From Here to Serenity: Sackler's Asian Garden Tour

This dish is from China's Ming dynasty. (The Freer Gallery Of Art)

What are gardens for? Those in "East of Eden: Gardens in Asian Art" at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery invite us into worlds better than our own.

In "East of Eden" no one works. No one prunes the branches, grumbles at the weeds, tills the beds or mows the lawn.

There are no living plants, or songbirds, in the Sackler exhibition, which is mostly made of objects from the permanent collection. But all of them cite gardens, and all of them invoke realms of perfect ease. No earthly cares intrude here. The air is soft and scented. Here red persimmons ripen, silver rivers flow.

A stroll among these screens and scrolls, porcelains and rugs, gold-touched Persian miniatures and antique Turkish velvets, is like a private garden tour though the best of neighborhoods. What makes it the best neighborhood is that it is next to paradise -- not the airy overhead heaven of the Christians, the one that you might see painted on church ceilings where cloud-plump cherubs float, but the paradise of Genesis, the greener one below.

Here no flowers rot. No mosquitoes buzz. These 67 objects take you on a long, wonder-seeking journey, Marco Polo style, eastward into Asia, with a side trip south to India, then onward across China to the marvels of Japan.

The landscape keeps changing. We cross deserts and climb mountains. The gardens differ, too, but the mood that they evoke -- which is meditative, prayerful, opulent and calm -- stays pretty much the same.

The farther east you go, the more the gardens change. Through these bowls and painted pages, calligraphies and carpets, wind two different paths to beauty, which lead you into gardens of two distinctly different kinds.

One looks out, the other in. One's symmetrical, one not. One kind of Asian garden borrows from the given, taking its aesthetic from the landscape that surrounds it, distilling what's been found. The other starts from scratch.

Lovers attributed to Manohar India, Mughal dynasty, ca. 1597.(The Freer Gallery of Art)

The latter sort of gardens -- gardens of the desert -- are those that found their form in the drier parts of India, and on Persia's arid plains. Anyone who's seen Iraq on TV -- those stretches of brown sand, the windstorms and the dust, the white, relentless sun -- can guess what it is like to try to conjure gardens there. In landscapes of such harshness you have to start with walls, of brick or stone or canvas, that keep the outside out.

What's inside is imported. The planting is imported. The water is imported, often underground (it would otherwise evaporate). So, too, are the ducks. The rigorous geometry -- which regulates the flower beds and keeps the walkways from meandering -- is another importation. These gardens from East Asia share a strictness. They look as if they've been sliced out of the environment with a straight-edge and a knife.

In Persian "four-part gardens" (where four watercourses meet at right angles at the center), the color-dotted beds are as rectilinear as rugs. There running water cools the air, adds its watery music and, equally important, alludes to the holy. Those four watercourses cite the four rivers of the paradise (rivers of pure water and wine, milk and honey) that Allah promises the righteous in the pages of the Koran.

Rectangles do not grow or age. Neither do such gardens. Those one sees depicted in paintings from Uzbekistan, India and Iran hardly note the changing seasons. They look cut out of time. Even when their maples take on rich fall colors, the spring flowers underneath them remain ceaselessly in bloom.