A Plant for His Garden

A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield, Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era and God Passes By. Words in quotation marks are from those accounts.

In The Chosen Highway, Lady Blomfield set down the spoken chronicle of Túbá Khánum, a daughter of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. One passage describes the garden near 'Akká called the Ridván, and the pilgrims who filled it with flowers.

Many of those pilgrims came from Persia on foot. The journey was long and hard, and on the way they faced many dangers, hostile people, bad weather and fatigue. They carried, "as the greatest treasure," a plant for the garden of the One they were travelling to see. "Often the only water, which the devoted pilgrims so urgently needed for themselves, was given to the plant." They tended the plants along the road and presented them to Bahá'u'lláh "alive and full of the power of growth."

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Túbá Khánum remembered that Bahá'u'lláh had suffered acutely from His close confinement in one room. He loved gardens and flowers, open country, riding, walking and picnics under the trees. The Governors of 'Akká came and went. Some became friends of the Master through seeing the life He led, and the rules relaxed; others arrived with their minds filled with false reports, and the family's little freedom was curtailed again.

The Ridván was a garden the Master had planted on a plot of land He had acquired, on the bank of a brook. It had a large mulberry tree with seats round its trunk, and a fountain that those who made the garden had contrived. Most of its flowering plants, the account says, had been brought from Persia by the pilgrims. Some gardeners who had once worked for Bahá'u'lláh at His country house in Persia remembered that a particular white rose had been a favourite of His: single, with a golden centre, brownish stalks, shiny leaves and a scent of its own. That rose came to flourish in the Ridván.

The account lists the rest: attar roses, rosemary, bergamot, mint, thyme and balm, lemon-scented verbena and musk; white, scarlet and rose-coloured geraniums; pomegranate trees with large scarlet blossoms. Each, it says, was "a symbol of devoted, loving service." Later, friends from California and from Europe brought their offerings too, so that the garden joined East and West.

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While He was still held in the barracks, Bahá'u'lláh had written to some of the friends: "Fear not. These doors shall be opened. My tent shall be pitched on Mount Carmel, and the utmost joy shall be realized."

'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself told how the doors opened. Bahá'u'lláh once remarked, "I have not gazed on verdure for nine years. The country is the world of the soul, the city is the world of bodies." Hearing of it, the Master rented the palace of Mazra'ih, about four miles north of the city, and had it put in order. Successive farmáns forbade the exiles to pass the city walls, yet He walked out through the City Gate. "Gendarmes were on guard, but they made no objection." When He asked Bahá'u'lláh to go there, Bahá'u'lláh refused, saying, "I am a prisoner." He asked twice more, then did not dare to insist.

So the Master sent a Shaykh of 'Akká who loved Bahá'u'lláh to plead with Him; Shoghi Effendi names him as the Muftí, Shaykh 'Alíy-i-Mírí. The Shaykh sat close to Bahá'u'lláh's knees and kissed His hands. "God forbid! Who has the power to make you a prisoner? You have kept yourself in prison," he said. For a whole hour he kept on pleading, until Bahá'u'lláh said, "Khaylí khub (very good)." The next day the Master drove with Him to the palace. "No one made any objection."

In Túbá Khánum's chronicle, after Bahá'u'lláh had been confined in one room for nine years, the Governor of the time consented to the Master's request that He might be at liberty to visit the Ridván.

The chronicle remembers the joy of that day. The garden "had been prepared for Him with such loving care by the Master, the friends, and the pilgrims." The Master was gladdened to see His Father resting under the big mulberry tree beside the little river, with the fountain running, after the long years in the pestilential air of the fortress of 'Akká. "Only those who were present there," the account says, "could realize in any degree what it meant" to be surrounded by so many flowers after the dull walls of the prison city.

In God Passes By, Shoghi Effendi writes that the Ridván, which Bahá'u'lláh called "Our Verdant Isle," and the palace at Mazra'ih became the favourite retreats "of One Who, for almost a decade, had not set foot beyond the city walls, and Whose sole exercise had been to pace, in monotonous repetition, the floor of His bed-chamber." The farmán of Sultán 'Abdu'l-'Azíz condemning Him was never repealed, but it "had by now become a dead letter." Bahá'u'lláh was still nominally a prisoner, yet "the doors of majesty and true sovereignty were," in the words of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, "flung wide open."

Túbá Khánum said her continuous memories began only in 1892, when she was twelve; before that she had impressions, "a sort of patchwork of mind-pictures." But she remembered well that the greatest of their joys was to go with Bahá'u'lláh on the occasional picnics to the Ridván. "How happy we were with Him," she said.

Of the garden itself the account says: "One seems to sense the atmosphere of devotion, which made this garden out of the desert."

This is a retelling. For the fuller accounts, see The Chosen Highway, Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era, chapter 3, and God Passes By, chapter XI.

Blomfield, L.. *The Chosen Highway*.