Sunder Nursery
Azim Bagh
A 90-acre heritage park where Mughal tombs stand in a working arboretum and nursery.
The ground was a Mughal garden on the Grand Trunk Road, then a British nursery for testing imported trees, then a neglected patch beside Humayun's Tomb. A long restoration by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture with the ASI and the municipality reopened it in 2018 as something Delhi did not previously have: a large park designed at once for heritage, horticulture and ordinary weekend use.
Six sixteenth-century monuments sit within it, including the domed Sunder Burj and Lakkarwala Burj and the tomb of a Mughal nobleman, cleaned and consolidated rather than rebuilt. Around them are a formal Mughal-plan garden on a central axis, a micro-habitat zone of marsh and ridge planting, a bonsai house, and an arboretum of some three hundred tree species. It is deliberately porous — a picnic ground and a monument park in the same fence — and it works.
- 01Sunder BurjA small sixteenth-century domed tomb with restored ceiling plasterwork and glazed tile.
- 02The central axisA formal water channel and lawn on the Mughal charbagh model, laid out during restoration.
- 03The arboretumAround three hundred tree species, with a marsh and ridge habitat zone at the northern end.
Ticketed, and worth it. Connected to Humayun's Tomb by a short walk; weekend mornings bring a farmers' market and crowds.