Town Gardens: Pliny and the Renaissance Garden

The area beyond the fence or wall is generally what we should nowadays call an informal planting of trees and shrubs, of varying heights, some ornamental and some grown for their fruit. An exception to this shows a fence of lattice-work with arches and open pergolas of the same material, ornamented with pitchers and vases. The ground of this last imaginary garden is sparsely furnished with a few flowering plants and the pergolas are beginning to be clothed with vines. These gardens were very sophisticated little affairs and represent the small enclosed town garden in a form subject to variation but not to further development. The next stage in a city of narrow streets and congested buildings was upwards. As in dense forests, life which elsewhere takes place at ground-level moves to a different plane and flowers, reptiles and small mammals become tree-top dwellers, so in cities gardens seek the light and move upward to balconies and roof-tops. There is evidence of roof-gardens at Pompeii; later, in more congested Rome, most gardens, except of the wealthiest patrician families, were of this sort. These Pompeian town gardens, charming and complete though they were, could have no direct effect upon later European gardening, for they lay buried under ashes; it was the gardens of which these little courtyards were the nostalgic reminders, the gardens of the Roman villas, that provided the foundations for the Renaissance. We owe our knowledge of villa gardens largely to the younger Pliny. He, too, has links with Pompeii. His uncle, the famous polymath, was Admiral of the Fleet at Misenum, and when the eruption began he had himself rowed across the Bay of Naples to see what was going on. He invited his nephew, then aged 18, to accompany him. Fortunately the young man was reading Livy and declined; had he not done so the history of Western gardening might have been different, for his uncle did not return. The younger Pliny was a man of wealth, learning and a cultivated palate. He practiced law, was a Senator, became Governor of Bithynia and Pontus under the Emperor Trajan, and wrote many letters to his friends. While many of the books of the great historian whose works he calmly read while Pompeii and Herculaneum were being destroyed across the bay are lost to us, the letters of this `well-bred, cultivated, blameless gentleman' have survived. Like the little town gardens, villa gardens also were Greek in origin.