Islamic gardens represent cultivated spaces across the diverse span of Muslim history and geography, created and set apart from wilderness of various kinds. They were designed to enhance the humanly constructed environment, to ornament the landscape, and to symbolize cultural and religious values and aspirations. As such, they are together with architecture and the arts among the most significant and enduring of Muslim expressions of the role and relationship of nature in its broader sense to human beings. Gardens and landscape architecture in Muslim societies have been an important expression of ethical assumptions about stewardship, ecology, and beauty. This heritage of spaces and values has in recent times come under increasing pressure because of very high levels of demographic change, desertification (the degradation of formerly cultivated land), burgeoning urban growth, and general neglect.

Gardens in the QurʾĀn

The Arabic word for garden (jannah) is used...