Analysing the Boundaries of the Ancient Roman Garden: (Re)Framing the Hortus

Victoria Austen, Analysing the Boundaries of the Ancient Roman Garden: (Re)Framing the Hortus (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). 9781350265189.

Reviewed by A.L. McMichael, Barnard College, amcmicha@barnard.edu.

Ostensibly, ancient gardens are places that no longer exist. Yet in Analysing the Boundaries of the Ancient Roman Garden, author Victoria Austen touches on many of the ways that we engage with ephemeral garden spaces—collective memory, texts, legal documents, wills, songs, poems, narratives, medicinal instructions, images, oral traditions, stories, and comparisons to current practice. In other words, ancient gardens and garden practices are alive and well, even if we cannot walk around in one with Pliny or Seneca. With that same spirit of engagement, Austen’s monograph offers a variety of approaches for examining enclosed gardens that Romans described as the hortus, using examples that are agricultural, sacred, or ornamental (p. 141). 

By honing in on garden borders of the Late Republic and Early Empire, Austen is able to maneuver the reader through intellectual reflections on the concept of edges, entryways, boundaries, and framing spaces that are both demarcated and permeable. The author chose to differentiate garden spaces from architectural spaces (p. 143), a decision that points the methodological discussion and evidence away from experiential site analysis and toward comparative analyses of texts and images.

After pointing out that the garden boundary has been neglected in previous scholarship, Austen argues that her surfacing of it is crucial because, “the garden boundary does not simply police access and control, but rather, acts as a porous membrane that mediates between a series of dichotomies,” including distinctions of inside or outside (pp. 8-9). These dichotomies are especially important for understanding Romans at this time, she asserts, because they “constructed garden boundaries specifically in order to open up or undermine the division between a number of oppositions,” such as “practical/aesthetic” or “sacred/profane,” (pp. 8-9). To understand the garden boundary, then, is key to understanding ambiguities in broader spatial networks of this period (p. 9). With that underlying context, Austen also engages with pertinent non-Roman theoretical approaches to the garden border. This includes her use of “thirdspace,” a concept borrowed from the discipline of human geography and referring in this book to a communal or liminal space that is not part of an interior/exterior binary (pp. 20-21).¹ That Austen chose interdisciplinarity theoretical framings to nuance her arguments is a strength of the book.

The three main chapters center around case studies that use pairings of sources to provide an extended comparison. The author examines primary sources (including, for instance, poems by Virgil and Columella in chapter two) through close readings to hone in on horticultural and agricultural themes. Through this approach, Austen is able to elucidate how the sacred and ornamental aspects of Roman society were reflected in the design and use of gardens in a variety of ways. In chapter three, the primary examples are the Ara Pacis altar complex (built outside Rome in 13 BCE and now enclosed in its own museum) and Livia’s Garden Room from Prima Porta around 39 BCE (now in the Palazzo Massimo). The author’s argument that horticultural imagery is “Augustan propaganda” in these built spaces is made with visual observations and scholarly examination of textual sources about the complex messaging of surface decoration. For example, Austen compares the harmony of nature described by Virgil to the aspirational qualities of plants in eternal bloom (pp. 87–89). Chapter four pairs Villa A at Oplontis (built on the Bay of Naples and destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE) with Pliny the Younger’s ekphrastic letters in order to see how other, similar works of art were poetically described. In every chapter, the author elucidates the Roman garden as a rich social construction without resorting to clichés of man versus nature.

The relatively broad topic of Roman gardens presents a number of opportunities to intervene in scholarly conversations. I particularly enjoyed considering Austen’s approach alongside recent research on domestic life in Rome. For example, Hannah Platts’s recent monograph examines domestic, daily life for a range of social classes via their spaces from the first century BCE to the second century CE.² Like Austen, Platts also examines the sensory experience via material and textual sources. When Platts quotes Pliny the Younger’s letter to Gallus (2.17), discussing rooms adjoining a garden (“woods”) as insulation from both the street and the rest of the house (pp. 131–32), it is clear that the room adjoining a garden was a place of respite. Reading these two books simultaneously felt like eavesdropping on a scholarly discussion, as if I were watching Austen join the conversation to discuss gardens that are just outside the domestic spaces explored by Platts.

Austen’s historiography involves a range of scholarly authors on Roman green spaces. These include, for example, a number of references to classicist Diana Spencer on environmental landscapes, especially her 2010 monograph, Roman Landscape: Culture and Identity.³ In a body of work that spans several decades, Spencer has used the topic of landscape and environment as a lens for conducting cultural study of Roman norms and society, rather than from a strictly scientific or botanical angle. Because Austen cites Spencer’s work throughout the book, the references serve as a foundational theoretical source; this move grounds Austen’s own cultural approach to history vis-à-vis gardens. Although Austen’s book predates Mantha Zarmakoupi’s Shaping Roman Landscape: Ecocritical Approaches to Architecture and Wall Painting in Early Imperial Italy, the continued stream of publications in this area speak to the importance of the topic.⁴ Austen’s bibliography does not extend to the work of Summer Trentin or Francesca C. Tronchin, authors whose takes on Roman gardens are (generally speaking) more focused on architectural space syntax and image placement.⁵ Instead, she includes a number of references to Bettina Bergmann, whose wide oeuvre includes deep investigations of painted garden images, including the ones at Oplontis revisited by Austen.⁶ The continual inquiry into and juxtaposition of text and image is also a key methodology of Austen’s work to activate liminal and complex spaces.

To fully engage with the author’s arguments, students and non-specialists may need some coaching, particularly regarding historical dates and time periods (which can be hard to discern within the narrative for monuments and primary texts). They may also need more context regarding secondary literature on the occasions when it is taken for granted that readers will be familiar with scholars and their relevant contributions. This occurs on pages 1–3, where the author mentions Miller, Pagán, and Spencer without first names or context about why they are grounding the conversation. A non-specialist may not be aware, for instance, that Diana Spencer’s Roman Landscape: Culture and Identity theorized landscape studies in 2010. 

However, in other ways, the work is well signposted and therefore good for teaching. Throughout the chapters and summarized in the conclusion, Austen does an admirable job of articulating the structure of the book. She begins by defining gardens and describing their boundedness with parameters that are well set out in chapter one (pp. 11–13). This highlighting of structure continues throughout, which makes the arguments clear and navigable. The author’s friendly, didactic, and engaging prose style is appealing and approachable. In several passages, the author explicitly lists research questions, a rhetorical move that students will appreciate as conversational and lively. For example, in the transition from chapter two to three, she asks “If garden boundaries are repeatedly contested, how are we able to establish a clear sense of division between what is inside or outside any individual space? Do we even need to be able to divide them?” as a means of leading into the next section exploring the case study “with these questions in mind” (p. 102). Additionally, the fact that primary texts are catalogued in both the Index Locorum (pp. 207–8) and the general index (pp. 209–11) will be helpful for instructors who want to emphasize the range of primary sources.

To close, I point to Austen’s book (which is part of Bloomsbury Academic’s Ancient Environments series) as an important contribution to emerging premodern threads in environmental humanities. Here I follow Austen’s lead and articulate a few research questions. Why look at ancient Rome’s garden boundaries as environmental? Why would ancient gardens be relevant to us today in light of climate change or environmental stewardship? The long, deep history of garden practices we see in this book point toward opportunities for additional scholarship. Environmental stewardship has much to gain from seeing how Romans recorded the entanglements of nature and built garden environments with regard to social class and identity. As scholars are now (re)assessing attitudes toward nature, environment, and sustainability, the longue durée offers context and examples through close engagement with complex sources like the examples this book provides. 

Table of Contents

Preface (xi–xii)
Introduction: Defining Garden Space (1–9)
1. Setting the Framework (11–27)
2. Who Has the Time? Virgil, Columella, and Hortus Poetry (29–60)
3. Augustus’ Garden Room? Re-Framing the Ara Pacis Augustae (61–102)
4. Distinguit et Miscet: Framing Roman Villa Gardens (103–140)
Conclusion: Seneca’s Thyestes and the Anti-Garden (141–50)
Notes (151–84)
Bibliography (185–205)
Index Locorum (207–8)
Index (209–11)

Notes

1. Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-And-Imagined-Places, (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996). See also Katharine T. von Stackelberg, The Roman Garden: Space, Sense, and Society, (London: Routledge, 2009). Austen cites van Stackelberg’s response to Soja as a precedent in Roman scholarship on placemaking.

2. Hannah Platts, Multisensory Living in Ancient Rome: Power and Space in Roman Houses (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).

3. Diana Spencer, Roman Landscape: Culture and Identity, New Surveys in the Classics 39 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also David H. J. Larmour and Diana Spencer, eds. The Sites of Rome: Time, Space, Memory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

4. Mantha Zarmakoupi, Shaping Roman Landscape: Ecocritical Approaches to Architecture and Wall Painting in Early Imperial Italy (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2023). See also Jessica Powers, Roman Landscapes: Visions of Nature and Myth from Rome and Pompeii (San Antonio: San Antonio Museum of Art, 2023).

5. Summer Trentin, “Reality, Artifice, and Changing Landscapes in the House of Marcus Lucretius in Pompeii,” Greece and Rome 66, no. 1 (April 2019): 71–92, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017383518000323; Francesca Tronchin, “The Sculpture of the Casa di Octavius Quartio in Pompeii,” in Pompeii: Art, Industry, and Infrastructure, ed. Eric Poehler, Miko Flohr, and Kevin Cole (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2011), 24–40.

6. Bettina Bergmann, “The Gardens and Garden Paintings of Villa A,” in Leisure and Luxury in the Age of Nero: The Villas of Oplontis Near Pompeii, ed. Elaine K. Gazda and John R. Clarke, Kelsey Museum Publication 14 (Ann Arbor, MI: Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, 2016), 96–110.

Discussion

1. In what ways do you engage with gardens and their boundaries now, and has your research had an impact on that engagement (or vice-versa)? For instance, are you a gardener?

I feel as if I am constantly disappointing people when I have to let them know that neither am I a gardener nor have I been historically able to keep a plant alive (although there has been progress with regards to the latter)! However, my research has absolutely impacted the way in which I engage with gardens and landscapes more broadly; I am much more attuned to the details of the spaces in which I move through and I definitely have a greater appreciation for design practices and planting choices.

2. In the review, I mention that several of your scholarly threads resonated with me as a reader. While you were researching and writing, what piqued your interest in the scholarly conversations you have chosen to engage in?

I think one of the biggest lessons I learned from this book project is that theory does not have to be this scary and overwhelming thing! I definitely pushed myself by embracing a multimedia approach that required grappling with a whole host of literary and spatial theorists, and a huge “lightbulb” moment during this process was the realisation that I did not have to see theory as this cage-like entity that I had to “fit” everything in to, but, rather, as a useful toolbox of vocabulary that I could pull from for working through my own methodological concerns.

In terms of more specific scholarly conversations, there were a couple that I was only able to engage with briefly in the context of this project but that I would like to focus on more in the future. First, I would like to think more carefully about how I can approach gardens and landscapes from a multisensory perspective (following Platts’s Multisensory Living). Second, building on some of the threads I established in chapter three on Augustus’s use of garden space, I am becoming increasingly interested in the intersection of landscape and memory, and I am currently working on a project focusing on “planty” commemoration in the construction and reception of the Mausoleum of Augustus.

3. You mention in the Acknowledgements that much of this book was written during Covid-19 lockdowns. Were there ways in which that context shaped your book’s content or methodology?

I think it is important to note that writing a book during a global pandemic whilst living alone and teaching a 4-4 load is not something I would like to repeat or that I would recommend! I am not sure the lockdowns had a direct impact on the specific content or methodology of the book, but the context of Covid-19 certainly taught me many lessons about my own research and writing processes and the importance of community in academia. Humanities research can be a very solitary endeavour at the best of times—let alone when you are unable to interact with anyone in person at all—so I really had to make sure that I was connecting with other scholars online in order to gain the specific “academia” support I needed during this time. I have tried to take the lessons I learned from that experience forward so that I always have those support networks available to me, regardless of my own location. In fact, one of my new favourite times of the week is the virtual writing group that I co-host with Josh Nudell. I already know this group is going to be fundamental to the next big research project!