Ancient Roman Gardens

“By means of our hands we struggle to create a second world within the world of nature.”

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Roman gardens began as practical sources of vegetables, herbs, and fruits for the household. Herbs were essential for culinary and medicinal use in the home – basil, bay, celery seed, hyssop, mint, savory, and thyme were the most popular. Later, favorite flowers included damask roses and violets, narcissus and lily and iris bulbs. Wildflowers grew on uncultivated land on the hillsides.

The Basic Hortus

Three generations before Cicero, farmers like Cato the Elder and Cincinnatus worked their lands with overseers and a few slaves. Every inch of land was devoted to crops, cattle, and making money from farming olives and other produce. The farm houses themselves were functional rather than beautiful, surrounded by productive acres.

The so-called Villa of L. Crassius Tertius is a prime example. Tertius’s villa is a rustic, two-story structure arranged around a monumental peristyle with a double row of Doric columns. Many of the rooms of tamed earth floors were left unplastered. The living quarters were housed on the upper floor while the ground floor rooms were used for manufacturing and storing wine and oil—a clear indication that most imperial villas were working farms or factories. After all, the Roman world was based on agriculture. These larger villas replaced numerous smaller farms where predominant crops were grapes and olive. Hence, the birth of the first global export market in Italy.

Peristyle Garden

A typical domus romana for an upper-class family like Cicero, on the other hand, enclosed both an atrium, with a shallow basin or pool to catch rainwater from the open roof, and a peristylium, a colonnaded courtyard for a garden of herbs and flowers, particularly roses, with fountains, small statues, topiaries, reflecting pools sometimes stocked with goldfish, sculpture, and benches for sitting to enjoy the view on sunny days.

Only the front door of townhouses faced the street. All windows faced inward. One entered through a vestibule into the atrium, the centerpiece of the house. The courtyard beyond stretched between two wings of private family rooms, ending in a focal point: marble statue or a bench against a back wall painted with frescoes, for example. Both the atrium and the courtyard garden were open to the sky for fresh air to circulate among the cloisters and the rooms during hot Mediterranean summers.

Villa Gardens

Cicero’s letters give us a much clearer picture of ancient Roman villas than most history books. He describes his Tusculum Villa where he withdrew to his library and gardens, only a day’s travel from Rome. Like typical Roman houses, his domus romana enclosed both an atrium, with a shallow basin to catch rainwater, and a peristylium, a peristyle courtyard for a garden of herbs and flowers, particularly roses, with marble fountains, small statues of gods, a sundial, and benches for sitting to enjoy the view on sunny days. Cicero’s personal library opened onto such a garden.

The site of Cicero’s family villa, Arpinum, on the northern border of the Volscian Territory, is where the elderly Cicero reassembled the battered remains of his libraries, hoping the scrolls would be more secure than in Rome.

“If you have a garden in your library, you will want for nothing.”  ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Tiberius, emperor during the Apostle Paul’s lifetime, built his country estate, Villa Tiberio near Sperlonga, a beach resort between Rome and Naples. A natural grotto formed a banquet hall graced with marble statuary of mythical scenes from Homerian epics. Later, he retired to Villa Jovis constructed by his immediate predecessor, Augustus, on the Isle of Capri, offshore from Naples. It remains standing today.

More elaborate imperial villas featured frescoes in brilliant reds and golds on the walls facing the garden, usually depicting birds and flowers and trees. Box and ilex topiaries were pruned into animal or geometric shapes, and low hedges of yew and box surrounded various beds of plants. Some villa estates even included riding grounds separate from the main house, such as Pliny the Younger’s Tuscan estate with avenues of pathways lined with cypress trees.

Villa Poppaea in the Roman town of Oplontis served as the main residence for Nero’s wife when she was not in Rome. A grand residence dating from the middle of the 1^st century B.C.E., it had been enlarged during Imperial times and was undergoing restoration work at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius. The villa housed at least a dozen gardens, including a peristyle garden in the original portion of the villa where archaeologists have found a fountain, a sundial, and even the remains of a rake, a hoe, and a hook. Another enclosed garden on the grounds featured wall paintings of plants and birds, and depressions in the corners where fruit trees had grown. Two other courtyard gardens also featured wall paintings.

Classic Italian Garden

The Renaissance Era added form to function, beauty to bounty, embellishments like marble statues and balustrades, terra cotta pedestals for statuary, and fountains of spraying water in sunlight. Topiaries and hedges clipped from box and ilex formed green architecture to provide framed views through terraced gardens and vistas of the countryside beyond tall cypresses and pines. The landscape became a balance of cultivated greenery and natural forest, called a boschetto.

What we consider the classic Italian garden structure is exemplified by the Villa de Castello of the 16^th-century Florentine Medicis. Axial organization linked separate gardens, a design concept incorporated at the Palace at Versailles in Paris and later at the Governor’s Mansion in Colonial Williamsburg. As breathtaking as these old villa gardens are to visit, they appear too grand for many of us today, unless we’ve been blessed with spacious acreage and financial resources. Yet, backyard gardeners like me can learn a thing or two about design and structure and apply those lessons to a smaller scale. Statuary and water features on a small courtyard, for example, a bench at one end of an herb garden enclosed by boxwood, an allee between a double row of trees or an interlaced arbor of vines—all easily are adaptable in today’s ornamental pleasure gardens.

In my own backyard garden, I have adapted several of these elements. What would have been a hortus in ancient times has evolved into an English-style garden of roses, peonies, iris, cat mint, veronicas, lilacs, dogwoods and a magnolia. A low box hedge encloses an axial herb garden with four parterres, a center sundial on a pedestal, and a bench arbor against the back wall.

Italian elements grace the courtyard: a yew hedge on one side, an Italianate wall fountain, urns and planters of Boston ferns and geraniums, table lanterns, black wrought iron seating and glass-topped tables. A pair of pillars supporting large urns flank the exit into a rosarium featuring an armillary.

And my library is just inside glass doors that I leave open in summer as tribute to la casa aperta.  Cicero would smile, I’m sure.