My walk along the ancient Roman road that is now Oxford Street A Trip Back in Time has triggered a growing interest in how the Romans gardened. I decided to do some more research. As I read I realised that the Romans might well have gardened with the same imprecision that I do. We all like to see the perfectly manicured plot. But if you need to eat from your plot then you, like me, will know that a perfect row of lettuces have to be cut and that untidy profusion is a better provider than ordered minimalism.
I want to find out if there is anything in the way that land around here might have been tilled 2000 years ago that could inspire or inform my own rooftopvegplot. Julius Caesar arrived at Dover in the late summer of 55 BC. Once the little matter of invasion and suppression had been achieved he would have discovered a bounteous rural idyll. England can be lovely in the early autumn. It is warm. The corn and barley would have been ripening. The Wealden forests would have been bounteous with creatures like hind and wild pig. The peasant pastures would have sung with the lowing of cattle and the burr of sheep. Imagine the chagrin of the Romans when autumn turned to winter. The Romans hated the cold and the wetness of Briton.
The staple of the ancient Briton diet was grain and meat. Both of these can easily be stored through a hard winter. Our forebears were herdsmen and grain farmers. If people did eat vegetables they would have eaten weeds just like the ones that colonise our London parks today. Wild garlic, nettles, chickweed, clover, coltsfoot and heartsease would have all had their uses, some culinary, some as medicines. Even the runners of couch grass would have been chopped up as a tasty root vegetable and used to flavour soups and gruels.
Despite the way we see them today, the Romans were not great inventors. Their skill was in assimilating the habits, cultures and proclivities of the lands they conquered. Irrigation comes from Egypt. The walled garden originated in Persia. Roman architecture is a bastardisation of Greek architecture, that itself was borrowed from the Pharaohs. The first fluted columns are thought to be a representation in stone of a bundle of Nile reeds, their seed-heads splaying out to form the scrolling foliage of the capital. What the Romans did so well was to copy, to rationalise and to improve.
By 45BC, when the Roman conquest of Briton was finally complete, their diet was as eclectic as their conquests. Meat and grain would have been staples for Caesar as much as they were for the ancient Britons, but the Roman diet was far richer. Travel makes gourmets of us. The ancient Minoans perfected the cultivation of grapes and olives on ground too poor to grow grain. The Romans assimilated this cultivation for their own stony hillsides. The dry, scrubby soils of the Mediterranean littoral would also have provided a wealth of ‘local weeds’ such as rosemary, myrtle and thyme. Citrus trees would have been imported in pots. Every new land they discovered contributed to their diet and thus to their gardens. And the Romans, being home-boys at heart, brought it all to Britain.
In the early 1970’s the archaeologist Wilhelmina Jashemskii undertook an excavation on the outskirts of Pompeii. I wondered whether the outskirts of what was an unimportant town like Pompeii, might give clues to what was growing around another contemporary outpost of the empire, namely Londinium. People had assumed that she would find only rubbish dumps. But what she unearthed was remarkable. She found a market garden rich with plants.
Two water cisterns were uncovered, as well as a channel running through the centre of the garden that was probably part of the irrigation system. She found terracotta pots with holes in them that are the first ancestors ever found of those we use today. Dotted around the ‘garden’ were the petrified stump remains of trees, preserved just as the bodies of trapped citizens have been found. From these stumps she was able to plot the garden plan and identify some of the planting. There is even a garden shed at the bottom of the garden and another little room next-door that might have been the privy.
What is most extraordinary to me is that she found something akin to our modern day allotment cultivation, long mounds of earth, which she concluded were vegetable patches and soft fruit plots. She only found small roots here.
In her paper Jashemskii quotes Columella’s contemporary treatise on agriculture:
…then let him take
The shining hoe, worn by the soil, and trace
Straight, narrow ridges from the opposing bounds
And these across with narrow paths divide.
Now when the earth, its clear divisions marked
As with a comb, shining, from squalor free,
Shall claim her seeds. ....
I was amazed to discover that these finely tilled vegetable mounds, when measured, turned out to be four feet wide. Exactly the same size as is recommended today!
In the surrounding orchards dates, grapes, figs and almonds flourished. But they have also found traces of annuals, including mundane vegetables such as Vicia faba L. var. minor - the good old broad bean – a staple of Roman cooking as well as a staple of her democracy. The Romans cast a white bean for yes and a black bean for no.
Pliny, in his writings, gives us a detailed account of the various fruit and nut trees recently introduced into the Roman world at that time. Among those mentioned are the cherry which was brought back by our friend Lucullus of chard fame, after his wars in the East. The peach known as the Malum Persicum would have been common, as well as an apricot known as the Prunus Armeniaca; and the pistachio which was brought into Italy by Vitellius from Syria where he served during the reign of Tiberius. Perhaps they all grew in Pompeii and perhaps they were all brought to London.
A chance comment later on in the paper made me sit up. The excavation of this Pompeian market garden has made archaeologists think again about the walkways and trellises that we find in classical gardens all over the world. If this was a market garden then there would be little need for decorative trellis. Yet a pattern of square stumps has been found here that match the foundation holes of the pergolas that have been reconstructed in the much more wealthy garden that adjoins the House of Loreius Tiburtinus (or D. Octavius Quartio) in the centre of Pompeii.
I switched my researching eye to Tiburtinus’ garden. There is nothing suburban about his house. You enter from the street, through an imposing high sided doorway into a small courtyard. Cool rooms lead off on both sides, some richly decorated with swags and dancing maidens. Now worn by age, the wall painting of a naked couple, Pyramus and Thisbe, reminds me of the pink and fleshy bodies in a Picasso adorning some modern-day rich man’s dining room.
In the garden a central cistern is flanked on either side by what has always been thought to be two pergolas. Nowadays tourists trot along these cool walkways, under the reconstructions. But what if they had not been built as pergolas, but as shade houses? What if the cistern, which is very deep for decorative or irrigation purposes, was in fact a fish pond? Perhaps when we look at Loreius Tiburtinus’ house we are looking at a more practical garden than first seems likely.
There are several wonderful examples of gardens painted or cast in Roman mosaic. There was a sumptuous portrayal of a garden from Pompeii that was exhibited at the British Museum only recently. (See the image at the top of this article) The scene it depicts is verdant, and looks to me like an idealised form of permaculture. There are bushes and trees in the background, perhaps bay or laurel. This is under-planted with vines and perennials. The twining rose takes centre stage, but in the foreground a mass of smaller flowers and vegetables thrive. A bird perches on top of a bamboo cane. A spider’s web can be seen in the shady understory beyond.
This might not have been the reality. Who has not wished that their own garden looks more like a painting? But the elements of this painting may well be a truthful representation of how the Romans gardened.
The Romans must have cursed the bad weather they encountered after the conquest of Britain. But better weather was to come. Then, as now, the climate was warming up. Within a few hundred years vines were to be found growing throughout Romano-British territory. London market gardens, if they existed like those of Pompeii, would have been able to grow figs, peaches, apricots and grapes. They might have tried citrus in pots, placing them under shelter in the winter, as I do today.
Unlike the ancient Britons, the Romans would have augmented their diet with imported Mediterranean plants. And I bet they would have cultivated British weeds as well.
We certainly know that the Romans added to our own stock of weeds. The red dead nettle – archangel, Lamium purpureum - originated in the mountainous regions of Southern Europe, but once introduced by the Romans, it took to the English climate with gusto. In a mild winter, like the one we are experiencing now, its delicate purple flowers will endure until a hard frost sets them back. Both leaves and flowers can be infused in a tea, boiled as a pot-herb or stir-fried with butter and chopped chives and served as a vegetable.
Today we look upon most gardens as having a primary function. It’s a flower garden, a herb garden, an allotment, or a playground for the kids. But in Roman times the garden was too precious a space merely for ornament, unless you were very wealthy indeed. Even the most decorative of gardens would probably have been considered as functional as well. It is difficult to think about a Roman garden without imagining it as an abundant larder for fruit, vegetables and herbs, as a pharmacy for the body. The images portray vegetables and flowers mixed up, as we do in companion planting schemes and orchards are under-planted with a rich variety of perennials and annuals, like a permaculture plot. To the Romans that pretty bird, seen perching happily in the wall painting, was also fair game for the table. Beneath the glinting water of the ponds, fish suppers probably swam oblivious. And in the background, foraging beneath the trees, would we have discovered the household pig or a few sheep? Surely at the very least chickens would roam? And what of those romantic pergolas? Perhaps they were the predecessor of the shade houses and cold frames we see today, not the haunt of poets and lovesick maidens.
