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 66 SRINAGAR AND NEIGHBOURHOOD

closure, and there are found along the canal which connects it with the Dal Lake the ruins of masonry foundations, which mark either the beginning of the old garden or the site of a pavilion within it. Causeways and channels probably extended across the garden with tanks and platforms.

The garden was in the strictest sense a formal garden, and appreciation of a formal garden needs an acquired taste. But the Moghals certainly under- stood such matters. They were quite right in selecting trees of formal growth, and planting them on geometrical lines, the essence of a good garden being that it should forma pleasing intermediate step between the free treatment which Nature lavishes on hills and plains, field and forest, and that necessarily artificial object—a building made by the hand of men.

Tae Nisuat Baca

The Nishat Bagh is decidedly the favourite garden in Kashmir, though it has ‘no building so fine as the pavilion with the black pillars in the Shalimar Bagh. Its situation on the rising ground sloping up from the Dal Lake, backed by a range of mountains immediately behind, and with views far over the water and over the valley to the distant snowy mountains, gives it an advan- tage over every other garden, and its beauty in