, somehow sensing I might never see it again. I was right. The civil war destroyed much of old Sanaa. I don’t know if that garden survived. I don’t know if Fatima survived. The uncertainty haunts me.

Those photographs feel now like archaeological records of a disappeared world—a Yemen where gardens still bloomed, where old women still tended roses their grandmothers planted, where private beauty could exist peacefully even as public life grew troubled.

Part Six: The Poetry of Flowers

Reading Rumi in Rose Gardens

Throughout Western Asia, I carried poetry—Rumi, Hafez, Sa’adi, Omar Khayyam, countless others. Reading them in situ, in actual rose gardens or jasmine-scented courtyards, transformed abstract verses into physical experience.

Rumi’s “The roses are laughing at our feet, come, come!” became real in Konya’s rose gardens. Hafez’s endless nightingale-and-rose imagery made visceral sense in Shiraz. Sa’adi’s “Gulistan” (Rose Garden) revealed itself as both metaphor and instruction manual for actual garden design.

These poets weren’t writing about flowers abstractly—they lived in garden cultures, knew actual roses and nightingales, worked their observations of nature into spiritual metaphysics. The flowers were simultaneously real plants and spiritual symbols, physical beauty and metaphysical meaning.

A literature professor in Tehran, Dr. Hosseini, spent an afternoon helping me understand this doubled vision. “Western readers often think Persian poetry is pure symbolism—the rose ‘really’ means something else, not actually a flower. But no—it’s both. Always both. A rose is a rose is a rose, but it’s also God’s beauty, the beloved’s face, the transience of life, the pain of love. The literal and symbolic don’t contradict—they reinforce each other.”

She explained that this worldview, where everything physical pointed to metaphysical realities, saturated Islamic culture generally and Persian culture specifically. Flowers weren’t reduced to symbols—they were elevated to carrying multiple simultaneous meanings without losing their flower-ness.

“When Hafez writes ‘Last night I dreamed angels were gathered at the tavern door casting lots with dice, and the pearl of my soul was the stake,’” Dr. Hosseini said, “you could read this as spiritual seeking, as divine love, as mystical experience. But you could also read it literally—he’s at a tavern, gambling, maybe drunk, maybe in love with an actual person. Both readings are valid. That’s genius—poetry that works on every level simultaneously.”

Contemporary Poets: New Voices

I also sought out contemporary poets writing about flowers in Western Asian contexts—how flower symbolism evolved, changed, adapted to modernity, or consciously resisted change.

A young Iranian poet, Mina, showed me her work—poems that used traditional flower imagery but subverted it. Roses with thorns that drew real blood, not metaphorical pain. Nightingales that ignored roses to sing about pollution. Gardens that were dying from neglect and climate change.

“I love Hafez, I love the tradition,” Mina said. “But I can’t write as if nothing has changed. Tehran’s air is poison. The gardens are disappearing. The roses still bloom, yes, but for how long? My poetry has to acknowledge what’s actually happening, not just repeat beautiful lies.”

Other poets took different approaches. Some maintained traditional forms and imagery precisely because those traditions were threatened. Others borrowed Western flower symbolism—roses meaning romance in simple, non-mystical ways, flowers as personal rather than universal symbols.

“Persian culture is schizophrenic right now,” a Turkish poet in Istanbul told me. “Trying to be modern and traditional, Western and Islamic, open and closed, all at once. The poets reflect that—some preserving the past, some embracing the new, most stuck somewhere in between, like all of us.”

Part Seven: Women and Flowers

The Hidden Gardens

One aspect of Western Asian flower culture remained partially inaccessible to me as a male traveler: women’s gardens, women’s flower practices, the ways flowers functioned in women’s spaces I couldn’t easily enter.

But through female translators, through women willing to talk with appropriate intermediaries present, through glimpses and fragments, I learned something of this hidden world.

In Iran, women’s gatherings—tea parties, celebrations, religious observances—featured elaborate flower decorations that men rarely saw. Women spent hours arranging flowers for these events, using skills passed from mothers to daughters, creating beauty for each other rather than male observers.

“My mother could make flowers do anything,” a woman in Isfahan told me. “Arrangements that looked like they grew naturally but were completely designed, every stem placed exactly. She learned from her mother, who learned from hers. But now? My daughter lives in Tehran, works in an office, doesn’t have time for flower arranging. The skill dies with my generation.”

This lamentation appeared repeatedly—traditional women’s crafts, including sophisticated flower arrangement and garden tending, disappearing as women entered workforce, moved to cities, adopted different lifestyles. Pride in women’s liberation mixed with grief for lost traditions.

Flowers and Resistance

But flowers in women’s hands also meant protest, resistance, claiming public space.

In Iran, women wearing flowers in hair or carrying flowers during protests made statements—beauty as resistance, femininity as defiance, flowers as symbolic of freedom and life against authoritarian restriction. Green Movement protesters in 2009 carried flowers as peaceful symbols.

In Lebanon and Palestine, women participated in protests where flowers replaced weapons—handing roses to soldiers, placing flowers in gun barrels, using beauty to shame violence. The images became iconic.

“Flowers are complicated for us,” a Lebanese activist told me. “Traditional symbol of women as delicate, decorative, passive. But also powerful symbol—life against death, beauty against violence, softness against hardness. We reclaim flowers not by rejecting them but by giving them new meanings while keeping old resonance.”

This dual consciousness—honoring feminine traditions while critiquing patriarchal limitations, using traditional symbols for radical purposes—appeared throughout my conversations with women about flowers. Nothing was simple. Everything carried contested meanings.

Wedding Flowers: Tradition and Change

Weddings throughout Western Asia featured flowers prominently, but practices varied dramatically by country, religion, class, and individual choice.

Traditional Persian weddings used specific flowers on the sofreh aghd—the ceremonial spread including honey, eggs, candles, mirror, and flowers (usually roses). Each element carried symbolic meaning, and the flowers represented earthly beauty and marital joy.

Arab weddings varied widely—Gulf weddings often featured imported flowers in massive quantities, ostentatious displays of wealth. Levantine weddings mixed local flowers like jasmine and roses with imported orchids and lilies. Turkish weddings blended Ottoman traditions with modern Western influences.

I attended a modest wedding in a small Iranian town where the family grew their own roses for the ceremony. The bride’s mother had tended these roses for months, selecting the best blooms for her daughter’s sofreh aghd. The intimacy—flowers grown with love rather than purchased—transformed the symbolism.

“These roses are from my mother’s hands,” the bride told me through a translator. “Every time I saw her in the garden, I knew she was thinking of my wedding. Now when I see these flowers, I’ll remember her love. That’s what flowers should be—not just decoration but memory, connection.”

But at a wealthy wedding in Tehran, flowers came from a high-end florist—imported roses, exotic orchids, elaborate centerpieces that cost more than most Iranians earned in months. The display was stunning but impersonal, Instagram-ready but lacking the intimate connection of the small-town wedding.

“We’re losing something,” an older wedding guest told me quietly. “When flowers become just about display, about showing wealth, about competing with other weddings—we lose the meaning. My generation still remembers when flowers were personal, meaningful. Young people just want impressive displays.”

But young people pushed back on this critique. “Why shouldn’t we have beautiful weddings?” a young bride in Beirut asked. “Why is it better to suffer and scrimp? If we can afford beautiful flowers, why not enjoy them? Maybe meaning isn’t less just because it’s also beautiful and expensive.”

Part Eight: The Garden as Paradise

Islamic Garden Design

To understand flower culture in Western Asia, I needed to understand jannah—paradise—and how Islamic garden design attempted to create earthly previews of heaven.

At the Alhambra in Granada, Spain (technically outside Western Asia but deeply connected to Islamic garden tradition), I studied the principles that had spread from Persia through the Islamic world: geometric design, water features, shade and fruit trees, flowers chosen for fragrance and beauty, enclosed spaces creating privacy and intimacy.

These principles appeared throughout Western Asia—in Istanbul’s palace gardens, Isfahan’s historic gardens, Damascus courtyards, Persian chahar bagh (four-part gardens). The design language was remarkably consistent: geometry representing divine order, water representing life and abundance, plants representing earth’s bounty.

“Islamic gardens are paradise made touchable,” explained a landscape architect in Isfahan. “In the Quran, paradise has flowing water, shade, fruits, beauty. We create gardens that offer those things here, now. They’re not decorative—they’re theological statements. We can have heaven on earth if we design it correctly.”

The flowers in these gardens weren’t random but carefully selected. Roses for beauty and fragrance, jasmine for purity and scent, fruit blossoms for beauty and productivity, flowers that attracted nightingales (themselves symbolic of souls seeking God). Everything served multiple purposes—aesthetic, practical, spiritual.

But modern pressures threatened this tradition. Urban development destroyed historic gardens. Water scarcity made traditional garden designs unsustainable. Younger generations preferred different aesthetics—lawns, non-native plants, Western garden styles.

“We’re losing the garden as paradise concept,” a preservationist in Turkey told me sadly. “Now gardens are just landscaping—pretty but meaningless. We’ve forgotten that gardens are supposed to remind us of heaven, to teach us about divine beauty, to be spiritual practice made physical.”

The Courtyard: Private Paradise

The traditional courtyard house—common from Morocco to Afghanistan—placed gardens at the center of domestic life. These weren’t viewed from outside but lived within, creating private paradises hidden from public view.

I visited numerous courtyard houses in various stages of preservation, modernization, or decay. The best-preserved showed how powerfully effective the design was: hot, dusty streets giving way to cool, fragrant courtyards with fountains and flowers. The transformation felt miraculous.

“The courtyard garden is Islamic architecture’s greatest achievement,” claimed a Syrian architect I met (he’d fled Damascus after the war began). “It creates paradise in miniature—private, protected, beautiful. The outside world can be chaos, violence, heat. Inside your courtyard, you have peace, water, flowers. That’s what we’re losing as we adopt Western apartment buildings. We’re losing our private paradises.”

But courtyard houses required wealth, space, water—increasingly unavailable to most people. Modern housing meant apartments, apartments meant no courtyards, no courtyards meant no private gardens. Flowers became potted plants on balconies, a diminishment of the traditional garden culture.

“My grandmother’s house in old Damascus had a courtyard with jasmine and roses,” a young Syrian woman in Beirut told me. “That house is destroyed now. I live in an apartment. I have two pots of herbs on my balcony. It’s not the same. I can’t give my daughter that experience of a courtyard garden. That world is gone.”

Cemetery Gardens: Death and Flowers

Western Asian cemeteries offered yet another window into flower culture—how death and gardens intersected, how flowers mediated between living and dead.

Islamic tradition generally discouraged elaborate grave decoration, preferring simple markers. But practice varied widely. In Turkey, I saw graves planted with roses. In Iran, graves covered with flowers on anniversaries. In Lebanon, Christian cemeteries featured elaborate floral displays while Muslim sections remained simpler.

“Islam says graves should be humble,” explained a cemetery keeper in Isfahan. “But people still want beauty, still want to honor their dead with flowers. We find compromises—not permanent plantings but fresh flowers brought regularly. The flowers die, are removed, new flowers come. Like life, like memory.”

I spent an afternoon in a cemetery on the outskirts of Tehran, watching families tend graves. An elderly man was planting roses at his wife’s grave, working carefully despite obvious arthritis. When I asked (through my translator) why he planted roses specifically, he quoted poetry—of course he did, this was Iran.

“Sa’adi wrote, ‘I am the servant of the rose; such thorny occupation suits me well,’” he recited. “My wife loved roses. I plant them for her, tend them for her. When they bloom, I imagine she sees them, she knows I remember. Maybe that’s foolish—she’s dead, the roses are just flowers. But maybe foolish things are what make grief bearable.”

This intersection of poetry, roses, death, and enduring love felt quintessentially Persian—transforming grief into garden work, maintaining connection through flowers, using beauty to make mortality meaningful.

Part Nine: Trade and Economics

The Flower Markets

Western Asia’s traditional flower markets—souks and bazaars where flowers appeared alongside spices, fabrics, and food—operated according to ancient patterns largely untouched by modern retail.

In Tehran’s bazaar, flower vendors clustered in specific sections, their stalls overflowing with roses, carnations, lilies, and seasonal blooms. The commerce was straightforward—vendors bought from growers early morning, sold to customers throughout the day, went home when flowers sold out or wilted.

“This is old business,” a vendor named Abbas told me. “My father sold flowers here, his father before him. Same spot, same methods, same flowers mostly. Cell phones and computers don’t change flowers—they still bloom, wilt, need water, smell sweet. Modern world hasn’t touched this corner of the bazaar.”

But that was changing. Younger vendors used social media to advertise. Some offered delivery services. A few experimented with non-traditional flowers—succulents, exotic imports, Western arrangement styles. The tension between tradition and innovation played out in the flower market as everywhere else.

“My son wants to sell flowers online,” Abbas said. “Build a website, take orders on phone, deliver anywhere in Tehran. Maybe he’s right—young people don’t come to bazaar like before. But something is lost when you don’t see the flowers before buying, don’t smell them, don’t negotiate price face to face. Buying flowers should be experience, not transaction.”

The Rose Oil Trade

Rose oil production—primarily in Iran and Turkey—represented Western Asia’s most economically significant flower industry. High-quality rose oil commanded astronomical prices in international perfume markets.

In Isparta, Turkey’s rose capital, I visited production facilities and talked with growers about the economics. The numbers were sobering: it took roughly 4,000 kilograms of rose petals to produce one kilogram of rose oil. A single kilogram might sell for $10,000 or more. The waste was enormous; the profit margins were thin for growers.

“We’re price-takers, not price-makers,” a Turkish grower explained. “International perfume companies set prices. We accept or we don’t sell. Most money goes to French perfume houses—they buy our rose oil, make expensive perfumes, sell them for huge profits. We get small share. It’s exploitation, but what choice do we have?”

Iranian rose oil faced additional challenges from sanctions, making export difficult and payment problematic. Some Iranian producers had turned to domestic markets—rosewater for cooking and cosmetics—but volumes and prices couldn’t match international perfume sales.

“Sanctions kill our rose oil business,” a Kashan producer told me bitterly. “We have the best roses, the best oil, but we can’t sell to international markets. So it stays in Iran, sells for fraction of value. Our roses are prisoners, like us.”

This politicization of flowers—sanctions, trade barriers, international tensions affecting rose oil commerce—showed how even beauty became entangled with power and politics.

Dubai’s Flower Imports

Dubai’s massive flower consumption required equally massive imports—roses from Kenya and Ecuador, orchids from Thailand, tulips from Holland, lilies from countless sources. The logistics were impressive: refrigerated air cargo, rapid customs clearance, distribution to hotels and flower shops within hours of arrival.

“We import almost everything,” explained a flower importer at Dubai’s flower market. “UAE doesn’t have climate for most flowers, and producing them here would cost too much. Cheaper to fly them from Africa or South America than grow them locally. Economics don’t care about local culture or tradition.”

The disconnect was sharp—Western Asian culture with thousands of years of rose cultivation and garden tradition, but the most visible flower consumption happening in Dubai through completely globalized, disconnected-from-tradition supply chains.

“Gulf states have more money than history,” a Lebanese florist working in Dubai told me. “They can buy anything, but they can’t buy meaning. The flowers here are expensive and impressive, but they don’t mean anything. They’re just wealth display. That’s not flower culture—that’s consumption culture.”

Part Ten: Environmental Realities

Water and Gardens

The elephant in every garden: water. Western Asia’s flower cultures developed in water-scarce environments, making gardens precious and constantly threatened.

In Isfahan, I met with water management experts who explained how historic Persian gardens used qanat systems—underground channels bringing water from distant sources. These engineering marvels allowed gardens in impossible locations, but many qanats were failing now, dried up or poorly maintained.

“Climate change is killing our gardens,” Dr. Karimi, a hydrologist, told me bluntly. “Less snowfall, earlier snowmelt, longer droughts. The water systems that supported gardens for centuries don’t work anymore. Isfahan’s rivers run dry. We have to choose—water for gardens or water for drinking and agriculture. Gardens lose.”

The Zayandeh River in Isfahan, which once flowed reliably through the city, now ran dry most of the year. The famous bridges that once spanned water now spanned dust. The riverside gardens were dying or had already died, replaced by dusty, sad remnants.

“My grandfather told stories about swimming in this river,” a young Isfahan resident said, gesturing at the dry riverbed. “I’ve never seen water here. The gardens he described—they’re fairy tales to me, impossible to imagine. How do you maintain garden culture when there’s no water for gardens?”

Throughout Western Asia, this crisis replayed: Turkish rose growers facing water restrictions, Jordanian public gardens struggling with severe drought, Lebanese gardens impacted by infrastructure failures, Iranian gardens watching ancient trees die from thirst.

The Future of Gardens

Climate change, water scarcity, urbanization, political instability—the forces threatening Western Asian flower culture were formidable. Yet people persisted in planting, tending, trying.

“We will always have gardens,” insisted a young Iranian landscape architect. “Maybe different gardens—drought-tolerant plants, native species, less water-intensive designs. But the garden as concept, as paradise, as essential to our identity—that doesn’t disappear. We adapt or die, and we prefer adapting.”

New approaches included xeriscaping with native flowers, drip irrigation systems, greywater recycling, choosing plants adapted to changing conditions. Some abandoned European-style lawns for traditional courtyard designs requiring less water.

“The irony,” noted an environmental architect in Beirut, “is that traditional Islamic garden design was already sustainable. Efficient water use, native plants, providing cooling through design rather than air conditioning. We adopted Western garden styles that don’t fit our climate, and now we’re rediscovering that traditional designs were better all along.”

But rediscovering tradition while addressing modern challenges required more than nostalgia. It required innovation, investment, political stability, and collective will—all in short supply.

Part Eleven: Personal Encounters

Tea with Roses

In Shiraz, I was invited to a family home for afternoon tea—a traditional Persian experience that involved elaborate hospitality and, inevitably, roses.

The family laid out sweets, fresh fruit, nuts, and tea flavored with rosewater. We sat in their courtyard garden, roses blooming on trellises, the fountain providing cooling sound and moisture. The conversation wandered through politics (carefully), family stories, poetry (of course), and flowers.

The grandmother, who spoke no English, communicated through her daughter’s translation and through her flowers—bringing me roses to smell, pointing out specific varieties, showing me how to properly appreciate their fragrance (cup the bloom gently, inhale slowly, exhale away from the flower).

“My mother says roses are the language when words fail,” her daughter translated. “She says you can’t understand Persians until you understand why we love roses. Not just beauty—devotion. We tend roses like we tend relationships, family, traditions. Carefully, with love, accepting thorns as part of the beauty.”

When I left, the grandmother presented me with a small bottle of rosewater, homemade, from her garden’s roses. “She wants you to remember Shiraz,” her daughter said. “When you taste this in your tea, remember our garden, our roses, our conversation. That’s what rosewater is for—carrying memory through scent and taste.”

The Last Gardener

In a small town outside Damascus (before the war), I met an elderly gardener—again, I’ll protect his identity—who maintained an ancient garden attached to a mosque. He’d been the garden’s keeper for fifty years, following his father, following his grandfather.

The garden was modest but exquisite: geometric beds of roses and jasmine, a central fountain, fruit trees providing shade, the whole space enclosed by old stone walls. It felt timeless, peaceful, outside history.

“This garden is 400 years old,” he told me through translation. “Maybe older—records are unclear. But roses have bloomed here for centuries. Pilgrims came, prayed, sat in this garden. Conquerors came, fought, destroyed much, but the garden survived. Gardens survive when buildings fall.”

He showed me his work—pruning roses, adjusting irrigation, removing weeds, all done with the attention of someone for whom this wasn’t merely work but vocation, almost priesthood.

“I am Muslim, the garden is Islamic, but gardens are for everyone,” he said. “Christians come here, Jews came here (before they left Syria), atheists, believers, everyone. The garden doesn’t ask what you believe. It offers beauty, peace, shade. That’s enough.”

I asked about the future—who would maintain the garden when he couldn’t anymore?

He shrugged, a gesture of resignation and hope mixed together. “God will provide. Someone will care. If not—” He gestured at the roses. “The roses will go wild, the garden will change, but something will survive. Gardens are patient. They wait.”

I think about that garden now, during Syria’s ongoing tragedy. Did it survive? Did he survive? I have no way of knowing. But I hold the faith he expressed: gardens are patient, something survives, beauty persists even when humans fail it.

The Flower Girl

In Beirut, near the Corniche, a young girl—maybe eight years old—sold small jasmine bouquets to passersby. She worked with her grandmother, who sat on a folding chair while the girl approached potential customers with a mix of shyness and determination.

I bought jasmine from them several times, and slowly conversation developed. They were Palestinian refugees, living in Beirut since 1982. The girl’s mother worked cleaning houses; the father had died. Selling jasmine supplemented the family’s meager income.

“I like flowers,” the girl told me in careful English. “They smell good, they’re pretty. People are happy when they buy them. I make them happy.”

Her grandmother, speaking through a mix of Arabic and gestures, explained that in their village in Palestine (now unreachable, destroyed, or forbidden—the details were unclear), jasmine grew everywhere. They’d brought seeds when they fled, planted them in Beirut, and now those jasmine plants provided both income and connection to a lost home.

“These jasmine,” the grandmother said through my translator, “they’re Palestinian jasmine. From Palestine, surviving in Lebanon. Like us—displaced but surviving, making beauty even in difficult situations. The jasmine remember Palestine even if the world forgets.”

That simple formulation—flowers as carriers of displacement, memory, persistence—haunted me. These refugees couldn’t return home, but they’d brought home with them in jasmine seeds. They sold memory and loss and survival disguised as fragrant flowers.

The Sufi Garden Keeper

In Konya, at a Sufi lodge attached to a shrine, I met a garden keeper who practiced Sufism and saw his garden work as spiritual discipline.

“Every flower teaches,” he explained. “The rose teaches about opening to love. The thorn teaches about pain accompanying beauty. The brief bloom teaches about death and transience. Tending the garden is meditation, prayer, spiritual practice. I’m not just maintaining plants—I’m maintaining connection to divine through God’s creation.”

He took me through his garden explaining the symbolism: forty roses (symbolic number in Sufism), arranged in geometric patterns referencing Islamic sacred geometry, water channels dividing space into four (four rivers of paradise), specific flowers chosen for their mentions in Sufi poetry.

“Western people come here and see pretty garden,” he said. “But this garden is text, like Quran or Rumi’s poetry. You have to know how to read it. Each flower, each arrangement, each element communicates spiritual meaning to those who understand.”

I asked if the garden’s spiritual meaning was diminished when people didn’t understand it.

“No,” he said definitely. “Beauty works on all levels. Someone who knows nothing about Sufism still experiences peace, still feels something. The spiritual meaning enhances but doesn’t replace the aesthetic experience. God’s beauty speaks to everyone, whether they understand the theological details or not.”

Part Twelve: Departures and Returns

Leaving Iran

I left Iran from the same Shiraz airport where my journey had begun, having come full circle. The city still smelled like roses—would always smell like roses, probably, unless climate change or political catastrophe eliminated them entirely.

At a garden cafe near Hafez’s tomb, I spent my last Iranian afternoon reviewing notes, photographs, and memories. An elderly man at the next table noticed my notebook and asked what I was writing.

“About flowers,” I said through my translator. “About Persian garden culture.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding sagely. “You understand, then. We are a civilization of gardens. When conquerors destroyed our cities, we built new ones. When disasters came, we survived. But always, we kept our gardens. Gardens are not decoration—they’re our answer to the question ‘Why should life be worth living?’ Our gardens say: life should be worth living because beauty exists, because roses bloom, because we can create paradise however small.”

He paused, then added: “The world thinks Persians are—what? Oil, politics, problems. But we are garden makers, rose growers, poetry lovers. Remember that. Tell people that.”

I promised I would, and I’m keeping that promise now.

A Turkish Garden Party

In Istanbul, friends threw a farewell gathering in a garden restaurant overlooking the Bosphorus. The garden was traditionally Turkish—roses, jasmine, grapevines overhead, water features, geometric beds—but also modern, with contemporary furniture and international cuisine.

The mix felt appropriate: Turkey’s eternal tension between tradition and modernity, East and West, Ottoman heritage and European aspiration, all played out in a garden party where roses met cocktails and traditional music mixed with contemporary pop.

“This is us,” said my friend Ayşe, gesturing at the scene. “Not one thing or the other, but both. The roses are Ottoman, the wine is French, the music is Turkish, the conversation is in three languages. That’s modern Turkey—everything all at once.”

We talked about flower culture’s future in Turkey. Opinions varied: some thought traditional garden culture was dying, others believed it was adapting and surviving, others didn’t care much either way.

“I love roses,” Ayşe said. “But I love them as flowers, not as symbols or traditions or national identity markers. They’re just beautiful. Maybe that’s good—maybe we should let flowers just be flowers instead of loading them with all this meaning and history and pressure.”

Maybe. But I’d learned that in Western Asia, flowers are never just flowers. They carry too much history, meaning, poetry, memory. Trying to see them as simply beautiful would require forgetting centuries of culture—possible perhaps, but diminishing.

The Airport Garden

At Istanbul’s massive new airport, I discovered they’d installed a “Turkish garden” near the international departure gates—a miniature version of traditional Ottoman garden design, with roses, geometric tile work, a fountain, and a glass dome allowing natural light.

It was artificial, commercial, Disneyfied even. But it was also oddly touching—this massive, modern, ultra-efficient airport making room for garden culture, acknowledging that travelers might want beauty and tradition alongside duty-free shopping.

I sat there, waiting for my flight, surrounded by hurrying travelers from everywhere, and thought about all the gardens I’d visited: Isfahan’s ancient courtyards, Damascus’s jasmine paradises (now memory), Dubai’s absurd flower excess, Yemen’s secret sanctuaries (destroyed or surviving?), Jordan’s desert blooms, Oman’s modest beauty, Saudi Arabia’s private spaces, Lebanon’s resilient replantings, and always, everywhere, roses.

Western Asia’s flower culture wasn’t one thing but a thousand things: ancient and modern, spiritual and commercial, public and private, thriving and endangered, preserved and transforming. The garden as paradise, the rose as divine beloved, the jasmine as city identity, flowers as poetry and produce both.

Epilogue: Seeds and Memory

I brought seeds and memories home—not many seeds (customs regulations, plant diseases, practical limitations) but enough. Rose seeds from Shiraz, jasmine cuttings carefully protected, dried flowers pressed in notebooks.

They grew, some of them, in my English garden. Not well—wrong climate, wrong soil, wrong light—but they grew, and growing, they carried their origins. The Persian roses never quite bloomed properly, but their fragrance, when they occasionally managed flowers, smelled exactly like Shiraz mornings. The jasmine struggled through English winters but produced a few blooms each summer, smelling exactly like Damascus nights I’d experienced in that brief window before the war.

These failing, struggling flowers in my northern garden became, unexpectedly, my most vivid connection to the places I’d visited. More than photographs or notes, more than souvenirs or memories, these living plants—however diminished—maintained physical connection across distance and time.

And I learned that’s what Western Asia’s flower culture had always been about: maintaining connection. Connection to divine through beauty. Connection to past through gardens. Connection to poetry through roses. Connection to place through scent. Connection to identity through cultivation. Connection to the dead through cemetery flowers. Connection to the absent through jasmine that remembers Damascus.

Flowers as threads binding people to what they’ve lost, what they hope for, what they believe, what they remember, what they love. Not symbols exactly, and not just plants, but something between and both—the physical and metaphysical refusing to separate, the literal and symbolic insisting on coexistence.

That doubled vision, that refusal to reduce flowers to either pure symbol or pure object, might be Western Asia’s gift to global flower culture. A rose is a rose is a rose—yes, absolutely—but it’s also the beloved’s cheek, God’s beauty, martyrs’ blood, poetry made tangible, memory made fragrance, paradise made present, love made visible.

Both. Always both. Never one or the other, but the impossible simultaneity of literal and symbolic, physical and spiritual, earth and heaven, meeting in the garden, in the bloom, in the scent that carries across centuries and continents and the vast distance between what we’ve lost and what we remember.

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Author’s Note:

This account draws from travels undertaken between 2009-2013 across Western Asia, before the Syrian civil war devastated that country and before regional instabilities made some locations inaccessible or unsafe. The Syria and Yemen I describe exist now primarily in memory and hope for restoration.

Many identifying details have been changed to protect individuals, particularly those in countries where speaking to foreign journalists involves risk. Some characters are composites. All experiences and observations are authentic; specifics are sometimes adjusted for safety.

The situation in Western Asia continues to evolve. Gardens have been destroyed and gardens have been built. People have fled and people have returned. Traditions have died and traditions have survived. Water has become scarcer. Politics have made flower culture more complicated.

This is a snapshot of a particular moment, filtered through one traveler’s experience and limitations. A more complete account would require multiple lifetimes and perspectives I don’t possess.

If these words inspire you to visit Western Asia’s gardens, please go with humility and openness. Learn some Persian poetry before visiting Iran. Understand the region’s political complexities before drawing conclusions. Respect local customs, particularly regarding gender and religion. Ask permission before photographing gardens or people. Buy flowers from local vendors when possible. Support people maintaining traditional garden culture.

And remember: the gardens are never just gardens. The roses are never just roses. Everything means more than it appears to mean. That’s the gift and the challenge of Western Asian flower culture—the insistence that beauty matters, that meaning matters, that connecting earth to heaven through cultivated plants is not merely possible but necessary.

The gardens remember paradise. The roses remember love. The jasmine remembers home. Pay attention, and they’ll share what they remember.

Shiraz to Isfahan to Tehran to Istanbul to Damascus to Beirut to Amman to Sanaa to Muscat to Dubai, and in memory, always returning to the gardens that bloom in the space between earth and heaven

A Final Fragrance:

It’s March in England, and the Persian rose I planted five years ago is trying again. A single bud, struggling against cold and wet and wrong latitude. It might bloom or it might fail. The jasmine beside it definitely won’t bloom—it barely survived winter.

But the scent memory is perfect and permanent: walking through Shiraz’s rose gardens on spring mornings, sitting in Damascus courtyards when jasmine-scented darkness fell, standing in Isfahan’s dried riverbed mourning gardens I’d seen and gardens destroyed, listening to Reza in Narenjestan Garden explain that roses are simple words with deep meaning.

The flowers fail, but the fragrance remains—memory made scent, place made portable, beauty refusing mortality, gardens blooming in the space between what was and what might yet be.

Khoda hafez, the Persians say. May God protect. May the gardens survive. May the roses remember. May beauty persist despite everything.

May flowers be flowers and also everything flowers represent: the human insistence that life should offer more than survival, that paradise isn’t only elsewhere, that we can make heaven here, however small, however brief, however impossible.

One rose at a time. One garden at a time. One perfect moment of fragrance carrying memory across the distance between then and now, there and here, lost and remembered, destroyed and hoped for, past and future.

The gardens remember. The roses know. And that, finally, is enough.