Western Europeans often talk about the fall of the Roman Empire; in fact, it was only the western part of the Roman Empire which collapsed into barbarism. The Eastern part of the Roman Empire survived as the Byzantine Empire, until Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453. By 1453, the Renaissance was flowering in Italy and many Byzantine scholars emigrated to Italy, so it isn't very accurate to think of a total break between the culture of the Classical world and the revival of Classical culture during the Renaissance.
Ornamental gardens were almost certainly created in and near Constantinople and other Byzantine cities, but archeologists have found very little evidence of them. While some traditions of ornamental gardening undoubtedly survived from the Classical world, the gardens of Renaissance Italy seem to have mainly been inspired by Classical literature and the ruins of ancient Roman gardens, especially the ruins of the Emperor Hadrian's villa at Tivoli. The tradition of ornamental gardening may not have survived as a living tradition from Imperial Rome, but the tradition of creating automata did survive.
Our most important source for information about automata in the Classical world is a book entitled Pneumatica by Hero (or Heron) of Alexandria. Scholars are unsure of when Hero lived; most of them place him in the first century AD. Hero wrote a number of treatises on mathematics and physics; in them he says that the theorems and inventions which he wrote about were not always his own, but were knowledge accumulated over centuries.
One of the inventions which Hero wrote about was the water organ (hydraulis), which was invented by Ktesibious of Alexandria around 270 BC. The water organ evolved out of a device that Ktesibious invented to produce bird song, it worked by regulating the flow of water into a closed cistern. As the cistern filled with water, air was forced into a pipe on top of the cistern, this pipe lead to a whistle hidden within an artificial bird. Ktesibious took this idea and developed it into a pipe organ. The ancient Romans fell in love with water organs; the Emperor Nero was an organist and had a water organ installed in his palace.
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