Over half of Iran is desert and there is an ancient tradition of making gardens which provide relief from the extremes of the climate – summer heat and winter cold.
The tradition and style in the garden design of Persian gardens has influenced the design of gardens from Andalusia to India and beyond. The gardens of the Alhambra show the influence of Persian Garden philosophy and style in a Moorish Palace scale from the era of Al-Andalus in Spain. The Taj Mahal is one of the largest Persian Garden interpretations in the world, from the era of the Mughal Empire in India.
Persian gardens may originate as early as 4000 BCE. Decorated pottery of that time displays the typical cross plan of the Persian garden. The outline of Cyrus the Great's garden, built around 500 BCE, is viewable today.
Caharbag (four gardens) is a rectangular garden divided by paths or waterways into four symmetrical sections.
Recent excavations at both Pasargadae and Susa suggest that the history of the Caharbag begins in the Achaemenid period. The clearest evidence comes from the Palace Area at Pasargadae.
There the surviving elements of several stone water channels help to define the plan of a major garden, which was founded in the later years of the reign of Cyrus the Great (559-30 B.C.). Those stone channels that have been uncovered so far describe the outline of two contiguous rectangular garden plots and the limits of a broad pathway that once enclosed the whole on at least three sides.
Furthermore, a fresh analysis of the plan of the palace area reveals that a required “line of sight” down the long axis of the garden, as defined by the fixed throne seat of the king within the “garden portico” of the palace, would have bisected the long sides of the two rectangular plots.
Such dispositions would necessarily have provided four separate plots, each nearly 70 x 50 m in area, within the confines of a rectilinear garden flanked not only by the palace but also by two ancillary “garden pavilions.”
The regularities in this innovative Pasargadae design seem to find an echo in Xenophon’s account of Lysander’s visit to the park of Cyrus the Younger at Sardis, where he marveled at the trees “finely and evenly planted” and at the way everything was “exact and arranged at right angles.” 
The grounds of a palace of Artaxerxes II (405-359 B.C.) at Susa may be more confidently associated with a quadri-partite plan. The design of this monarch’s “pleasant retreat,” located on the right bank of the Shaur River, appears to have included an almost square garden with axial sight lines intersecting at right angles.
The two key vistas can be presumed to have extended from the “garden portico” of a large hypostyle hall marking the east side of the garden and from a vantage point probably preferred by the king in the portico of an elevated pavilion that once overlooked the north side of the garden.
  In view of the previously unsuspected antiquity of the quadripartite garden plan it is certain that such gardens (and even the sequence of two such gardens along the principal axis) were familiar to the Sasanians, energetic builders who particularly delighted in the creation of very elongated garden designs.
British archaeologist David Stronach is recognized as a pioneer of archaeology in Iran.  Educated at Cambridge,
Stronach was director of   the British Institute of Persian
Studies for twenty years beginning in 1961, during which time he also conducted excavations at Pasargadae, Nush-I Jan and Nineveh, as well as other sites in the Middle East. (Source: Encyclopedia Iranica)

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