Arbors and Pergolas
Many of the photos which have been submitted to Suite 101's My Garden in Winter contest are of arbors and pergolas. This has caused to me ponder a question which has often tormented me: is there any difference between an arbor and a pergola?
I live on the southern Oregon coast and I don't know anyone in this area who has a pergola. If an overhead structure lets in some rain and has a vine growing on it, we call it an arbor.
In preparing to write this article, I plowed through books, looking for the solution to this great mystery. I am still a bit confused about the difference between arbors and pergolas, but not as much as I was before.
" Pergola" is an Italian word which is directly descended from the Latin word "pergula". Ancient Roman pergulas were arbors which usually supported grapes, but the word was also used to describe any projection or shed which had been added onto a house.
The word "arbor" is more confusing. All of my sources tell me that it is from the Middle English word "erber" and the Old French word "erbier", both of these words originally described small Medieval gardens. Many of these gardens featured vines growing on lattice structures. I suppose that it is possible that these structures were so closely connected with herbers that they took on the name. At some time in the past, there was a phonetic change from "herber" to "arbor". This is understandable because "arbor" is the Latin word for "tree" and many Medieval arbors were created by pleaching trees together to form an outdoor room. At any rate, by the middle of the sixteenth century, the word "arbor" was being used to describe leafly retreats.
It should be obvious from the above paragraph that the ancient Romans didn't use the word "arbor", because it hadn't been invented yet, but they did create arbors. Arbors are among the oldest features in the gardens of Western Civilization, dating back to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The earliest arbors may have been created by planting rows of evenly spaced trees; grapevines were encouraged to grow up the trees and then woven together to form garlands which hung from tree to tree. We know that the ancient Romans grew grapes in this manner. This tradition is still practiced in areas of rich volcanic soil near Naples.
Architectural arbors are also very ancient garden features. We know that they were being constructed in the gardens of ancient Egypt, at least during the New Kingdom. There are no depiction's of ornamental gardens which survive from the Old Kingdom, but a painting which was found in the tomb of one of Amenhotep III's high officials shows a garden with two rectangular arbors. I have read that most Egyptian arbors were made of wood and that only the gardens of the wealthy featured pergolas with masonry pillars. I question this because wood was always rare in Egypt, while there was plenty of clay to make bricks from.
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