The smell I remember. It was sensuous and sweet in the early summer morning but also airy, light, with an almost spicy edge. And it shifted character as I walked past the murmuring fountains and groomed myrtle bushes. But I didn’t pay much attention. Eight years ago there were other impressions to attend to, made by the honeycombed ceilings and ornamented stucco, the interweaving geometries on tiles and stone, the views of tall cypresses and corrugated rooftops. The place, in uniting opposites, seemed to insist on a mythical significance as fortress and pleasure garden, a seat of power and a meditative retreat: the Alhambra.

You would hardly expect the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx to have reproduced the sensations of that 14th-century palace complex in Granada, Spain, in its exhibition opening on Saturday, “Spanish Paradise: Gardens of the Alhambra.” What point could there have been in trying to replicate the heavens depicted on the ceiling of the Hall of Ambassadors, its wooden pieces inlaid with mother-of-pearl stars? Or to imitate the “Escalera del Agua” — the staircase in the palace gardens whose hand rails have carved channels in which currents of water flow, so that as you descend under overhanging trees you feel immersed in a rushing stream? The exhibition catalog tells us that the garden designer Russell Page called the staircase “the best thing in gardening that I know anywhere in the world.”

Any such reproduction would have been doomed to failure, so instead the Botanical Garden has created an exhibition of allusions and images, a three-part homage to the impact of the Alhambra and its gardens. Outdoors, in collaboration with the Poetry Society of America, the Garden mounted 16 panels of nature poems by Federico García Lorca, who was born near Granada and was intoxicated by the Alhambra.

In its library gallery, a show of four centuries of rare prints, folios, paintings and other artifacts evokes the lure the Alhambra had for visitors. Organized by Patrick Lenaghan, a curator at the Hispanic Society of America, the exhibition includes some of the first portrayals of the palace interior from the 17th century, etchings of Romantic images created by the artist David Roberts and others, and pioneering 19th-century photographs of its stunning facades and courtyards. There are also materials associated with Washington Irving, whose 1832 book, “The Alhambra,” so popularized the palace — then a pile of relics and ruin — that it still pays homage to Irving by preserving the rooms in which he stayed.