There are showers of golden mimosa in the gardens round the Bay of Naples. Old oranges and lemons are still glowing like prizes on the trees and trailing stems of deep blue rosemary are tumbling off the walls beside some of the region’s most ancient habitations.
In England, by contrast, daffodils have been laid flat by frost and the cold weather has called for real commitment before we make any progress in the flower bed. As our new season begins, I find it very heartening that so many gardeners have been down similar routes before us, especially the ancient Italians and Romans whose efforts can still be discerned in the ancient sites round Naples.
Ancient gardening has had quite a bit of attention lately and the prettiest of the books on the subject is Gardens of the Roman World, with a text by the sharp-eyed Patrick Bowe. He has some spectacular pictures of modern gardens that he connects to the ancient Roman example, including a handsome water-garden at Hammamet in Tunisia and the prince of all post-Roman gardens, the original Paul Getty Museum garden at Malibu in California. The Getty certainly put post-Roman gardening back on the horticultural map. The main pool garden has a box-edged array of beds that owe a deliberate debt to the ancient Roman gardens at Pompeii and especially Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples. Unquestionably, the Museum Garden is now the finest ancient Roman garden visible in the world.
Nonetheless, I love to imagine the plundered ruins of Pompeii and its houses with the gardens that their many keen owners laboured to give them. In so many ways, they are the forerunners of those show garden designs that turn up yearly at the Chelsea Flower Show.
I can most imagine the garden-owners at Pompeii in socially-mobile Fulham, west London. The reason is that most of their gardens were much too small for their owners’ aspirations and designs. They tried to cram far too much into cramped surroundings, much as the starter homes of today’s corporate financiers cram in decking, a water pool, and far too many shrubs against the perimeter wall. Like the Pompeiians, we like to put modern copies of traditional ancient statues in gardens that are usually too small for them. As in Fulham, so in Pompeii, on warm summer evenings the owners would eat outdoors with their ornamental glass and their sets of silver dinnerware. In one ancient house, the house of Menander, an entire set of silver for the dining table was found stored away to save it from the volcanic pumice and the subsequent surges of hot gas. If a disaster ever happens in west London, I have no doubt that the sets of Provencal plates and the silver pheasants will be similarly stacked for safety beneath the decking.
Did the ancient Pompeiians have any visually exciting ideas? In the past 30 years, we have come to have a better idea of their positioning of plants and shrubs thanks to the brilliant work of the garden archaelogist Wilhelmina Jashemski. She pioneered a technique of exploration that would give us an idea of the lost root systems of plantings in the Pompeiians’ back gardens. She directed attention to the holes that were visible at ground level on newly-cleared areas of garden and that themselves were filled with the pumice dust of the volcanic eruption in August AD79. These well-preserved holes could then be emptied of the pumice and filled with cement so as to give a cast of the shape of the root-ball planted in the original hole. The contours of the surrounding soil enabled her to identify the probable size and identity of the missing trees and original shrubs and vines.
Previous archaeologists had almost entirely ignored the range of evidence for the Pompeiians’ plantings and green spaces. Decades of work have shown how much of the town originally had green spaces, which previous historians had ignored. Big olive trees, rose bushes and small vineyards were plotted with the help of her cavity technique. One or two areas have been replanted in the light of her findings and their general effect is to remind us how much cultivation and production went on within the general area of the city’s walls.
At the same time, much more attention was given to the details of the wall paintings, such a distinctive feature of Pompeii’s most interesting houses. They are the most touching evidence for the styles of small town gardens in Pompeii that we have otherwise lost.
The evidence continues to grow, as it was only in 1979 that one of the most interesting series of paintings was fully revealed in the house now known as the Golden Bracelet. It had the most beautiful pictures of birds, statuary and planting, all shown on a back wall of one of the house’s courtyards. It enhances the visitor’s sense of being in a green space and adds the illusion of lush flowers, shrubs and songbirds to what was probably a more mundane back yard in the hard light of day.
How similar this sort of gardening is to the styles encouraged by our thriving gardening magazines and those endless television programmes and their dreaded “makeovers”. They share a touchingly similar aspiration and a fondness for instant, easily maintainable effects. If the summer was hot at Pompeii and the slaves refused to do the watering, it did not really matter, because there was a never-fading garden of flowers and greenery painted as an illusion on the courtyard’s back wall.
The more detailed examples show classic Italian garden shrubs, which could still be bought in a local garden centre. Bay trees, rather modest roses, opium poppies, marigolds, irises and evergreen laurustinus are painted on the wall and look even more beautiful than they ever would in real life. They make me think of the impatient wife of an extremely shrewd financier who showed me how she had decorated the walls of her new garden with painted poles, the supports for her clematis and roses of the future. While the clematis and roses developed, she had painted the posts with pictures of how the flowers would one day look and she preferred the paintings to the reality. It was the most Pompeiian garden imaginable and it was only a pity that her first winter in the Cotswolds washed all the paintings off before the clematis had made much progress.
Just when the ancient world seems quite close to us, it always turns out to be strikingly different. We can relate to the Pompeiians’ water canals and fountains in their back courtyards. Some of the planting is familiar and there is no end of detail in the outstanding book on the subject, Linda Farrar’s Ancient Roman Gardens, published in 2000 and still the most excellent guide to the topic. Farrar has a splendid chapter on ornamental pools in which she arranges surviving examples under seven categories. The pools of Roman Britain, she tells us, tended to be Type A. They are the most boring shape, but we have woken up nowadays and on a generous interpretation, even my garden’s swimming pool would qualify under her more imaginative Type D. Her excellent book shows how much detail has been recovered from gardens all over the Roman Empire in forms of garden design that we still patronise.
What we ignore nowadays are two things: the birds and the masks. The best frescoes at Pompeii show the most lovely birds, ranging from herons to golden orioles. Did the owners have small aviaries in their back courtyards? I doubt if they often did and I suspect the pictures of birds are a substitute for the real thing.
As for the masks, they dangle in the upper sky of some of these paintings and they are echoed by sculpted heads and masks on little pillars in the garden planting. There are also framed plaques with painted scenes, like prints from a special offer in a newspaper’s colour magazine. Our designers have not tried to exploit this sort of trick. In frescoes, these painted panels add a further note of eclectic mythology and scenes from stories of the Greek world. There is also plenty of scope for reclining female nudes. As for the dangling masks, some have associations with the world of the theatre, which was so enjoyed in the Pompeiians’ home town. Nowadays, I suppose we would paint the dangling faces of celebrities on pillars to represent their Oscars. I fear I may live to see celebrity culture invading the London back garden in the name of post-classical authenticity.
These links across the centuries are a strong reinforcement for us as the season of active gardening begins. The paintings, root-holes and ground archaeology of Pompeii and other Roman sites remind us that even in our small urban spaces, we have keen gardeners who were there before us.
The one thing they never had was access to wonderful flora of China. What a treat they missed, one I will never deny myself in the name of classical accuracy. With Pompeii’s vines and laurels in my mind, I have just ordered another Chinese prunus, blessing the global progress that has added this paradise of garden shrubs since the old Roman days.
