Victoria Austen’s Analysing the Boundaries of the Ancient Roman Garden: (Re)Framing the Hortus uses an “intermedial analysis” approach to understanding garden spaces in Roman literature, sculpture, and painting. She focuses on how the boundaries of gardens, as socially constituted landscapes, are defined and negotiated in these media, asking questions such as: How do garden boundaries translate across real, represented, and written forms? How would visitors or readers have perceived these boundaries, and what did they signify? Austen focuses her study on gardens from the Late Republic and Early Empire near Rome and Pompeii, resulting in a volume organized through three pairs of related case studies. The goal of the intermedial analysis in each pair is not to define a border common to all Roman gardens, nor to identify other essential characteristics across textual or artistic representations. Instead, it’s how the borders are intentionally broken down that reveals additional meaning in each example. Returning to this framing in each chapter results in clarity around the main argument but also a certain amount of repetition, occasionally leaving a reader grasping for the larger significance of the case studies. Austen joins a growing body of scholarship considering the role agriculture, nature, and technical writing in a broader cultural context.[1]
She draws heavily on the work of Wilhelmina Jashemski, Kathy Gleason, and Bettina Bergman, among others, but breaks new ground in the nimble connections made between different garden exempla and their larger cultural context; Austen is unafraid to posit the intention of a garden’s creator or the potential impact on a viewer, always difficult to do with certainty but also interesting to consider. A meta-discussion of boundaries throughout is also particularly thought-provoking, helping the reader understand the tension in defining different garden spaces (whether agricultural, sacred, ornamental) for both ancient people and modern scholars. Three body chapters along with introduction and conclusion lay out the case studies, and while they make sense as a whole, they are also self-contained enough to be read alone. Combined with a liberal sprinkle of garden puns, this quality makes the book an excellent choice for teaching advanced undergraduates about a number of topics including space theory, Roman wall painting, Augustan propaganda, villa culture, and more, a rare but desirable quality in a scholarly monograph.
Chapter 1, “Setting the Framework,” provides an overview of how gardens were described and defined in ancient art and literature and their distinction from similar areas (e.g. porticoes or parks). Through these she introduces a series of potential boundaries or binaries that will emerge and be challenged in the case studies over the next three chapters (e.g. interior/exterior, wild/cultivated, public/private, etc.). As a way to explore the difficulty of understanding and defining bounded spaces, Chapter 1 also contains a very thorough introduction to theoretical frameworks for space, boundary-making, and framing, including Soja’s Thirdspace, Foucault’s heterotopia, Derrida’s response to Kantian parergon, and many more. While this was useful as a refresher on space theory, it was not clear how readers would apply the dozen or so concepts she mentioned to her case studies, and despite their frequent mention throughout the text, the subsequent chapters did not entirely clear my confusion. Occasionally, the density of theoretical frames bogged down the text. One that was particularly helpful for this reader was the framing of Soja’s Firstspace (the physical garden), Secondspace (imagined representations of the garden) and Thirdspace (the intermedial analysis of the garden); it helped to pin down what register of analysis was happening in given moments throughout the book.
In Chapter 2 Austen analyzes Virgil and Columella to explore the connection of the hortus to agriculture through temporal and spatial dimensions. She investigates the relative realism of their written representations and considers how each author manipulates the framing of the garden in the text. She discusses how the authors define the relationship between the hortus and the farm and focuses particularly on the boundary both authors erect carefully between them. The chapter concludes that both texts define gardens as marginalized spaces: In the Georgics, the garden, as a space that must be worked in spare time, is both physically and temporally sidelined to primary farming tasks. Columella, meanwhile, confoundingly describes his 10th book on gardens as a remainder, a bonus, and a key element of a complete treatment of agriculture, a potential reflection on the paradox of gardens as essential to farms while unimportant relative to other farm tasks. Her application of Derrida’s supplement (58-59) to Columella’s tenth book and its relationship to the Georgics does not provide a more compelling explanation of its format or purpose than those offered by other scholars in recent years.[2] However, her consideration of how each text positions the garden in relationship to agriculture is a major innovation and contribution and will surely prompt similar close readings in other agronomists.
Chapter 3 analyzes the place of garden imagery in Augustan image-making as another way to understand how contemporary Romans understood the role and boundaries of gardens. Austen examines the lower exterior register of the Ara Pacis and Livia’s garden room together to analyze the dichotomy between abundance and control, a key point in Augustan ideology. Both depictions showcase a large variety of sacred plants, sometimes in unrealistic simultaneous bloom, while also being controlled within demarcated spaces, creating another blurred garden boundary. One wonders how explicit the meaning of this would have been to the average viewer of the altar, despite Austen’s claim that it would be “especially pertinent to a keen-eyed contemporary observer as symbols of Augustus’ appropriation of botanical features into public messaging” (85). More compelling is the interpretation of the Ara Pacis as a lucus, related to interpretations of Livia’s garden room as a sacral-idyllic landscape, and the posited impact of a marble sacred grove on passersby in understanding the Augustan programme of abundance supported by moral control and social boundaries.
Chapter 4 compares Villa A at Oplontis with Pliny the Younger’s garden letters to “demonstrate how the garden boundary operates as a porous membrane within the villa…that mediates between a series of oppositions…and how this blurring of distinctions creates garden spaces that consistently multiply the perspectives on offer” (106). Specifically, Austen uses Pliny’s ekphrastic account of villas to guide our understanding of viewer experience at Villa A, emphasizing the importance of the garden and garden representations as framing devices for a visitor, including potential impact. This chapter offers a particularly useful tour of how a visitor to the house would walk through and experience the different garden elements as both delimiting space and opening it, and is the only case study in the book to describe an actual garden and its contents. It is here that the use of space theory is most impactful.
Because the book focuses primarily on the representation of Roman gardens in art and literature, there is little discussion of archaeobotany or environmental archaeology. This is not an issue in itself, as a book covering every aspect of Roman gardens would be several feet thick. However, pointing to existing archaeological evidence for gardens, especially outside of Pompeii and its environs, would have been helpful even in passing. Austen writes that “limited physical evidence” survives from horti (14) and that “in the absence of material evidence…representational evidence emerges as our first point of entry into the garden” (29). While it is true that physical evidence for gardens is scarce in imperial Central Italy outside of Pompeii, it is a body of evidence that will only grow, with some new work already available for the period in question at Rome itself.[3] Furthermore, more abundant botanical evidence for gardens is available from areas of Northern Italy and various provinces, and while those fall outside the geographic scope of Austen’s work, they may provide comparative value.[4] This may prove a fruitful way to engage in the future with intermedial analysis of gardens.
The conclusion closes with an analysis of an anti-garden in Seneca’s Thyestes. Austen argues that the unkempt grove in the center of the palace, by undermining the generally positive associations of natural cycles and trees, represents the breakdown of boundaries in right and wrong behaviors occurring throughout the play. This addendum feels slightly out of place. The space is described as a lucus, silva, and nemus, but never a hortus. Austen may be right that it is meant to evoke a courtyard garden, but even so, it feels unconnected to the other case studies in that it exists only in Soja’s secondspace, an imagined representation of the garden. The first three chapters included either physical objects/gardens or intermedial analysis to provide grounding a larger context and meaning.
Ultimately, the book concludes that gardens across media are bounded spaces, whether physically or in description, but also create ambiguity in a variety of spatial, temporal, and experiential ways that make defining those boundaries difficult. She further concludes that gardens can actively blur the distinction between the binaries presented in the first chapter and act as frames for larger ideas or spaces, and that perhaps Roman authors, artists, and leaders used them in this way intentionally. Austen’s book will be a useful volume not only for scholars interested in gardens, but in the many other topics she touches on in her tour through the various horti of the case studies.
Citations
Langgut, D. (2022). Prestigious early Roman gardens across the Empire: the significance of gardens and horticultural trends evidenced by pollen. Palynology, 46(4), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916122.2022.2089928
Lodwick, L. and Rowan, E. (2022) Archaeobotanical research in classical archaeology. American Journal of Archaeology 126: 593–623.10.1086/720897
Notes
[1] For example: Nelsestuen 2015 on Varro, Doody 2012 on Pliny, Reay 2005 on Cato, etc.
[2] Gowers, E. (2000). Vegetable Love: Virgil, Columella, and Garden Poetry. Ramus, 29(2), 127–148; Doody, A. (2007). Virgil the Farmer? Critiques of the Georgics in Columella and Pliny. Classical Philology, 102(2), 180–197; Reitz, C. (2017). Auctoritas in the Garden: Columella’s Poetic Strategy in De re rustica 10. In M. Formisano & P. van der Eijk (Eds.), Knowledge, Text and Practice in Ancient Technical Writing (pp. 217–230). chapter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[3] See, for example, Langgut, D. (2022). Prestigious early Roman gardens across the Empire: the significance of gardens and horticultural trends evidenced by pollen. Palynology, 46(4), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916122.2022.2089928 and Masi, A., Vignola, C., Lazzara, A. et al. The first extensive study of an Imperial Roman Garden in the city of Rome: the Horti Lamiani. Veget Hist Archaeobot 33, 111–120 (2024).
[4] For examples of such work, see the overview in Lodwick, L. and Rowan, E. (2022) Archaeobotanical research in classical archaeology. American Journal of Archaeology 126: 593–623.10.1086/720897.