Gardens have long been a symbol of great civilizations. Many religions envision paradise as a garden—in fact, the word “paradise” derives from an ancient Persian word for “walled garden.” Yet the origins of history’s most famous gardens are far from angelic. 

The Aztecs harnessed the natural springs at Chapultepec to build one of the world’s first botanic gardens. Soldiers made the Sun King’s Versailles rise from a former swamp. Emperors of the Qing Dynasty diverted water from lakes and rivers to feed the fountains of Yuanmingyuan (The Garden of Perfect Brightness). 

With their vast scale and technological advances, these gardens of empire bent nature—and their subjects—to the ruler’s will. The plants and people collected within them represented the lands they controlled, placing status, wealth and power at the root of these man-made Edens.

“The whole idea of a botanic garden, one that is representative of all the species an emperor could command from his empire, hit the ground in Europe in Italy, but may have been inspired by the New World,” says Susan Toby Evans, author of Aztec royal pleasure parks: Conspicuous consumption and elite status rivalry.

Spanish conquistadors wrote home with dazzling accounts of the extensive gardens of the Aztec. Cortés described Huaxtepec, a garden seven miles wide with hundreds of species of herbs, shrubs and trees from across Moctezuma’s empire, as the “largest, most beautiful and freshest” gardens he’d ever seen. 

The Aztecs were advanced botanists with a complex plant classification system. They knew of over 3,000 medicinal plants, including ones to ease childbirth and menstruation pain. Hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms called Teonanácatl (“divine mushrooms” or “flesh of the gods”) were used to communicate with the divine and reserved for use by nobility and priests.

Plants were an essential part of the tribute system underpinning the Aztec Triple Alliance, in which the city-states of Tenochtitlán, Texcoco and Tlacopan ruled together in exchange for contributions from the city-states they conquered. Fragrant plants like Tlilxochitl (vanilla bean orchid) and yolloxochitl (Mexican magnolia) were luxuries and indicators of rank. 

Rare plants were delivered to imperial gardens “wrapped in fine cloth,” says Evans, and accompanied by dedicated gardeners to care for them. Plants from warmer parts of the empire that failed to thrive at the high altitudes of the emperor’s pleasure palaces were carved in stone alongside living plants to form what Evans calls “a green encyclopedia of the empire’s wealth and resources.” 

The location of a garden was just as important as what it contained. Chapultepec offered sweeping views of the capital of Tenochtitlan and was an easy commute from the city by canoe. The springs at Chapultepec supplied water to the capital, and the grand five-mile long aqueduct that linked them was a showcase for the empire’s technological achievements. In making his personal paradise the source of life-bringing water to his people, Moctezuma “demonstrated he could appropriate places of beauty and spiritual significance and command massive resources to achieve mastery over those landscapes,” says Evans. 

When the Spanish arrived, one of Moctezuma’s last acts as emperor was to have his image carved into the hillside of Chapultepec, setting his memory in stone alongside the flowers he loved.

No ruler was more obsessed with divine garden imagery than Louis XIV, aka “The Sun King.” He expressed this obsession through his stunning gardens at Versailles. “Apollonian imagery is everywhere at Versailles,” says Ian H. Thompson, author of The Sun King’s Garden. 

Identifying with the Greek Sun God allowed Louis to skirt Christian imagery. “Although Louis was often styled the ‘Most Christian King,’ he didn’t want to be told what to do by churchmen,” says Thompson. Louis was hell-bent on building a French empire and garden meant to give Rome—then the dominant Christian power in Europe—a run for its money. 

It took a lot of money to transform a former swamp into the most famous garden in the world. Designer André Le Nôtre (1613–1700) harnessed nature to meet the king’s demands. Versailles employed 7,000 gardeners and had over 2,400 fountains. Water consumption accounted for a third of the garden’s budget. The fountains required so much hydropower that they could not all be turned on at once, so staff were stationed throughout the grounds to turn individual fountains on as King Louis XIV passed by. 

When the Machine de Marly, an invention that drew water uphill from the Seine to Versailles, failed to pump enough water, the king took a page from the Aztecs and Romans and commissioned Vauban’s Aqueduct. The soldiers building it were called to war and it was never completed.

Louis’s thirst for water, like his thirst for territorial expansion, had a human cost, and the military bore the brunt of it. “The army did much of the construction work. When they weren’t fighting, they were digging,” says Thompson. Many of the Swiss Guards who excavated The Pond of the Swiss died of malaria. Court chronicler Madame de Sévigné reported: “every night wagons full of the dead are carried out.” 

During the day, at least, the gardens were full of life. The Sun King’s fondness for flowering citrus trees was legendary; there were 3,000 orange trees in the Orangerie alone. To maintain constant blossoms, gardeners sourced plants from all over the globe that bloomed at different times and developed new forcing techniques so the king saw—and smelled—his favorite flowers at will. 

“The gardens were a statement of France’s glory, and Louis loved showing them off,” says Thompson. The king wrote several editions of his "Manière de Montrer les Jardins,” a manual on how to best view the gardens. In addition to prized flora like tulips, narcissi and irises, the garden was also home to prized fauna like lions, rhinos, and elephants. “The design of the Menagerie de Versailles was a precursor of the Panopticon prison, where a single warder can watch dozens of inmates,” says Thompson. 

While previous French kings ruled from Paris, Louis chose to build his palace and gardens on the remote site of his father’s former hunting lodge. “It was a place of safety he’d fled to during the Frondes, a period of rebellion against the crown," Thompson says. "By moving his court there in 1682, he could make sure they weren’t plotting against him."

In its heyday, the Imperial Gardens at the Old Summer Palace spanned 860 acres, nearly five times the size of the Forbidden City and eight times the size of Vatican City in Rome. The Qing Dynasty built large because they had a lot to prove: When the first Qing emperor took power in 1644, he ended 400 years of rule by the ethnic Han Chinese. 

“The new Manchu rulers were under pressure to establish their new identity as rulers of all of China,” says Ying-chen Peng, associate professor at American University. “They had to demonstrate a strong understanding of the empire’s different ethnic groups, especially the Han Chinese elite.” To that end, the Manchu learned Mandarin Chinese, practiced Confucianism and adopted Han aesthetics. “The garden was a critical part of that,” she says.

Construction on Yuanmingyuan began in 1709 under the emperor Kangxi. At just five miles northwest of The Forbidden City, the summer palace and its gardens made for an easy commute for the emperor and his vast court. 

Like Moctezuma, Kangxi chose a location with abundant access to water, an element not just necessary for plants, but imbued with religious significance. Water was a symbol of purity and clear-mindedness embedded in the name of the dynasty itself: Qing (清), which translates to "clear" or “pure.” The emperor gave the summer palace and its gardens to his son Yinzhen, who expanded the garden before leaving it to his son, Qianlong. 

“Qianlong saw Yuanmingyuan as a miniature of his empire,” says Peng. While Moctezuma and King Louis XIV had their plants brought to them, Qianlong personally embarked on collection tours of his empire. “He would visit important gardens and cultural sites, then have his architects recreate the vistas he had appreciated,” Peng says. He didn’t just take plants; he copied entire gardens. For example, Qianlong’s Ruyuan (Garden of Ease) is a replica of one of Nanjin’s oldest classical gardens, Zhanyuan Garden. 

While the Qing emperors ruled by divine right, “in the early years of the dynasty, they still encountered a lot of resistance. There was a sense of insecurity, and this dynamic is reflected in many areas of the garden,” says Peng. Qianlong commissioned buildings to represent styles from across his kingdom, including Tibet and Mongolia. He even hired European Jesuits to recreate Western-style palaces and fountains. He filled these buildings with art and priceless manuscripts from early Chinese civilizations, portraying his dynasty as heirs to that cultural lineage. 

The emperor collected people alongside beautiful things. Yuanmingyuan housed the emperor’s xiunu (“beautiful girls”). Consorts who outlived the emperor were kept in the garden in a sort of retirement home—or prison, depending on how you looked at it. Eunuchs (castrated male servants) performed “tableaux vivants” for the royal family. Painters were employed to paint its iconic vistas, and Qianlong wrote famously grandiose poetry in praise of those same views.

Qianlong chose the highest ground in his garden to build a Buddhist temple “for worshiping my grandfather and father in order to extend their endless solicitude,” Qianlong wrote. With his ancestors looking down over his garden—itself a representation of his empire—it’s likely he imagined his descendants one day worshipping his memory, much as Moctezuma did when he had his likeness carved into the caves of Chapultepec.

As the empire and its tax revenue shrunk, so, too, did the garden. “You can see the decline of the empire by looking at how the garden was maintained,” says Peng. As the Opium Wars raged on, the imperial family began to restrict its activities to only the most important areas of the garden. Eventually, the garden was looted and burned to the ground by French and British troops under Lord Elgin in 1860.

If these gardens embodied state power, they also contained the seeds of their decline. The fall of the Aztecs, the Bourbons, and the Qing Dynasty marked the end of their respective Edens … or at least the exclusivity they once stood for. 

Today, Huaxtepec is the site of Six Flags Hurricane Harbor water park. Moctezuma’s Chapultepec has been replaced by a modern botanic garden crowned by Chapultepec Castle, built in the 1860s for Mexican Emperor Maximilian. A restored Versailles is visited by 15 million people a year, though the grounds now contain plaques about the French Revolution alongside plants. In Beijing, the ruins of the old summer palace and its grounds have been left as a testament to the “century of humiliation”—the term the Chinese government uses to describe the period from the start of the Opium War in 1839 to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.

Long before flower delivery service FTD began telling customers to “say it with flowers,” emperors and kings were using landscaping as a show of power and legacy.