Art & Culture Quiz: Mughal Gardens and Famous Gardens of India

Babur laid out the Aram Bagh at Agra in 1528, within two years of the first battle of Panipat, and it is the oldest Mughal garden that still survives in India.

Jahangir built Shalimar Bagh above the Dal Lake in 1619 for his queen Nur Jahan, and it is the largest of the Mughal gardens of Kashmir, laid out in terraces with the Diwan-e-Aam, the Diwan-e-Khas and a zenana garden.

Nishat Bagh was laid out about 1633 by Abul Hasan Asaf Khan, Nur Jahan's brother and the father of Mumtaz Mahal.

The Pinjore garden lies at Pinjore in Panchkula district of Haryana, on the road from Chandigarh to Shimla, and is a seven terraced Mughal garden laid out by Fidai Khan, the foster brother of Aurangzeb.

Humayun's Tomb was begun in 1565 by his widow Bega Begum, also called Haji Begum, with the Persian architect Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, and it is the first tomb in the subcontinent set at the centre of a charbagh crossed by water channels.

Charbagh means four gardens, and the plan is a walled square or rectangle cut into four equal quarters by two axes that meet at the centre, where a tank, a platform or a tomb is placed.

The garden at Shibpur in Howrah, across the Hooghly from Kolkata, was founded in 1787 by Colonel Robert Kyd of the East India Company and renamed after Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose.

Hyder Ali of Mysore began the Lalbagh garden at Bengaluru in the eighteenth century in the Mughal manner, and his son Tipu Sultan extended it and added trees and plants collected from many countries.

Nek Chand Saini, a roads inspector in Chandigarh, began building figures and courtyards out of broken tiles, bangles, sockets and other waste in a gorge near the Sukhna Lake, and the work he did largely alone became the Rock Garden, now one of the best known sights of the city.

The gardens behind Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi were designed by Edwin Lutyens, who combined the Mughal charbagh plan of water channels and terraces with English flower beds and lawns, and they were long called the Mughal Gardens.