Garden scholarship is by now an established field in the discipline of Classics, pioneered by W.F. Jashemski (The Gardens of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the Villas Destroyed by Vesuvius [vol. 1, 1979; vol. 2, 1993]), developed by K. von Stackelberg (The Roman Garden. Space, Sense and Society [2009]), and further by a large edited volume with key experts contributing chapters on a wide range of issues, which has since been launched into an online database of gardens (W.F. Jashemski, K. Gleason, K. Hartswick and A. Malek [edd.], Gardens of the Roman Empire [2018]). These studies have approached the garden as a site of interaction, and garden scholarship played a key role in the spatial turn within the discipline in the last decade. It is in this rich vein of scholarship that A.'s monograph sits, adding to it at a time when broader ancient environmental studies are coming to the fore and sitting neatly between the spatial and the environmental turns of Classics.
In a move away from traditional spatial understandings, A. rejects outright the traditional framework of B. Hillier and J. Hanson (The Social Logic of Space [1984]), though its absence is not especially noticeable until the conclusion (p. 143), and instead proposes a reading of Roman garden space through E. Soja's Thirdspace model (Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined Spaces [1996]), briefly introduced in the opening chapter (p. 20). This model relies on a bridge between the conceptual and the reality, and it is this bridge, or blur, that A. fully embraces in her analysis of real and imagined garden spaces in the Roman world, covered in four chapters.
The opening chapter, ‘Setting the Framework’, reveals the distinct types of gardens in the Roman world and establishes the categories through which the rest of the book must be read. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 take on the topics of agricultural, sacred and domestic gardens in Rome, with each focusing on paired case studies. These case studies, Virgil's Georgics with Columella's De re rustica, the Ara Pacis Augustae with the garden room of the Villa of Livia, and Pliny's garden letters with the gardens of Villa A at Oplontis, cross discipline boundaries within Classics and reflect the broad appeal of A.'s work. Taken together, these chapters build a compelling narrative of blurred lines across the corpus of Roman evidence. However, readers may be led to wonder whether, if A. can draw such clear boundaries between agricultural, sacred and domestic, the blurring of the boundaries is perhaps not as ubiquitous as A. argues.
Chapter 2 takes on two disparate authors, in two complex texts, one well-trodden, the other less so, and A. makes a good effort to unite scholarship on both into one chapter. It is difficult, however, in a book concerning gardens, to begin with literary gardens. There are complex theoretical concepts at play here, from heterotopias to topopoetics, and the chapter ends with a focus on J. Derrida's work. These concepts are often introduced to the reader, but we move on so quickly from introduction to use that, if the reader is unfamiliar with the terminology at play, they might struggle to keep up in this breakneck tour of often complex Latin literature.
We move from these literary gardens, and the blurring of boundaries here, to the third chapter, ‘Augustus’ Garden Room? Re-Framing the Ara Pacis Augustae’, which reclassifies the Ara Pacis as a lucus in the heart of the Campus Martius and pairs it with another famous Augustan ‘fake’ garden, the frescoes of the garden room at the Villa of Livia. Here, detailed readings of Strabo combined with scene analysis of the botanical lower frieze on the monument are taken to present the Ara Pacis as a key part of Augustus’ ‘greening’ of Rome, a popular trope in environmental Classics. Here, A. raises key questions about the complex messaging that has been suggested by G. Caneva (Il codice botanico di Augusto [2010]) and instead reads it within a broader, flexible programme of Augustan propaganda, pushing back against P. Zanker's unificatory approach to Augustan art (The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus [1988]). Boundaries, for A., are blurred across the Roman world, not solely within and around gardens.
The fourth and final chapter, ‘Distinguit et Miscet: Framing Roman Villa Gardens’, picks up on the domestic garden, focusing on both Pliny's imagined and self-portrayed garden, which blurs the boundary between art and nature, and the gardens of Villa A at Oplontis. In this last example we see physical art reflecting nature, and architecture framing garden features. Historically, the focus on Pliny's garden letters, 2.17 and 5.6, has been to use them as ways to learn about the gardener, while A. intends to use them to learn more about gardens, and to combine them with modern understandings of Thirdspace to read backwards and to find the blurred boundary of nature and art in Roman gardens.
A. manages to blur these boundaries skilfully throughout, and by the close of the monograph, readers find themselves in support of the key premise: that Romans did not have a direct boundary for garden spaces, that borders were blurred and that even in unexpected contexts, like Seneca's Thyestes, with which A. closes the book, we see an outside space deep inside the palace, a transitory grove made eternal. The work is itself a blurring of the boundaries, sitting between the spatial and the environmental turns, a consequence of embracing approaches like Thirdspace and applying them to environmental features.
A.'s work does leave room for further exploration. She teases at the opening of the monograph a relationship between Roman women, control and gardening (p. 12, citing Plin. HN 19.57). Elsewhere, the artificiality of Pliny the Younger's gardens, presented as an artwork, and using terms such as hortus pinguis (referenced by A. on pp. 113–14), could be linked to imago hortorum, the phrase used by Pliny the Elder to describe the window boxes (Plin. HN. 19.59; K. von Stackelberg, The Roman Garden. Space, Sense and Society [2009], p. 2) that adorned city windows. A.'s monograph prompts further discussion on gardens and their role as sites, it tears down the boundaries between the built and the planted, and builds on a well-established theoretical basis to engage with the garden not as a space separate from the natural and from the unnatural, dealt with on a case-by-case basis, but instead universalises the blurred boundaries: gardens are, for A., simultaneously natural and unnatural, real and artificial. Romans understood these boundaries as constantly flexible, if they even existed in the first place, and so, A. argues, should we.
