We treated the garden as a neighbour
whose gifts visited us in the hands of perfumed winds.
— Ibn ʿAmmār, 11th century Arab poet from Silves, Algarve

Inspired by these verses, curators and collaborators from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation brought the Gulbenkian garden into the Museum’s Gallery of the Islamic East, through the representation of the leaf in Islamic art.

A quick glance around this gallery reveals that leaves are scattered everywhere across the collection: a testament to the power of vegetal patterns and plant imagery for the myriad cultures of West and South Asia, as well as for the collector, Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian.

Many of the leaves depicted mirror those found on trees in the garden outside, such as the cypress, elm, Judas, planetree and poplar. This exhibition explores this affinity, at a time when beyond this building and throughout the lands where these arts originated, climate change is affecting the foliage cycles of trees and threatening their survival.

In nature, as in Islamic art, leaves gather collectively around a branch, and the process that gave rise to this exhibition shared this sense of community.

The diverse people from the Gulbenkian Foundation, who joined the curatorial team to explore the theme ‘leaf’, have enriched the interpretation of the objects on display, by sharing their personal stories, poems and works of art.