Short answers, pulled from the story.
Zaheruddin Babur founded the Mughal Empire and established the Aram Bagh in Agra around the 1520s as the first charbagh in South Asia. Babur engineered these gardens to mimic the fast-flowing streams of his Central Asian homeland while imposing strict geometric order on the flat Indian landscape.
The Taj Mahal was completed in the 1640s and its surrounding garden reflects the Quranic description of paradise through four quadrants divided by water channels that lead to the mausoleum. Shah Jahan designed this funereal paradise to extend the garden's symbolism into the afterlife.
The Mughals constructed elaborate networks of canals, step-wells, and reservoirs to bring water from rivers and natural springs into the garden center. At the Shalimar Bagh in Lahore, 450 fountains could shoot water 12 feet into the air using gravity-fed channels and terracotta pipes powered by Persian wheels known as saqiya.
The tulip served as Shah Jahan's personal symbol and appeared in white marble pavilions inlaid with semiprecious stones depicting scrolling naturalistic floral motifs. Shah Jahan also commissioned the Mahtab Bagh across the Yamuna river to be filled with night-blooming jasmine and other pale flowers to glow under the moonlight.