5 SEPTEMBER 1941, Page 10

It was sad to see how year by year the

sweet and ancient flowers of Persian culture were replaced by plants bedded out from Odessa or Berlin. I recall, as symbolic of what happened, the courtyard of the theological college at Isphahan. Whol I first saw it in 1925 it was filled with lilac bushes and its which repeated the tints of the tiled dome and colonnades producing variations from deep purple, through aubergine, lo faint lilac, a colour-scheme which assuredly I have never seal excelled. I returned in 1926. The lilacs and the irises bad been replaced by scarlet salvias and the screaming accents ri the canna tribe. Such, in so many ways, is the modernisatio to which Iran has succumbed.

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