At night, the scent of Poet’s Jasmine woke me up.

We slept outdoors, on wooden beds arranged next to the 12-foot deep fish pool with statues of silver-skinned dolphins that spat water into the air when the fountain was turned on. Tehran’s summers were dry and brutal. At mid-day, the heat melted the asphalt on the sidewalk and turned the city into a ghost-land. By five o’clock, the red bricks on the floor of our yard were still too hot to step on barefoot. At dusk, when the gardener hosed the ground, a thick, white cloud of steam rose off the bricks and made him invisible from the waist down.

But at night, a cool breeze blew from the mountains to the north, luring us — my parents and grandparents, my two sisters and I — out of the house and into the garden. Around us, centuries-old maple trees rose into the star-filled sky until their tops disappeared from view. Ancient walnut and persimmon and mulberry trees — their bark rough and scaly, their branches gnarled, the ground beneath them splattered with fruit so ripe, it fell off the tree and burst open of its own volition — cast eerie shadows in the dark. Flower beds — pansies and petunias, geraniums, pink Muhammadi Roses so large you had to use both hands to cup the bulb — framed the lawn. Slender, mint-green vines of Poet’s Jasmine covered every trellis. The vines had tiny white flowers — four or five leaves, each as delicate as a butterfly’s wings, with a fragrance at once subtle and all-pervasive, light and long-lasting, and that was strongest at midnight.

I remember it even now — the smell of Poet’s Jasmine in our yard and on my hands and clothes, the way the silver shell of the dolphins looked blue in the moonlight, the smell of fresh mint at dawn, the clicking of the gardener, Hassan’s, scissors as he pruned the roses in the early-morning hours before the sun came out.

Hassan came to work in a dark suit and a white dress shirt every day. He took off the jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves and pants legs while he worked in the garden, but he never came inside the house, or went on an errand, without his formal clothes. He acted as if this were normal, as if he didn’t know that he was the only gardener anywhere in Tehran who dressed up like an English butler. He had done this since he was twelve years old — since his peasant father, who could not feed him, put him on a bus with a one-way ticket and “gave” him to my grandfather for life. My grandfather had bought Hassan his first suit. In time, he would buy him his own house and even find him a wife — a mysterious young woman who left home the morning after their wedding, and never came back. Hassan was left alone with his wedding suit, the life-sized statues of fallen kings and brave princes he had convinced my grandfather to erect in the yard, and the Persian Garden he had both raised and grown up in.

*

A typical Persian garden, ours was vast and many tiered, each tier built around a pool or fountain and boasting ancient, stalwart trees. In a country that was two-thirds desert, water represented both material wealth and spiritual awareness: you could look onto the calm surface of a pool, Persians believed, and see more than your outer image. Trees, too, were a symbol of veneration — so much so that tree-planting had been a sacred profession that passed from father to son and only in designated families. Persia’s gardens gave the world the Rose, an underground system of irrigation, called Qanat, that transported water for hundreds of miles through desert country, the four-fold pattern of quadrants that would inspire garden design from India to France, from Spain to Arabia. They were the stuff of many a poet’s creation, a cultural icon that survived every devastating invasion and long-term foreign occupation.

For my sisters and me, the garden was where we played cowboys and Indians every summer with our one male cousin: he carried both the guns, and the arrows and knives, because he was a boy, he said, and knew how to handle weapons. It was where we built snowmen in the winter by covering Hassan’s beloved statues with snow and letting it freeze overnight, where we picked armloads of red and orange and yellow maple leaves from the ground in the Fall, threw them into the air like a rain of colors, and stood as they descended back on us till our hair and skin was covered with their dust.

I remember this — the ground covered by a carpet of leaves three inches thick; my mother crossing the yard in white, patent-leather boots, a black coat, Jackie O pearls, giving Hassan instructions that he says he will follow only if he decides they make sense, do me a favor, miss, and let me decide how to grow peonies.

Once, when the peonies he had planted that year had all died in unseasonably warm weather, my sisters and I surrounded Hassan and asked him about his runaway wife. It had been many years, he said. He didn’t remember her name, only that she had a loud laugh, and drank like a man. When last he saw her, she had worn a red dress too low in the neckline and too short in the hem. And she had no shoes on. She had claimed she was going to the corner store to buy a bottle of “rosewater” to bathe in, but people had seen her at the bus depot downtown, headed for God knows where, still with no shoes and no rosewater.

*

Persian rosewater was made in the city of Mashad, through a process of reverse osmosis that involved boiling pots full of Muhammadi rose petals, capturing the steam, and turning it into liquid form. It was used as additive in food, perfume for women, air-freshener. Its fragrance was strong and long lasting — nothing like the watered-down, half-hearted version available in Arabic and Iranian markets in Los Angeles. This other version is an attempt to satisfy the nostalgia of a people who haven’t quite come to terms with the fact that they have left Iran and, with it, their Persian gardens; who still believe they can re-capture, in a city as young as Los Angeles, the peace and solace they had drawn from belonging to a place for over two thousand years.

They do this by keeping alive, in exile, the language and arts, the music and poetry that has been stifled in Iran. They do it by pretending that the monarchy is not dead and gone, that a political system founded by Cyrus the Great and that has lasted over the millennia will withstand a temporary historical glitch. And they do it by planting native Iranian trees and vegetables in their gardens, building fountains and pools, caring for their trees.

They plant and prune and coax, wait and watch, change the soil, adjust the light. They seek advice from one another, exchange instructions.

But the roses they grow in America barely have a scent, the sour cherries and persimmons have little flavor, the American Jasmine is brittle and reluctant and quick to disappoint. They say it’s the water–too much chalk and fluoride and look how it makes your hair go limp, how it dries the skin and leaves that funny taste on your tongue. They say it’s the light — it’s too blurred, too white, too filtered through smog and fog and whatever else lies low over the city. Or the climate.

They admit they may be expecting too much, idealizing the past, forgetting there was a reason why they traded the land of roses and nightingales, that magic kingdom asleep under an eternal spell, for the open vistas and new horizons of America.

I think this — the newness of the soil here — that makes the difference between our American gardens and the ones in Iran. I think it was the earth that could tell a thousand tales, that had claimed the love and loyalty of fathers and sons, that made our gardens into places of enchantment.

*

The last time I saw Hassan, he was standing in our garden, next to a pomegranate tree that had twice been given up for dead, survived droughts and aphids and the evil eye of many an envious neighbor. He had known for over a year that my parents and I were going to leave Iran, but he had never said a word about it or acted as if he cared. At the last minute, when my father went up to shake his hand, Hassan burst into tears.

He stood there — a man in his late-sixties — crying like a twelve-year-old who is about to lose, again, his entire family.

“You won’t remember me,” he said.

“Where you’re going, the land has no memory.”