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Ancient Roman Gardens

© Kirk Johnson

My article for September was a review of Annamaria Ciarallo's book The Gardens of Pompeii. Ciarallo approached the subject from a botanist's point of view and barely touched on the subject of garden design, so I was very pleased to discover that Linda Farrar's book Ancient Roman Gardens, copyright 1998, is still in print. This article is a review of that book.

I bought my copy of Ancient Roman Gardens soon after it was published, and I hadn't read it from cover to cover since, so I learned quite a bit from rereading the entire book. I just finished doing that tonight. This book is an excellent companion to Gardens of Pompeii, because while Farrar devotes a chapter to plants and she has the horticultural insight of an avid gardener, Ancient Roman Gardens is primarily about garden design.

Even though Ancient Roman Gardens is not very thick in comparison with most of the gardening books in my library, every sentence is loaded with information. It is not a book that most people will breeze through in an afternoon. I doubt that most people will want to digest more than one chapter at a time. It took me several days to reread and I am fascinated by the subject matter.

The book jacket of my copy states that "Ancient Roman Gardens is the first comprehensive account of gardens and gardening during the Roman period". So far as I know, this is a fact. This is the first book to deal with the subject of Roman gardens from the very beginnings of Rome to the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire.

This wasn't an easy book to write because most of the archaeological evidence about Roman gardens comes from Pompeii and Herculaneum, where gardens were entombed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. The science of garden archaeology is so new that even in the Vesuvian area, most of the evidence about gardens was destroyed by early archaeologists. It is only from gardens uncovered since the 1960s that archaeologists have gleaned large amounts of information.

Pompeii is a time capsule where every furrow was preserved. The plants rotted under their covering of ash and pumice, but every tree and shrub left a root cavity for archaeologists to uncover. At most other sites, gardens were eventually abandoned and allowed to return to nature. In Pompeii, we often know where archaeologists found each piece of sculpture and garden furniture, but we don't even know how much of the Roman sculpture that fills museums were found in the ruins of ancient gardens.

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