This book honors the legacy of its original editor, Wilhelmina Jashemski, the pioneer of Roman garden archaeology. When she died on Christmas Eve 2007, the project out of which it has grown was already well under way. A pioneer Jashemski certainly was, but also an amateur: she was a text-based historian who plunged into archaeology because Roman texts tell us so little about Roman gardens.Footnote ¹ The long epigraph to the Introduction comprises the English translation of a passage from the Elder Pliny (HN 19.49–51, 59) that Jashemski is said to have adopted as her own “definition of garden” (2). Unfortunately, because the editors have not included any Latin glosses for the English terms, we do not know that Pliny is talking about hortus. The closest he comes to defining it in this passage, as translated in the Loeb Classical Library edition, is by telling us that, in the Twelve Tables, “garden” (i.e., hortus) is used for “farm” (i.e., villa), and “family estate” (i.e., heredium) is used for hortus. With due respect to the memory of Jashemski, most modern readers will not find this helpful in clarifying what the Romans meant when they thought of a garden.Footnote ² The authors of individual chapters in this volume adopt their own definitions of “garden” without reference to the Latin categories that reflect the Roman domestication of nature: in her discussion of the archaeology of villa gardens, for example, E. Macaulay-Lewis specifically adopts the modern terminology of “garden,” “landscape,” and “designed landscape” (88). But no single definition of “garden” is employed throughout the book. “What was a Roman garden?” is an interesting question that lurks in the background of this volume. It merits cohesive discussion.

The Introduction to the volume comprises Jashemski's own account of the development of the project, first conceived in 1955. It is supplemented with a Postscript by her co-editors bringing the narrative up to date, and it concludes with a guide to using both the printed volume that is the subject of this review and an online catalog of 1,500–1,800 entries covering all (?) the known gardens of the Roman Empire. Even though this catalog has not yet appeared, it is worth considering the potential of such a project and the demands placed upon its design. The format has to be sufficiently flexible to accommodate a constantly expanding body of evidence and enable users to manipulate the data in many different ways. As a project that was “born digital” rather than adapted from an original print format, this catalog has been conceived to be accessible, citable, low-cost, and easy to preserve, maintain, and update.Footnote ³ In other words, it tries to walk the tightrope between a user-friendly interface and easy maintenance. As such, it is formatted in Markdown rather than conventional HTML, and employs “controlled vocabularies” to maintain consistency among its hundreds of entries, thereby making it easy to reuse the data. (It is to be hoped that the “controlled vocabularies” will overcome the difficulty of imposing consistency in translating terms from different languages.) The articles are generously linked (e.g., to Pleiades for geographic referencesFootnote ⁴) to make it possible to harvest the data in multiple ways, so that, for example, it is easy to see how many times a particular item of scholarship is cited, or to find all the tomb gardens in a particular location (district, city, or province), or to identify every garden in which a particular species of plant has been traced. Even if the copyright restrictions associated with the reproduction of images cannot be overcome, this catalog has the potential to make the gardens of the Roman world flower anew in future scholarship.

The rest of this review is necessarily limited to the printed volume, although “limit” is not the right term for approaching a project of such vast scope. “Gardens of the Roman Empire” might be thought to imply “gardens of the Roman provinces,” but Italy – especially Campania and, to a lesser extent, the city of Rome – predominates in the volume, although this is not immediately apparent, since the arrangement is not geographical but thematic. The 18 chapters are grouped in three broad categories: types of garden, gardens in literature and art, and the practicalities of gardening. Many of the same issues – and the same examples – are discussed in more than one place, but cross-referencing is minimal.Footnote ⁵ Its absence may mean that readers overlook important contributions, such as the fine account of water in Chapter 1, “The Garden in the domus” (45–57), which could be missed by a reader who assumed that the only treatment of this topic was in Chapter 15, “Water and water technology in Roman gardens,” which does not mention the earlier discussion. Because readers of collected volumes are likely to read only the contributions that appear to address the specific topics that interest them, cross-references inserted by editors are urgently needed to guarantee comprehensive use of the work.

The lack of cross-referencing in this book means that it is left to the reader to trace connections via the index, an operation that in this case requires some ingenuity: if, for example, you want to look up Sperlonga, for which there is no index entry, and you happen to know its association with Tiberius, you can get there by looking up the five pages listed under his name, on one of which (102) Sperlonga is mentioned; or you can trawl through the list of illustrations, where Sperlonga is named in the captions to figures 3.7A and 3.7B (the index entries do not include the captions). Similarly, there is no entry for the plane tree, and, although an article by A. Marzano containing an important discussion of this species is included in the bibliography (albeit under a truncated title), a note annotating literary sources on the plane tree with a reference to the Elder Pliny (chap. 17 n.113, cited on 476) gives no hint that the reader might profitably consult Marzano's discussion.Footnote ⁶ The online catalog, obviously, should enable readers to amass relevant material with a few clicks; but in a printed book there is no alternative to the hard editorial grind of inserting cross-references.

Garden types (Part I) are represented by gardens in the domus; gardens in the villa (two chapters); produce gardens; temple gardens and sacred groves; gardens in baths and palaestrae; gardens in gymnasia, schools, and scholae; and tomb gardens. The experience of gardens via literature and art (Part II) comprises chapters on the evidence from Greek literature, largely derived from Byzantine sources; gardens in Roman literature, which is to say, Latin sources; frescoes; mosaics depicting nature; and garden sculpture. The practicalities of gardening (Part III) are covered by landscape design; water supply; gardening techniques; and plants. This section, and the entire text, wraps up with an envoi that focuses on terminology, the archaeology of gardens, and the potential of interdisciplinary approaches, which was one of Jashemski's articles of faith. Notes, glossary, bibliography, and index complete the volume. The glossary comprises 93 terms, most of them Latin, from aedicula to xystus.Footnote ⁷

E. Morvillez treats a wide range of archaeological evidence for the garden in the domus. Readers whose default familiarity is with Pompeii will appreciate the added focus on Roman gardens in France. Homeowners exercised striking ingenuity in creating gardens in whatever space was available, accommodating differences in elevation by exploiting porticoes as viewing platforms or introducing terracing or sunken gardens. Morvillez stresses that porticoes mediate between inside and outside, usually bringing the outside in, but under certain conditions (e.g., in winter) shutting it out by means of intercolumnar screens or even glazing. He is conscious throughout of the garden as a lived space, giving due attention to water features and dining spaces, but also documenting the vulnerability of the garden to encroachment by the expansion of the built environment under pressure from necessity or simply fashion.

K. Hartswick's chapter on the Roman villa garden focuses on literary evidence ranging from Varro and Vitruvius to Statius and Martial. It is followed by an overview of the archaeological evidence by E. Macaulay-Lewis which is more than twice as long as Hartswick's article and entirely independent of it (another instance where editing could have pulled things together). Since Hartswick's article is one of the few that does not have a final section headed “Conclusions,” it is more difficult to identify the major takeaways. Macaulay-Lewis's findings, on the other hand, are clear: she emphasizes the versatility of the concept of a “villa garden,” ranging from a simple kitchen garden to the imperial equivalents of Versailles, and documents many of the features that Morvillez identified for the garden in the domus. These include the dynamic nature of the garden, transformed by seasonal plantings or building projects; the striving for panoramic views and scenic outlooks; the tension between utility and pleasure; and the symbiosis between house and garden. Additionally, she discusses the evocation of mythological landscapes that blur the boundary between fiction and reality, most memorably at Sperlonga, and stresses the extent to which local conditions, climatic factors, and indigenous flora shaped the concept of the Roman garden that was inherited from the metropolis and exported around the empire. She identifies order and symmetry as strong governing principles, arguing that even naturalistic landscapes are contrived: ars est celare artem.

Jashemski's chapter on “produce gardens” covers kitchen gardens, vineyards, orchards, and commercial flower gardens. Much of the material is already scattered throughout her monumental two-volume work on the gardens of the Vesuvian sites, but its cumulative impact is far more than the sum of its parts, and the discussion of vineyards, in particular, is augmented by separate sections devoted to Germania Superior, Pannonia, Britannia, Achaea, Syria-Palestine, and Africa. Anyone unfamiliar with Jashemski's earlier work will be struck by the insights gained from her sympathy for the traditional practices employed by the modern inhabitants of the Roman empire, such as her identification of postholes aligned with vine-roots in the large vineyard at Pompeii (II.5) as traces of an arbor-covered pathway similar to those found in the area today (figs. 4.5A–B).Footnote ⁸

Temple gardens and sacred groves pose two problems: one is that the terminology is unstable; the other is that most of the evidence is literary. M. Carroll succeeds in showing that sometimes archaeology confirms the claims of textual sources, when planting pits or root cavities are found associated with an ἄλσος or a lucus. Beyond text and archaeology, she also demonstrates the usefulness of coins for associating sacred spaces with plantings. Her own excavations at the Temple of Venus in Pompeii receive detailed attention. She suggests that the alternation of planting pits containing pots and stakes with pits that are empty may attest the regular alternation of plants that are tall with others that are short, or those that are columnar with others that branch; or the explanation may simply be that plants requiring propagation in pots were made to alternate with those that did not. The “architectural” nature of the plantings does, however, seem obvious, as the evidence for the plantings aligns with the columns of the temple.Footnote ⁹

J. DeLaine argues against the assumption that gardens were regularly attached to baths and palaestrae, showing that this was an association extrapolated by P. Grimal from the great imperial thermae. She argues instead that baths and gardens each enable sensual pleasure, and that they share a mythological repertoire that conveys this sense (wood- and water-nymphs, Venus, and Dionysus). She concludes that plantings associated with most baths and palaestrae are limited to shade trees, often in conjunction with water features, and that these evoke the original Greek concept of the gymnasium as a site for hard physical exercise. The varied plantings that correspond more closely to the modern concept of a garden are only found in the grand imperial thermae, perhaps influenced by the landscaping associated with luxury villas.

M. Carroll's chapter on gymnasia, schools, and scholae focuses on the Greek East, where archaeological evidence for Roman educational buildings, some of them adapted from pre-existing Greek structures, is more plentiful than in the West. Despite the associations of the Greek philosophical tradition with outdoor instruction and a garden setting (the “Garden” of Epicurus being the most famous example), traces of gardens in the courtyards of these structures are scarce. In the West, it is often hard to determine the function of a building, but a few have been tentatively identified as clubhouses (scholae), whose members might have congregated in the courtyard, although whether these spaces featured any plantings cannot be determined, since, in the case of organic material, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Part I closes with a masterly chapter on the tomb garden by J. Bodel, who harnesses his philological, epigraphic, and archaeological expertise not merely to collect the evidence for funerary gardens but also to analyze their function in Roman society. The chapter ends with a discursive appendix identifying tomb gardens around the empire (232–42). Until now, to my knowledge, the only treatment of tomb gardens as a category has been a chapter by Jashemski, noting (as Bodel also does) difficulties of identification.Footnote ¹⁰ Bodel teaches us how to spot them. Inter alia, you need an enclosing wall, the ancient hallmark of the productive garden, which a tomb garden clearly was (the derivation of paradeisos from Avestan pairi-daeza, “around” and “wall,” is adduced to demonstrate the point). Bodel stresses the close connection between dwelling places in life and in death by examining evidence from well-excavated sites for what he calls the “tomb-villa-garden complex” (207). In these sites, a tomb is located inside a produce garden which is, in its turn, contiguous with the house and its own pleasure garden, so that the four elements comprise a single domestic entity. The variability of the nomenclature for tomb gardens is matched by the vast range in their size, as is immediately apparent from a compact and instructive table (224–25) compiled to help answer the question whether the tomb garden was intended to provide income for the upkeep of the tomb. The evidence being necessarily limited, the answer is tentatively negative: a tomb garden was a fashionable luxury fueling the Roman ambition to outdo others and, more significantly, an emotional crutch for survivors who liked to imagine their loved ones enjoying a comfortable afterlife in a space where their descendants could celebrate their memory with offerings and feasts.

Part II, on the Romans’ experience of their gardens, necessarily adduces evidence from representations in literature and art rather than from traces of actual gardens. A. Littlewood's chapter first mines Greek sources for evidence of Roman gardens in the West and for imaginary gardens described in Greek sources, admitting that these imaginative descriptions are more common than actual accounts of Roman gardens or their Greek prototypes. He goes on to survey the evidence for gardens in the Greek East from Late Antiquity and the Early Byzantine period, identifying three ways in which Christianity promoted gardening: monasticism advocated horticulture, urban and suburban churches were surrounded by plantings (as were pagan shrines), and church interiors were decorated with images from the natural world. The chapter concludes with an overview of the Geoponica, a 10th-c. amalgam of two earlier agricultural and horticultural manuals that are themselves compilations, in Greek, of sources going as far back as the Hellenistic period. While Littlewood's chapter is useful for its collection of passages, a study of early Christians and the garden by R. Lane Fox applies a more analytical approach to some of the same material, postulating a Christian typology of flowers, discussing the function of the garden in Christian texts, and showing how rarely literate Christians actually dirtied their hands in the soil instead of delegating the job to underlings.Footnote ¹¹ Littlewood's brief treatment of the Geoponica is particularly welcome, however, because the technical treatises of Cato, Varro, and Columella in Latin receive only brief mention in the following chapter by S. Myers, whose main focus is on the ambiguous moral and ethical freight of gardens in the prose and verse of the Late Republic and Early Empire.Footnote ¹²

Despite the limitation implied in its title, B. Bergmann's chapter, “Frescoes in Roman gardens,” discusses paintings of gardens (many of them miniature depictions on the dado) as well as paintings of other subjects depicted in gardens (chiefly on the walls of peristyles and porticoes). The chapter deploys two of her signature approaches to Roman painting. The first is the way in which a painting conditioned the Roman viewer's experience of the space that it decorated. The second is the way in which the artist's depiction of perspective undermines the angle from which it is seen by the viewer, thereby compromising the “realism” of the depiction.Footnote ¹³ Bergmann shows that the symmetry and order in the gardens of the miniature depictions, and the inclusion of a distinct boundary, are ubiquitous features of actual gardens as revealed by archaeology, whereas the abundance of flora and fauna depicted on entire walls in Roman interiors tends to compress seasonal variations into a single illusionistic and idealized representation. This idealization, she argues, contrasts with depictions on the walls surrounding the garden itself, which mimic and reinforce the combination of natural and man-made features in it (i.e., fountains and sculptures) and simultaneously incorporate fictive elements to introduce an “alternative realm.” While depictions of gardens considerably outnumber other subjects on outdoor façades, Bergmann reminds us that a narrative image such as Orpheus in the eponymous house at VI.14.20 in Pompeii would never have been seen in its entirety, in the way in which this painting is seen in a reproduction today, since the viewer's sightlines would have been obstructed and the image was too large for a viewer to take it all in at once. These limitations, so easily overlooked, are crucial to a proper appreciation of the painted backdrop against which the plantings and installations of a Roman garden would have been experienced.

While paintings of and in gardens are amply attested in the Roman world, mosaics of and in gardens survive less frequently, partly (no doubt) because in gardens they will not have been laid on the ground but on the walls of pools and nymphaea. The magnificent nymphaeum at Massa Lubrense on the Sorrentine peninsula, whose mosaic-lined niches sparkle with garden scenes, is illustrated in Bergmann's article (298–99, figs. 11.17A–B), and A.-A. Malek alludes briefly to a mosaic of Oceanus that lines a shallow pool in the House of the Nymphs at Nabeul in Tunisia (333). But despite the title of her chapter, “Mosaics and nature in the Roman domus,” Malek focuses almost exclusively on floor mosaics in North Africa, with a short excursus on the Lycurgus mosaic at Vienne in France (324–26). She is concerned, first, with “immersive images,” stylized representations of branches, flowers, or vines “strewn” on the floor in an abstract design or “growing” out of urns in the corners, either in an all-over pattern or as a massive frame surrounding a tiny narrative emblema – or, in the case of the Lycurgus mosaic, a disembodied figure – in the center. It is hard to resist the urge to find hidden meanings in such a remarkable image as the “Jonchée” mosaic from Caesarea in Mauretania, with its strewn “carpet” of flowers and laurel branches (fig. 12.1), but it seems a stretch to conclude that “This unusual mosaic, with its erudite allusions to the ancient past and to philosophical landscapes, implies a sophisticated owner, steeped in classical learning” (321). Second, Malek discusses narrative mosaics laid adjacent to peristyles with views over a garden, but I found the associations that she draws between them a little difficult to follow without accompanying ground plans.

Part II concludes with a chapter on sculpture in gardens. K. Hartswick suggests that most of the large sculptures that are known (or assumed) to have been displayed in domestic contexts – both statues and columns – were placed in gardens, on the basis that these were spaces accessible to guests and therefore suitable for showing off the owner's most impressive possessions. But he simultaneously acknowledges that modern findspots are an unreliable guide to the original locations of display, the crucial exception being Pompeii, where objects too large to be carted away at short notice must have been displayed in antiquity exactly where they were found more than 1,500 years later. He draws attention to the contrast between the dynamic appearance of live plants and the static form of inanimate sculptures, and, like Bergmann, he encourages us to reconstruct the experience of the ancient viewer, seeing these artifacts within the architectural context that served to frame the ensemble of nature and artifice.

Apart from Bodel's chapter on tomb gardens, Part III, “Making the Garden,” is likely to cover ground least familiar to classical scholars. Since the construction of an ancient garden is better preserved in the archaeological record than its plantings, modern landscape architects are able to postulate the stages by which it was designed and built. The chapter by K. Gleason and M. Palmer traces the construction of a hypothetical section of a garden from the initial survey of the site through the construction of the surrounding peristyle to the final planting, each stage illustrated by a 3-D computerized model. Enough of the Roman built environment remains for historians to trace the ebb and flow of architectural fashions, but, for changes in taste in designing a garden, they rely mainly on remarks in textual sources about crazes for imported plants. Yet, as this chapter shows, the balance of plants versus architectural features in the Roman garden tells its own story: the ambulationes of the Late Republic, lined with exotic plants, give way in the Early Empire to a preference for architectural elements marking water features and dining installations.Footnote ¹⁴ The chapter shares many diagrams and illustrations with a chapter by the same authors in the Sourcebook for Garden Archaeology, but in that chapter there is more detail about the computerized models and other tools that enable modern archaeologists to visualize ancient evidence.Footnote ¹⁵

The chapter on water and water technology by G. Jansen adopts a strictly archaeological approach, explicitly excluding from discussion the evidence from texts and wall paintings. Jansen focuses on four sites – Pompeii, Ostia, Conimbriga (Portugal), and Ampurias (Spain) – where it is possible to trace the water supply more clearly than in the city of Rome itself. In each of these sites, water is supplied variously from three sources – wells, rainwater cisterns, and aqueducts – in accordance with five key factors: structure of subsoil; depth of water table and quality of resulting water; slope of terrain; rate of flow from the spring feeding the pipes; and population density. Jansen stresses that the challenge to the Roman gardener was not only how to bring water into the garden but also how to get rid of it, since perennially flowing fountains and aqueducts posed a risk of flooding that could ruin a garden just as surely as a drought could.

Jashemski's chapter on garden practices and techniques combines the evidence of archaeology with texts and artworks, especially mosaics and wall painting, and pays a well-deserved tribute to the ground-breaking work by K. D. White, with its meticulous combination of evidence from both text and archaeology.Footnote ¹⁶ Her subsequent chapter on garden plants, co-authored with K. Gleason and M. Herchenbach, is notable for a section on recent scholarship, arranged geographically, that identifies the strides being made in the contributions of archaeobotany. In analyzing the evidence of pollen, phytoliths (fossilized particles of plant tissue), charcoal, root cavities, and carbonized plant remains, scientists are able to distinguish between plants imported as foodstuffs, medicines, furniture, construction materials, etc., and those cultivated in situ. Readers should, however, be aware that, despite the title “Plants of the Roman garden,” the chapter is only incidentally concerned with the types of plant actually grown there. For information on that crucial topic, including a catalog of 184 plants attested in various sources from Pompeii, it is necessary to consult an earlier work co-authored by Jashemski and two of her collaborators.Footnote ¹⁷

A concluding chapter by Jashemski's three co-editors and M. Palmer revisits the vocabulary of words for “garden” in Latin (hortus/horti, paradeisos, virid(i)arium, and xystus); enunciates an object lesson in what can be learned from the investigation of soil layers (the stratigraphic method pioneered by B. Cunliffe at Fishbourne in England and synthesized by Gleason); cautions against succumbing to the temptation of replanting an ancient garden (a process guaranteed to destroy the ancient evidence); and ends with a brief paean to the collaborative nature of garden archaeology, which demands specialists in numerous technical areas.

Any form of categorization risks imposing artificial distinctions that may distort the evidence. As is recognized by Bodel in his chapter, separating “produce gardens” from “temple gardens” and “tomb gardens” begs the question whether worship of the gods and rituals of remembrance are associated with commercial enterprise. The implications of such an association can be far reaching: Jashemski discovered that the surroundings of the sanctuary at Sant'Abbondio outside Pompeii used to be richly planted with vines, which seemed to her to clinch its identification, followed here by Carroll (162), as a “Temple of Dionysos.” But the complex has recently been reidentified as a sanctuary of the Italic god Liber, and the surrounding vineyards are postulated to have been the property of small farmers of free status, whose mores chime more closely with Italian simplicitas than with the Hellenistic luxury associated with Dionysos.Footnote ¹⁸

This book was a long time in production. Evidently, not all the authors updated their chapters, so that some relevant contributions to a related volume are quoted while others in the same publication are not.Footnote ¹⁹ The photographs (almost all in color) and the exquisite drawings and site plans (some drawn specially for this project by Victoria I) are fundamental to the usefulness of the volume. The layout of the illustrations, for which Victoria I is also responsible, achieves the near-impossible in placing almost every image in close proximity to the place where it is discussed in the text. The decision to limit the captions to site and source, however, makes some of the plans, in particular, hard to navigate (e.g., are the 34 planting pits round the temple of Juno at Gabii meant to correspond to the 35 dark squares on the plan or the 30 light squares?). The pairing of a site plan with a visualization or a photograph is potentially helpful, but matching one to the other can be difficult without corresponding arrows and labels, or (in the case of a photo) an indication of cardinal direction in the caption (e.g., figs. 3.1A–B, 3.11A–B, 3.12A–B, 3.19A–B, 18.1A–B, 18.4A–B). Since the running heads for the text give chapter titles without numbers, whereas the headings and running heads for the endnotes give chapter numbers without titles, readers would be well advised to memorize the number of each chapter in advance, to reduce frustration in trying to consult the 2,132 notes. The onerous task of consolidating the bibliography for an 18-chapter volume has resulted in some irregularities that could make it easy to overlook an item, as I did when trying to find an article by A. R. Littlewood, for whom eight items are grouped under three separate entries. Despite the involvement of four editors and a team of copyeditors, the volume – admittedly an enormous undertaking by any standard – contains more errors than one ought to expect from a major university press.Footnote ²⁰

Until recently, a detailed modern commentary on any of the agricultural authors has been entirely lacking. Many of the chapters in Gardens of the Roman Empire make fleeting reference to Cato, Varro, Virgil's Georgics, and Columella, and Jashemski's chapter on gardening practices and techniques relies to some extent on the agricultural writers. But the detailed analysis of horticultural techniques in these works, which are often a confusing blend of practical knowledge and superstition, begs for detailed explication. Since this book appeared, the scholarly landscape has changed with the publication of a compendious commentary on the surviving portions of the 3rd-c. manual De arboribus pomiferis, by Gargilius Martialis, an author scarcely mentioned here.Footnote ²¹ As an intermediate figure between Columella in the 1st c. and Palladius in the 5th c., Gargilius is heir to one and anticipates the other, and therefore this commentary sheds light on the entire tradition. It deserves prominence in the online catalog.

Jashemski took it upon herself to make archaeologists aware of the garden, “by its very nature the most fragile element of a culture” (as Morvillez puts it, 71), and to develop techniques for identifying its scant remains and for documenting and preserving them. A glance at the list of illustrations (x–xxviii) shows how many photographs and diagrams – not just in Jashemski's own chapters – come from the Wilhelmina F. Jashemski Trust at the University of Maryland. Many of the photographs in this priceless documentary archive have now been digitized and incorporated into the invaluable website PompeiiinPictures, compiled by J. and B. Dunn.Footnote ²² This lavish volume, in many ways a synthesis of research at the time of Jashemski's death, is a testament to her mission to save Roman gardens from oblivion. It makes clear how central gardens were to lived experience throughout the Roman empire, and how urgently their traces should be protected.