Roman gardening

I had missed the sad fact that Wilhelmina Jashemski died just before Christmas, aged 97. Hardly a household name, she had been Professor at the University of Maryland for almost 40 years, retiring in the 1980s. It was, however, thanks to her that we have a reasonably good idea what the average Roman garden once looked like.  I never met her .. and our only contact was when she asked me to write an article on ancient cucumber frames (sic -- which I regretfully declined). But I find that I’ve been using her more and more while I’ve been writing about Pompeii.

Jashemski’s triumph was to see that you could do a proper archaeology of Roman gardens. That meant  not just picking up all those microscopic traces of seeds and pollen that earlier archaeologists simply didn’t spot. Jashesmski did for plant roots what Giuseppe Fiorelli did for dead bodies.

That is to say, where Fiorelli in the late nineteenth century saw that you could pour Plaster of Paris into the cavities left in the lava by decaying corpses and reveal the shapes of the bodies, Jashemski saw that you could do the same with  the roots of plants … and so see what big trees/shrubs had been growing.

Whole gardens came to life.

I’ve been looking at a few of these for my Pompeii book. One of them – the garden in the site in Pompeii known as the “House of the Chaste Lovers” (called after some rather coy kissing in the wall paintings) – is a text book case of how we imagine any classical garden to be. It’s a smallish garden within a colonnaded courtyard. Really careful excavation has shown that there were geometrical flower beds, marked off with decorative fences made of reeds. The flower beds contained nice colour contrasts of little cypress trees and roses, with lower-growing plants round the edges. The boundary wall sported a luscious vine.

The excavators concluded, from the number of cockle shells found there, that the ancient Pompeians would have wandered through the garden, eating their cockles, then chucking the shells away. Another solution is that the garden was a convenient dumping ground for any used shell from any part of the house (a bit like cigarette butts now).

The other one that I’ve found really interesting is in the “House of  Julius Polybius”, just a few doors away from "Chaste Lovers". The space is roughly the same, and it’s also in an open court in the centre of the house. Bt this time Jashemski’s work revealed a quite different plan. This plot was not an ornamental garden at all. It was packed full of fruit trees and probably a couple of olives, and against the boundary wall more trees were espaliered.

The guess is that these might have been something exotic, like lemons. The evidence? Well around the roots, there were still fragments of the terracotta pots in which these trees had been planted out – and that’s the kind of process that Pliny recommends for more delicate plants.

It was in other words a working garden, not an elegant place for a promenade at all. Further proof of this was found in the print of a ladder some 8 metres tall found on the surface of the soil. It tapered towards the top, and Jashemski’s workmen instantly recognised it as the kind of ladder they used for picking fruit.

Hers was a brilliant career, literally bringing to life a whole forgotten (or at least mis-remembered) area of the ancient world – and giving us back some of its blooms.

Comments

[nick]

Paulo - frafting a tomato onto a potato is certainly possible - at least according to my mother who did this as a project at teacher training college in the 1950's and has reminded us of it frequently over the years!

[Tony Francis]

The American Heritage dictionary has the derivation of the word "villa" under the Indo-European root "weik". This is where I got the notion it was related to "vicinity". There is nothing about "hair", though, which I think is odd. To engage in jejune etymology, go to these sites which contain the same information as my 1967 edition of the dictionary:
http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE558.html
http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE559.html
http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE560.html
One of the sites concerning Italian gardens states that one can get rid of slugs and snails by putting glasses of beer or wine out. The slugs and snails will crawl into the glass and drown, apparently in a happy, intoxicated state. My neighbor advised me to do this. This is the same neighbor who was growing heirloom tomatoes. I ended up with a bunch of rancid glasses of beer in the garden, and no slugs or snails. Worst of all, I wasted a really good beer in the process. Keeping some grain around encourages birds. who do a good job of picking off the slugs. But the tomatoes must be picked at first sign of pinkness, or the birds will pluck them as well. It doesn't affect the taste to pick them early. This same neighbor puts long blue plastic strips on poles which he claims frigthens the birds away. I am not sure this works.

[Paul Potts]

I was once told that it is possible to graft a tomatato shoot onto the top of a potato plant, giving plant that produces both. Now, if we had aubergines as well, what more do we want? Deadly nightshade perhaps. Perhaps the genetic scientists are aready working on this, but I fear it's the poisons they would be interested in.

Paulo

[Eileen]

i think Tony must mean the word vicino, not vinci. vinci is the 2nd person of the italian verb vincere-to win, conquer, etc.

villa derives from the latin vicus,(village) as does the italian vicino which means nearby. vicino/vicina can also mean neighbor.

[Tony Francis]

I can't find any of Jashemski's work on line for free. A site with a lot of information is:
http://www.gardenvisit.com/
This contains several complete books, including Marie-Luise Gothein's 1913 "History of Garden Art" and Tom Turner's "Garden Design in the British Isles - History and Styles since 1650." The former has a large section on Roman gardens. Look under the "History and Theory" section. Turner's book lacks some of the photos of the original.
There are some nice photos:
http://www.lifeinitaly.com/garden/roman-garden.asp
The Wiki article is on a junior high level, although there are couple of pictures:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_gardens
Do the words "villa" or "villous" come from the fact that country dwellers were hairy and unkempt? I have also seen that these words are closely related to "vinci", meaning "in the vicnity of", but this seems less likely to me.

[Tony Francis]

The Willa Cather books "One of Ours" and "My Antonia" can be read, for free, on line at:
http://www.classicreader.com/
In fact, they state there are close to 3500 books on this site which can be read.
"My Antonia" was made into a movie in 1995. The Romanian Elina Lowensohn played Antonia, even though the character was supposed to be a Czech. She gave an impressive performance as a teenager, despite being close to thirty years old when this was filmed.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0530581/
Neil Patrick Harris played Jim.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Patrick_Harris
As I recall, the film seemed to end about the time Antonia became heavy with child, and without a husband. Apparently a lot of the book was left out of the movie. Still, it is worth watching. Willa Cather's notes about My Antonia are found:
http://www.bookrags.com/notes/ma/

[anthony alcock]

Merely wish to endorse the sentiments of William Adams. Well done.

[Fran Saban]

Re: Cockle shells. Would slugs/snails have been a problem? If so, this might explain the shells...

[Tony Francis]

Dearest Foska: Unfortunately, Pangea is all we have. Here is the logic: flowering plants clearly developed 100 million years ago. They may have developed 140 million years ago. Chemicals associated with flowers have been detected in fossils 250 million years old. So flowers may have appeared 250 million years ago. Tomatoes and Eggplant are members of the flowering division Magnoliophyta and the family Solanaceae.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnoliophyta
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanaceae
According to Pangea theory, South America and India were in fairly close proximity until the mid-Cretacious period, which ended 65 million years ago. If this doesn't seem like empirical science, you would be correct. As a wise-aker recently posted on an adjacent site (paraphrasing): "The science of theology is akin to the science of unicorn husbandry. I believe in fact based science." Too bad for him. If theology is unicorn husbandry, then we can say, with validity, that evolution is akin to ghost (read: dead) husbandry. Astrophysics is akin to phantom husbandry. Having spent several years studying quantum mechanics, I am not sure it qualifies as either science or husbandry. But if it did, it would be closest to a solitary, non-reproductive, isolated mimicry of husbandry. So, we can say your jejune etymology is acceptable. Even your skepticism would be justified. Concerning Pangea: the first time I heard about it was when I was with the US Army in Desert Storm. Someone asked me: "You believe in Pangea, don't you?" I asnwered: "Huh?...What?" That's how I learned about it. The wiki article does have a cool animation, though.

[abc]

Elegance is also a relative term - "not an elegant place for a promenade at all". Prince Charles could have a garden which he in fact calls a "working garden" and yet others might call it elegant and unlabourly. It's important, I think, not to make judgments based on appearances as that leads to all forms of bias.

[abc]

this is right and the first rung of the ladder should work with the next rung of the ladder etc - not the higher rung with the immediately lower. problem happens when the next rung breaks, you can either use the ladder parallel or counter to it or do something else. the point is that the next rung up was spoilt and broken.

[SW Foska]

thanks tony. I did not know about Pangea, although I did once submit a scholarly article with the opening line "All continents have pointy bottoms, but some continents' bottoms are pointier than others'", citing Alexander von Humboldt in support. I was very indignant when the peer reviewer mistook my apophthegm for a quotation from von Humboldt.
But if Pangea is true, it is meaningless to cite one or other origin for the different plants. Sorry if my etymological excursus appeared jejune in America. Yours ever, SWF

[Tony Francis]

The tomato, eggplant (as aubergine is called in the US), the potato, the petunia and other flowering plants are members of the "nightshade" (Solanaceae) family.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggplant
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato
Some of these plants produce a variety of drugs called "alkaloids" such as cocaine, morphine, caffeine, theophlyllin, quinine, and various anti-cancer drugs among others.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaloid
If one believes in evolution and Pangea, it is easy to explain eggplant in India and tomatoes in South America. India and South America were once closely situated geographically, and did not separate until the Cretaceous period, long after the appearance of flowering plants. Eggplants were in India, and what became tomatoes were in South America. Watch the animation at the bottom of the page:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangea
India crashing into southern Asia caused the Himalayas. My neighbor got into growing so-called heirloom tomatoes. But he quit it after a few years. There is a reason we grow hybrids: they do better.

[Moses Fessman]

Thank you for this. I am ashamed to say I had never heard of Wilhelmina Jashemski. It is always good to learn of people whose imagination and dedication re-animate the past. Gardens may seem very small beer compared to the rise and fall of emperors, but they remind us that a love of beauty and of growing things is a mark of civilization in every age.
For anyone whose interest has been stirred by this topic, I strongly recommend "Ancient Roman Gardens" by Linda Farrar (ca 1998).

[william Howard adams]

Dear M.B. What a surprise and pleasure to read your splendid tribute was a Senior Fellow of Dumbarton Oakes Library where I first met Wilhelmina. She was an extraordinary force and generous scholar! I recall speaking to her about the problem of finding a publisher willing to take on the job of reproducing all those marvelous photographs, drawings and plans that her husband had executed. They were really a team and it was Stanley who developed the brilliant idea of hoisting the remote controlled camera up in a ballon to just the right elevation in order to capture the garden layouts. William Howard Adams

[SW Foska]

Willa Cather's 'My Antonía' also contains some fantastic descriptions of immigrant gastronomy, I have read few more vivid passages on food and memory. All the more striking in contrast to the food-deafness of many great male american novelists.
I am puzzled by the tomato-aubergine relation. Popular phraseology knows them to be cousins. Italians call them both apples (pomodoro, a 'golden apple', melanzana, a 'crazy apple' < Lat. mela insana); Romanians call them reds and blues ('rosii' & 'vinete', which are really adjectives qualifying the same noun 'patlagea' < Turkish patlican, < Arabic and Sanskrit brinjal, also the root of aubergine, in which the 'au' is Arabic 'al-' - into French via Catalan, apparently).
But the historians say one came from the New World and the other from India. How can that be?

[DML]

Virgil mentions digging seashells into the soil to help crops (Georgics 2.346).

[Tony Francis]

Sea shells contain calcium which has a tendency to leach out of gardens. Crushed sea shells are still used to counter this problem. A layer of shells obviates the need to weed the garden. http://www.ehow.com/how_2152248_mulch-garden-crushed-shells.html
Tomato gardens have a problem with "blossum rot" or "blossum end rot", where the fruit is shriveled and brown. A little calcium takes care of it. I use crushed up pieces of calcium wall board retrieved from building sites. It works just fine. http://www.aces.edu/homegarden/news/archives/002192.php
Of course, the old Romans did not have tomato gardens. If you can figure out where my house is on google earth, you can see my two tomato gardens, covered with bed sheets to keep the sun off, as they appeared in August, 2004. Read Willa Cathers' book "One of Ours" to see how carefully the immigrants in Nebraska tended their gardens, back in the old days.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_of_Ours

[Lucy]

You've just reminded me of a nursery rhyme.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary
how does your garden grow?
With silver bells
And cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row

Other than that, I've known gardeners who throw other shells onto their gardens - oysters mainly - and as I'm no gardener I can't remember exactly why, but I think there might have been some practical reason for it, like something in the shells nourishes the ground or keeps specific pests away?

Fascinating post btw, gardens in Pompei!

[Richard]

I suppose it must sometimes have happened that a garden was valued for both ornamental and practical value (after all, some fruit trees can be kept in neat shapes and have attractive blossoms).

I'm trying to think whether we have in ancient comedy the idea of an assignation in the garden - but I suppose that the conventions of ancient staging (everything happens outside the front door) and the fact that the garden must have been the most visible space in the house would both tell against it... Shame: what's Latin for

Pamphile: I shall be in the conservatory under the second lemon tree on the left.

Moschion: Second on the left?

Pamphile: Yes, the usual lemon tree.

??

Richard