The Guardian's Gardens at Bahjí

A retelling based on The Priceless Pearl by Rúḥíyyih Rabbání. Words in quotation marks are preserved in that account.

In 1952, after the final transactions with the State of Israel had been completed and more than 145,000 square metres of land around the Shrine of Bahá'u'lláh had been secured, Shoghi Effendi began to level a stretch of wilderness facing the Shrine. A bulldozer was hired, and for many days the Guardian stayed at Bahjí to direct the work himself.

On the edge of the ground being levelled stood a ruined one-room building. Wanting some perspective on the land, which lies in the middle of a flat plain, Shoghi Effendi climbed up onto it. The added height made such a difference that he had the walls and roof repaired, a wooden stair put up outside to the roof, and the room furnished. He used it as an office and a place to answer his mail.

Rúḥíyyih Khánum, his wife, tells the story in The Priceless Pearl, along with what came before it. In the days of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, when water was a major problem, He had made small gardens beside the Holy Tombs at Bahjí and on Mount Carmel, mostly citrus trees and flowers. Shoghi Effendi altered, extended and formalized them.

He was not, she writes, interested in gardening but in gardens. She doubted he had ever planted anything in his life, or wanted to, but he never missed a chance to visit a beautiful garden, and in twenty years together they visited more than she could count, often returning to the same one year after year. In the first ten years or so of his ministry he ordered thousands of bulbs from Holland one year and hundreds of rose bushes from France another, and even had tree ferns sent from the Antipodes. Between gardeners of limited skill and plants unsuited to the land, these efforts failed, and in the end he gave up importing anything but grass seed. His lawns, she understood, were the first grown on a large scale in Palestine.

Apart from the terraces on Mount Carmel, he never had an over-all plan. With no fuss, no advice and no help except the unskilled farmers who served as gardeners, he would walk the land until a pattern suggested itself, then work it out in drawings of his own, not to scale but with every dimension calculated and marked. Then he would stand on the ground and show the men how to lay it out: string tied to pegs for long lines, a peg and string as a compass for circles, the span of a stretched hand for the distance between trees, light-coloured soil poured out to mark a line. Often he had other gardeners follow behind those who were measuring, so that holes were dug, cypresses planted and beds set out while he was still measuring ahead of them. In this way a whole section of garden was often laid out in a single afternoon. There is a proverb among the Arabs, Rúḥíyyih Khánum explains, that whoever wears King Solomon's ring has only to turn it and everything is changed in the twinkling of an eye, and some of the Arab workers used to say that Shoghi Effendi had found King Solomon's ring.

At Bahjí his original design had made the Shrine and the adjacent Mansion the hub of a great wheel, with paths converging on them. From the roof of the ruined building he saw the property from an entirely different angle, and a new idea came to him. A great deal of earth was being scraped up by the levelling, and he had it pushed to the east and raised into a high embankment, from which anyone could see the whole area stretched out like a patterned carpet. The result pleased him so much that he built not one stepped-back terrace but two, amounting in height to a small hill. The cart-wheel design had to be given up. Many times, she writes, he would alter a plan because his eye, on the spot, showed him something he felt was more beautiful and worthy.

He gave the same care to the interiors. In the Mansion of Bahá'u'lláh and in the Shrines, not a picture hung that he had not placed himself, to within a centimetre, and he produced the effect at a minimum cost, buying things less for their style or period than because they were inexpensive and could achieve an effect regardless of their intrinsic worth.

In the first years of his Guardianship, Professor Alain Locke of Howard University had walked with him in the gardens of the Shrine of the Báb and heard him talk about the details of their planning. Locke wrote of those details: "They were important because they all were meant to dramatize the emotion of the place and quicken the soul even through the senses."

When the new area at Bahjí was finished, with its lawns and flower beds planted and lamp posts lining the red path, the Guardian at once moved his meeting with the guests out to its edge. He seated them along the semicircular path facing the Shrine, almost a hundred metres from where he had been used to sit. Rúḥíyyih Khánum had not known this was planned, and that evening she asked him about it. He said he had moved the meeting further away "out of respect for the Shrine." From then on all meetings at Bahjí were held in the new position.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Priceless Pearl by Rúḥíyyih Rabbání.

Khánum), R. R. (.. (1969). *The Priceless Pearl*. George Ronald.