My Cypress Garden grew from my experience of immigration and my search for a new sense of home. After immigrating to the United States, I felt as though I had lost my center of gravity. Like many immigrants, I experienced a sense of being uprooted—of no longer fully belonging to the landscape that had shaped my memories, identity, and understanding of home.
This feeling led me toward traditional Persian painting. I wanted to reconnect with my roots, not simply by remembering them, but by entering them again through art. Learning an artistic tradition from Iran became a way of mentally returning to a familiar world while also finding a connection with my new surroundings.
Finding a New Center Between Iran and Seattle
Seattle unexpectedly became part of that connection. Its landscape is filled with trees and remains intensely green through much of the year. Nature is constantly present here. Somewhere between the visual world of Persian painting and the evergreen landscape of the Pacific Northwest, I began to find a new center—a place where my past and present could coexist.
For two or three years, I studied traditional Persian painting and learned its techniques, forms, and visual language. During that period, something else was also changing within me. The sadness, homesickness, and sense of displacement that had accompanied immigration gradually began to soften.
The Cypress Tree in Persian Gardens, Art, and Poetry
Then, one day during meditation, an idea came to me: the cypress tree could become a form through which I could speak.
The cypress—sarv in Persian—has existed for centuries in Persian gardens, paintings, and literature. Evergreen and enduring, it carries associations of dignity, continuity, beauty, and resilience. In Persian poetry, its graceful upright form is frequently compared to the beloved. The garden itself is equally important in Persian culture: a place of beauty and harmony and, in mystical literature, an earthly reflection of paradise.
Creating My Cypress Garden
I began using the form of the cypress as a container for whatever occupied my heart: memories, questions, emotions, people, stories, and ideas that I wanted to express. Within this familiar Persian form, I could speak in my own voice while using the techniques and visual language I had spent years learning.
This became My Cypress Garden.
Each cypress in the series tells its own story. Together, they became a personal garden—a place where Persian cultural memory, the nature surrounding me in Seattle, and my own inner world could meet.
A Garden That Grew from Being Uprooted
Looking back, I realize that My Cypress Garden grew directly from the experience of migration. Over the two or three years in which I developed these works, the homesickness and grief I had carried were gradually transformed into something creative. What began as an attempt to recover my roots became something different: not a return to the home I had left behind, but the creation of a new inner landscape in which both places could belong.
My Cypress Garden is, for me, the garden that grew from being uprooted.
