providing believers a chance to benefit from the spirituality of a venerated person and the particular aura of the garden. The invasion of Persia by the Mongols in the thirteenth century led to a new emphasis on highly ornate structure in the garden. Examples of this include tree peonies and chrysanthemums. The Mongols then carried a Persian garden tradition to other parts of their empire (notably India). The Mughal emperor Babur introduced the Persian garden to India, attempting to replicate the cool, refreshing aura of his homeland in the Ferghana Valley through the construction of Persian-style gardens, like those at other Timurid cities like Samarkand and Herat. Babur was a zealous gardener and personally designed and supervised at least ten gardens in his capital of Kabul in modern Afghanistan, such as the Bagh-e Babur, where he recorded the allure of the pomegranate, cherry and orange trees he had planted. Though his empire soon expanded as far as north-central India, he abhorred the stagnant heat and drab environment of the hot, dusty plains of India; he was thus interred at Bagh-e Babur in Kabul by his widow in 1544. The Aram Bagh of Agra was the first of many Persian gardens he created in India itself. Mughal gardens have four basic requirements, symbolizing four allegorical essentials for the afterlife: shade, fruit, fragrance and running water, and this pattern was used to build many Persian gardens throughout the Indian subcontinent, such as the Shalimar Gardens of Lahore, the Shalimar Bagh and Nishat Bagh of Kashmir, and the Taj Mahal gardens. The Taj Mahal gardens embody the Persian concept of an ideal paradise garden, and were built with irrigation channels and canals from the Yamuna River. These gardens have recently been restored to their former beauty after decades of pollution by the Indian authorities, who cut down the fruit- and shade-bearing vegetation of the garden. The Safavid dynasty (seventeenth to eighteenth century) built and developed grand and epic layouts that went beyond a simple extension to a palace and became an integral aesthetic and functional part of it. In the following centuries, European garden design began to influence Persia, particularly the designs of France, and secondarily that of Russia and the United Kingdom. Western influences led to changes in the use of water and the species used in bedding. Traditional forms and style are still applied in modern Iranian gardens. They also appear