The Garden of Cyrus

Parallelisms and resemblances, found in both art and nature, easily reveal the elegance of this order. ❧ That this pattern was used in various ways by diverse and distant nations is suggested by several ancient sources. In the hanging gardens of Babylon, according to Abydenus, Eusebius, and others, Curtius describes this rule of decussation decussation: the act of crossing or intersecting in the shape of an 'X'. In the memorable garden of Alcinous—anciently conceived as an original idea inspired by Paradise Alcinous was the King of the Phaeacians in Homer's Odyssey; his garden was famous for its eternal fruitfulness—there is mention of a well-contrived order; for this is how Didymus and Eustathius have explained the emphatic word used to describe it. Diomedes, describing his father’s rural estates, uses the same language to account for trees planted in an orderly fashion. And Ulysses, when he was a boy, was promised by his father forty fig trees and fifty rows of vines producing all kinds of grapes. ❧

That the eastern inhabitants of India made use of such an order, even in open plantations, can be inferred from Theophrastus a Greek philosopher often called the "father of botany". While describing the trees from which they made their garments, he plainly states that they were planted in rows original Greek: κατ' ὄρχους (kat' orchous) and in such an order that, from a distance, men would mistake them for vineyards. The same seems confirmed in Greece from a unique expression in Aristotle concerning the arrangement of vines; he uses a military term representing the ranks of soldiers, which also confirms the antiquity of this form, which is still used in vineyard plantations. ❧

That the same pattern was used in Latin plantations is plainly confirmed by the praising pens of Varro and Quintilian, and the beautiful descriptions of Virgil. ❧

That the first plantations made not long after the flood were arranged in this manner is suggested by the widespread and ancient use of this order observed in vineyards. Furthermore, from scholarly inquiry, Saturn—who divided the world between his three sons, who carries a sickle in his hand, and who taught the planting of vines, the grafting of trees, and the best parts of agriculture—is discovered to be Noah. Whether this early and widespread husbandry husbandry: the care and cultivation of crops and animals; farming in vineyards had its origin in that patriarch is no illogical original: "paralogical" doubt. ❧

And, if it were clear that this was used by Noah after the flood, I could easily believe it was in use before it. I am not willing to attribute such ancient inventions to any origin higher than Noah; nor can I easily imagine that those ancient heroes—whose diets were vegetarian and consisted only or chiefly of the fruits of the earth—were at all lacking in their magnificent cultivation of the land, or after the...