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Pompeii's Peristyle Gardens - Page 2

© Kirk Johnson

Because Vesuvius entombed Pompeii in a deep layer of volcanic ash and lapilli (pumice about the size of peach stones), we know more about the gardens of Pompeii in 79CE than we know about ancient Roman gardens of any other period. We would know much more if all of Pompeii's gardens had been excavated after the science of garden archeology had been developed. We should be glad that parts of the city are still unexcavated, because it is only from those gardens excavated during the second half of the 20th century that archeologists have really learned about how the gardens were planted.

What we do know is that Pompeii's oldest peristyle gardens seem to date from the second century BCE. Earlier gardens were at the rear of houses and seem to have been planted with vegetables. "Peristyle" is actually an English word, the Romans always said that they had a "peristylium", from the Greek word "Peristulon". Many of the rooms that opened onto a peristyle also had Greek names. The Romans were always aware that a peristyle was a Greek addition to their traditional Roman homes.

Because the earliest peristyle gardens were created centuries before the eruption of Vesuvius, we can't really know how they were first planted, but because many gardens were shaded by large trees in 79 CE, it is safe to assume that those trees had been planted many years earlier.

We know about Pompeii's trees because when the buried trees rotted, lapilli gradually filled the root cavities. Archeologists carefully remove the lapilli and fill the cavities with plaster. After the plaster is hard, the surrounding soil is removed, leaving a cast of the root.

Pompeii only got an aqueduct during the time of Caesar Augustus and at the time of the eruption, parts of Pompeii still did not have access to the the aqueduct's water. Some homes that had access to the water were not connected to it, so we know that earlier gardens were watered from cisterns. In the center of a traditional Roman atrium, there would be an opening in the roof, called a compluvium. Rainwater fell through this opening into a shallow collecting pool called a impluvium. Water from the impluvium was led by pipes to a cistern which served all of a household's needs before the aqueduct was constructed. Because of the limited supply of water, it is likely that Pompeii's peristyle gardens were originally planted with trees and grapevines, which needed very little water once established.

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