Part 2 · Where These Ideas Come From

The Arabic Agricultural Revolution

Varahamihira, Ibn Wahshiyya and Ibn al-Awwam wrote down grafting, seed treatment, irrigation and the moving of plants between regions. The part most courses skip.

28 min read

There is a hole in most permaculture reading lists, and it is roughly a thousand years wide and covers the Islamic world and South Asia. Between the Roman agronomists and the medieval English manor, farmers from India to al-Andalus were grafting fruit trees, treating seed, routing water and moving plants from one country to another, and several of them wrote it down in encyclopedias that survive. A learner who can name Cato but not Ibn al-Awwam has half a map.

The part most courses skip

The reason for the gap is practical. The standard medieval Arabic agricultural works have no complete English translation, so courses built on English reading skip them. But the ideas are neither obscure nor lost. Varahamihira, working in India in the sixth century, wrote an encyclopedic Sanskrit treatise whose tree and garden chapters describe grafting and watering in detail. Ibn Wahshiyya, around 904 CE, produced the Nabataean Agriculture, and Ibn al-Awwam, in the twelfth century, produced the Kitab al-Filahat, the most comprehensive medieval Arabic farm encyclopedia. The techniques the English manor later used came through this world.

Varahamihira: grafting, watering, and moving trees between countries

Varahamihira's Brihat Samhita is an encyclopedia, and its chapters on water springs, gardens and the treatment of trees read like a nursery manual. The grafting method he gives is a wet-layering technique rather than a whip graft, and the watering schedule is one any nursery worker would recognise.

Where this was written down first

Varahamihira, Brihat Samhita 6th century CE

For jack tree, ashoka, plantain, lemon, pomegranate, vine and jasmine, "the grafting may be done by smearing a branch with cow-dung and transplanting it on the branch of another; or it may be done by cutting off the trunk of a tree and by transplanting it like a wedge on the trunk of another tree", and "the part where the junction is effected must be covered with a coating of mud". On water: transplanted trees "should be watered morning and evening in summer; on alternate days in cold season; and whenever the soil is dry during the rains." Trees planted 20 cubits apart are very good, 16 moderate, 12 inferior, because roots that interlock "are tortured and do not yield fruits in sufficient quantity." And on moving plants: "Trees can be taken to other countries and there grafted on others, if they are smeared from root to the stem with ghee, Andropogon, sesamum, honey, Vidanga, milk and cow-dung."

That last line is the whole idea of moving a crop between regions, written as a nursery procedure: prepare the plant, carry it, graft it onto local stock.

Ibn Wahshiyya: the Nabataean Agriculture

The Nabataean Agriculture was written around 904 CE and claims to translate far older Babylonian and Mesopotamian farming knowledge. Whatever its true lineage, it is the earliest known Arabic agricultural treatise, and it is on disk in full.

Ibn al-Awwam: the Kitab al-Filahat

Ibn al-Awwam's Kitab al-Filahat (Book of Agriculture), from the twelfth century, is the largest of the medieval Arabic farm encyclopedias, and the one that gathered the whole tradition into a single work.

Reading these works without a translation

The lesson here is a method as much as a set of names. When a source sits in a language you cannot read, say so, and use the catalogue and the secondary literature rather than inventing a quote. That is the same honesty the whole course asks of a yield figure or a soil test: if you did not measure it, label it.

The Arabic and Urdu texts named in this lesson are held in full at ancient-ag-texts/ so that a learner who reads those languages can go straight to them. The descriptions of Ibn Wahshiyya and Ibn al-Awwam above are taken from the collection's INDEX record, not from a translation. Varahamihira's tree chapter is in English and is quoted directly.

Exercise

Graft by the wet method the Indian text describes

Choose a woody plant you can layer, fig, grape, jasmine or pomegranate, and try Varahamihira's method. Smear a branch, ring or wound it, bind it onto a stock or into moist soil with the junction covered in mud, and keep it damp. Water it morning and evening in summer, as the text directs. Label the date and check for a union in a few weeks.

Exercise

Give one plant the spacing test

Take one tree or large shrub and plant or thin it to a real spacing, 12, 16 or 20 cubits apart scaled to your ground. In the text, close planting tortures the roots and cuts the fruit. Mark the spacing you chose and, in a season, record whether the plant fruits as freely as one with room around it.

Fieldwork

Trace where one plant in your ground came from

Pick the oldest grafted fruit tree you can reach and find the union, the swollen collar where the scion meets the rootstock, less than a hand's width above the soil. Photograph it close, and note the height of the join and the age of the tree if it is known. Then trace where that variety was first grown and when it reached your region, and write the two places and the dates on one line. Bring back the photograph and that line.

Image neededThe tree-treatment chapter of the Brihat Samhita on screen or in print, with a fig or vine cutting beside it

Video neededSmearing and binding a branch onto a stock with the junction covered in mud, 3-4 min, showing the seal

Image neededTwo fruit trees at visibly different spacings, with a tape or the interlocking roots visible, showing the crowding the text warns against

Failure mode

Two failures are named in the text and both are common. A graft or a layer dies if the join dries before it unites, so the mud coating and the watering are not optional; the text calls for watering "morning and evening in summer". And a plant moved to a new country can carry pests or die of climate it is not suited to, so the same text prepares and smears the plant before it travels. Acclimatise slowly, and quarantine new stock, or the transfer becomes the disaster.