Studies of Roman and more broadly ancient gardens have been intrinsically linked to Wilhelmina Jashemski and Pompeii, where she did the vast majority of her ground-breaking scholarship. While extremely important garden archaeology was conducted in the provinces, most notably by Barry Cunliffe at Fishbourne in the 1960s and by Ehud Netzer and Kathryn Gleason at Jericho in the late 1980s, garden archaeology was, for many years, focused on Italy with a particular emphasis on the Bay of Naples. This began to change in the 1990s. Archaeologists increasingly excavated gardens outside of Italy. The ongoing excavations in Petra, where a lavish garden-pool complex was uncovered by Leigh-Ann Bedal, and in Aphrodisias, where a monumental public palm grove was discovered during the NYU excavations, have demonstrated that gardens were an integral aspect of Roman culture across the Empire.

There has been extensive research on the gardens in the north-western provinces by non-English-speaking scholars, but much of this scholarship, especially Francophone work on the gardens of Roman Gaul, was only accessible through articles published in regional journals, which were difficult to obtain. Therefore, this publication is a welcome addition as it focuses on Francophone scholarship and presents a great deal of archaeological evidence for Roman gardens from outside Italy, particularly in Roman Gaul and to a lesser extent in North Africa and Egypt.

This publication includes papers presented at three conferences organized by and held at the Universities of Paris West, Nanterre La Défense and UMR ArScAn (MAE René-Ginouvès) in January 2009, October 2009 and January 2010. These conferences sought to discuss new approaches and methods for garden archaeology, as well as how to theorize, define and conceptualize the garden as a space. It is unclear from the two-page introduction whether all of the papers that were presented are published here, and whether the three themes of the book served as the basis for each of the conferences.

The book is organized into three thematic sections. The first section is entitled, ‘Theme I. Archéologie du jardin: diversité, organisation, équipment et productions’. The seven papers in this section focus on the diversity of approaches, methods and evidence used in garden archaeology. Five of the seven (A.-A. Malek, H. Dessales, E. Chassillan, A. Tricoche and C. Cribellier) discuss gardens in the provinces of the Roman Empire, while the final two (P. Van Ossel and A. Heitzmann) consider fifteenth- and sixteenth-century garden spaces in the quarter of Saint-Honoré, Paris, and the garden of the Pavilion around the Trianon at Versailles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively. The first five papers also employ different approaches and utilize different evidence, demonstrating that garden archaeology often involves excavation and scientific study, as well as visual and textual analysis. These papers establish the diversity of gardens in the Roman world from the immersive, three-dimensional quality of garden mosaic pavements in North Africa (Malek) to the funerary gardens of Roman Alexandria (Chassilan). The last two papers (Van Ossel and Heitzmann) are not focused on Roman-era gardens. These two papers, however, present the most complete archaeological studies. Heitzmann's paper is effectively a mini-excavation report on some of the gardens at Versailles. It also incorporated stratigraphy and pollen analysis, thereby presenting a clear, concise model for garden archaeology, even though the site is chronologically much later than the Roman gardens discussed.

The second part of the book, ‘Theme II. Archéologie environmentale du jardin: méthodes d'approaches’, is composed of four papers. These are on archaeobotany (F. Pilon, K. Maames and F. Jedrusiak), transformations of soil (M. Pieters), the contribution of geoarchaeology in understanding garden and unbuilt space (C. Cammas, C. Vissac, Q. Borderie and C. David), and the scientific methods used in archaeological studies of wood (A. Dietrich). Although these papers touch on some of the major approaches in environmental archaeology, their brevity (a mere forty pages) results in this section being disappointingly short and under-developed. These papers assume a great deal of background knowledge; therefore, they are less useful to readers not already versed in the different applications of archaeological science to the study of gardens.

The final section of the book, ‘Theme III. Regards croisés et approches comparatives: les modèles en question’, seeks to present comparative interpretative and scholarly approaches and models for the archaeology of gardens. The section seems to lack a clear rationale. It is hard to establish the thematic relationships between the papers, as well as their theoretical or methodological connections, because the papers are so broad in their geographic and chronological scope. The papers range from the economics of Mesopotamian gardens (F. Joannès) to the kitchen and fruit gardens of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century France (F. Queiller) and the recent gardens and forests of Polynesia (H. Guiot). The individual papers on the transformation of late antique Roman gardens (E. Morvilleiz) and on the definition and boundaries of a Roman garden (C. Saliou) both offer original and interesting perspectives on these topics. Two other papers in this section consider the textual and art historical evidence for the funerary gardens of Alexandria (A.-M. Guimer-Sorbets) and the legacy of the Roman villa in the Maghreb and the Iberian peninsula during the medieval period (M. Terrasse).

Although the papers in the volume are short, like academic hors d'oeuvre, they provide a tantalizing taste of the wide-ranging and important recent work done by Francophone archaeologists and scholars on Roman gardens. Together the papers about Roman gardens demonstrate that gardens were nexuses of Roman culture, but that these were reinterpreted and redefined locally in the Empire, while other papers provide stimulating ways of thinking about gardens or scientific techniques that can be applied within the archaeology of gardens. The volume would have benefited from a more robust introduction, as well as a conclusion where the editors might have attempted to interconnect and synthesize the three themes of the conferences, the book and the individual contributions. Such an introduction and/or conclusion would have made the volume more accessible to non-garden specialists, as well as more useful to scholars who work on gardens and who seek to identify new techniques and/or theories which can be used in the study of gardens.

The bibliographies, despite their extreme brevity, are a starting point to explore these topics and Francophone scholarship in more detail. Many of the black-and-white images are grainy, and it is difficult to discern subtle details in certain images, especially those of soil stratigraphy. The volume, despite this, is a welcome contribution to the literature on garden archaeology and scholarship because it makes French-language scholarship more accessible. The lack of synthesis and connection amongst the papers and themes in this volume, however, means that as a whole it does not advance debates about the study, approaches and methods used in garden archaeology as much as one might hope.