Victoria Austen’s Analysing the boundaries of the ancient Roman garden offers a timely and incisive rethinking of how Roman gardens were conceptualised, experienced and represented. Its publication coincides with a broader surge of landscape-focused scholarship in that year (Powers Reference Powers2023; Zarmakoupi Reference Zarmakoupi2023), reflecting the extent to which ancient environments and spatial practices have become central again to current methodological debates. Austen contributes to this renewed attention with a theoretically rigorous yet materially grounded framework for interpreting garden space as a dynamic, relational and fundamentally ambiguous category. Building on work that has stressed the garden as a culturally loaded landscape and microcosm of ideal space, Austen’s core argument is that garden boundaries function less as fixed lines than as porous and interpretive ‘frames’.
The Introduction establishes the stakes, asking the deceptively simple question: ‘what is a garden?’ Austen shows how definitions of gardens across cultures consistently comprise two components: enclosure and cultivation. The etymology of hortus, chortos and paradeisos reinforces boundedness as foundational to the garden’s conceptual history. Yet physical demarcation is only part of the story. Drawing on spatial and landscape theory and engaging with the work of Diana Spencer (Reference Spencer2010) and Katherine von Stackelberg (Reference von Stackelberg2009), Austen argues that gardens constitute intensified landscapes—spaces socially produced through practices of cultivation, framing, memory and ideology. Their boundaries operate simultaneously as pragmatic separators and conceptual mediators, marking the garden as different from its surroundings while remaining in tension with what lies beyond. This articulation of the garden as a liminal, relational and semiotically loaded space sets the tone for the book’s intermedial approach.
Chapter 1 lays out the typological and theoretical scaffolding that underpins the study. Austen surveys the terminological and functional diversity of Roman garden spaces—utilitarian, sacred and ornamental—while emphasising their shared logic of separation. Yet these separations are never absolute. Roman gardens consistently dissolve the very binaries they establish: practical versus aesthetic; urban versus rural; architecture versus nature. To account for this instability, Austen adopts Soja’s ‘Thirdspace’ model—drawing on von Stackelberg (Reference von Stackelberg2009)—in which material gardens (Firstspace), their representations (Secondspace) and culturally lived garden experience (Thirdspace) intersect. She pairs this theoretical model with Derrida’s theorisation of the parergon and Foucauldian heterotopias, ultimately reframing ‘boundary’ as ‘frame’, following Verity Platt and Michael Squire (Reference Platt and Squire2017)—a device that both delimits and generates meaning. Together these frameworks recast garden boundaries not as architectural enclosures but as conceptual devices that load space with layered meanings. The chapter thereby establishes the tools that structure the book’s analyses: garden space as a zone where boundaries are constructed, challenged and transgressed.
The three central chapters demonstrate this method across a carefully chosen set of comparative case studies. Chapter 2 turns to the classical sources of Virgil’s Georgics and Columella’s De Re Rustica, examining how the hortus appears in agronomic writing as a space both marginal to and constitutive of agriculture. Austen shows that Virgil frames the excursus on the old Corycian gardener (Georgics 4.116–48) through a pointed detachment so that the garden becomes a reflection on its place within the larger agrarian order. Turning to Columella, she interprets the prose preface to Book 10 as a paratext that both minimises and elevates the garden: the garden poem is at once ancillary and indispensable, revealing the underlying instability of agronomic categories. Throughout, Austen uses temporality and paratextual framing to demonstrate that literary gardens function as liminal zones—neither fully inside nor fully outside agriculture—exposing the porousness of Roman agrarian systems.
Chapter 3 shifts to Augustan Rome, pairing the images of the Ara Pacis with the frescos in the Garden Room at the Villa of Livia to discuss the ambiguity of garden space in the context of Augustan ideology. The vegetal friezes of the Ara Pacis, with their hyper-fertile but carefully ordered botanical programme, operate as conceptual engines that frame the monument’s spatial, temporal and ideological meaning within the deliberately greenscaped Campus Martius and Augustus’s broader vegetal mythology. Livia’s painted subterranean garden room at Prima Porta, immersive and perspectivally unstable, operates similarly by dissolving architectural boundaries while multiplying conceptual ones. By reading these compositions through the analytic of the boundary-as-frame, Austen contributes to discourses on how Augustan visual culture internalised the logic of garden space—showing that its porous borders, suspended temporalities and capacity to hold contradictions functioned as a mode of political communication.
Chapter 4 brings the argument into the elite domestic sphere by focusing on Villa A at Oplontis, southern Italy. Austen follows up on the notions of integration and mediation, as highlighted by Bettina Bergmann (Reference Bergmann and McGinn2002) and this reviewer (Zarmakoupi Reference Zarmakoupi2014), to explore the multimedia environment of this villa through a critical analysis of specific garden spaces and views. Austen juxtaposes Pliny’s ekphrastic villa descriptions (Epistulae 2.17 and 5.6) with the architectural and pictorial programme of the villa to argue that elite villa culture conceptualised gardens not as stable, bounded entities but as multivalent, perspectival constructs. Garden boundaries frame space and simultaneously undermine the frame; they distinguish (distinguit) and blend (miscet). In this setting, the villa garden becomes at once a framed space and the frame itself, extending the book’s central claim that Roman gardens are inherently unstable boundary constructs shaped to orchestrate perception and unsettle categorical divides.
In closing, Austen turns to an anti-garden: the sinister nemus in Seneca’s play Thyestes. This ekphrastic grove—lifeless, unpruned, filled with underworld symbolism and embedded within the predatory palace of Atreus—represents a radical departure from the dynamics traced throughout the book. Here, boundaries do not open, mediate or hold oppositions in tension; they collapse entirely. The grove becomes a heterotopia of terror rather than ambivalence, a ‘non-garden’ whose inversion of renewal, containment and cyclical growth mirrors the moral and dynastic degeneration at the heart of Seneca’s play. By concluding with this anti-garden, Austen underscores how Roman culture could imagine the breakdown of garden boundaries not as ambiguity but as pathology—thereby highlighting, through contrast, the generative instability that characterises the gardens examined throughout the book. Austen’s volume is thus a valuable contribution to Roman garden studies: it is theoretically sophisticated, intermedial and attentive to its productive tensions.
