Soon after my book Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India appeared, an Indian newspaper took me to task for speaking ill of Lord Curzon and his restoration of the gardens of the Taj Mahal. As viceroy of India 1899–1905 with a great love—one might even call it an obsession—for Agra’s monuments and most especially the Taj Mahal, he took an unusually personal role in remedying what he saw as the calamitous state of the gardens of that great monument. An Indian blogger likewise defends Curzon’s restorations and, moreover, applauds the ‘Raj’s green legacy’ in general, lamenting misbegotten efforts to replace the tried and true flora of that era with such monstrosities as the ‘greyish palms that sprouted on traffic islands all over Delhi’ before the Commonwealth Games of 2010. Unlike the imported lantana of another era, they did not last a summer. Sadly, today’s youth, ‘SilkStalking’ claims, may flirt with environmentalism, but they scarcely know one plant from another and have no hands-on experience of greenery itself. ‘Like my nostalgia for lantana hedges, it has to get personal.’

Ask those who have visited the Taj Mahal what they remember of the gardens. If your experience is like mine, they will offer only the vaguest description, or, more likely, draw a complete blank. And yet when the Taj was conceived in the seventeenth century, the garden would have been considered just as important as the tomb of Shah Jehan’s beloved wife, both a memorial to the living empress and the embodiment of the Paradise promised to the Faithful by the Qur’an. Now, the gardens are little more than an inoffensive backdrop for the architecture, intended to direct the viewer’s gaze to the mausoleum and incidentally provide a pleasant experience of greenery (figure 1). To all intents and purposes, the landscaping of the Taj remains essentially as Curzon decreed it over a century ago. Even more intriguing, it has to a large extent become the template for subsequent landscaping of India’s historical monuments from Sarnath to Khajuraho, Bhubaneswar to Srirangapatnam, just as Edwin Lutyens ‘green city’ vision of New Delhi has been to a somewhat lesser extent the model of urban planning.