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Starting from Eden.

by Egenia Salza Prina Ricotti

HISTORY OF GARDENS
Joking, I was always saying that to understand the history of gardening one had to start from the very first one: to wit from the Garden of Eden. Of course this was only a witticism. Also if we really wanted to begin the research starting from the Man’s Creation and base ourselves on the Bible, the garden we find in this book is certainly not the real site. It was only the kind of gardens that whoever wrote the Bible was accustomed to see, and it was certainly much more recent. As a matter of fact it results to be one of his times: a park where all kinds of wild animals dwelt, a place covered by trees among which there were also many fruit ones. To sum it, a Persian preserve. In an even later descriptions to all these amenities a spring was added, a rill as the ones that were often found in the Persian parks. However, as this particular source gushed in the Garden of Eden, it could not be imagined as a common, natural spring. Thus who wrote the Bible says that it was so powerful and rich of water and that it formed the four great river of the world.
Then when did the very first gardens have been created? And, over all, what do we have in mind speaking of them? Because on this argument there still exist a great perplexity. As a matter of fact we see that also in the more serious scholarly papers on ancient gardens, we find described as such cultivated plots of land that with a real gardens have very little in common. Hyams, the author of a book on this argument, reach even the limit, and speaks of the Neolithic ones asserting that – also if for magic purposes – the primitive men dedicated themselves to gardening. He base his affirmation on the fact that in the excavations of a Neolithic place he found tools that he cites as the one used to till the soil. But when he describes them we find that they were only a sharpened stick hardened by the fire and a crooked branch. Really not enough to sustain his affirmation.
But not only the Neolithic gardens feed my doubts. When I analyze some of the ones that have been considered and cited as such, I discover their true nature. Thus the most quoted “Alcinous’s garden” reveal itself to have been only a well tended and watered fruit grove, not certainly what we are accustomed to call a garden and, of course, also Laertes plot was not really a garden but an orchard.
Naturally nobody wants to deny that gardens derived from orchards and fruit groves: but it is also quite evident that they originated by their transformation and that this transformation took millenia. Little by little ornamental trees and shrubs were planted among the utilitarian plants, and at the end those plots were transformed in real gardens, that is to say, places principally based on aesthetic and pleasurable criteria, sites where to spend one’s time enjoying the beauty of the nature. It is also true that in the first gardens the prevalence of the utilitarian plants over the decorative ones was always preponderant, but as many fruit trees were very decorative they fitted in the place and contributed to its beauty. Anyway it took nearly 5000 years to pass from Alcinoo’s fruit grove to the sterile parks of the rich Roman patricians, those gardens that Horace, Martial, Seneca and Pliny so much deprecated.
Now lets us pause a moment and consider that if we must criticize whoever described as gardens an ancient orchards, even worse we consider those who declared a farm as a park. For instance lets take in exam the one near Olympia that was acquired by Xenophon with the money given to him as a reward for his Persian campaign. On his land- as it is registered in the sources – he built a temple to Artemis and to this sanctuary he gave all this beautiful property, a large farm watered by a little river, and composed by a luxuriant fruit grove surrounded by pastures, forests and hunting preserves. Near the temple Xenophon put an epigraph with which he invited his share-farmer to take good care of the shrine. During the festivities for the goddess - tells the chronicler – the believers received barley flour, bread, wine and sweetmeats, and to this was naturally added the meat of the sacrificed or hunted animals: all that bounty was produced by the farm. Then it was a sharecropping farm. Yet often there was who listed it among the gardens.
But let us come back to the real gardens, the ones that existed in all the ancient civilization, and lets us concentrate on their study. This part of archaeology began to be systematically studied in the first years of the twenty century. What was known at those times was very little. In part the news were found in the ancient sources and it was not much: some scant notes and some schematic descriptions that gave little of concrete for the researcher and let nearly everything to his fantasy. To the sources, however, one could add what was found in the graphic arts. Basing herself on this a German noblewoman, Marie von Gotthein, succeeded in compiling a strong and voluminous book that, written, around the year 1900, studied all that concerned gardening starting from its beginning, and following it through all the centuries till it arrived at its author’s times. Also if the volume suffered from some defect due to the time in which it had been composed, as the lack of footnote and an illustration based only on drawings (now, in some last editions, they have been substituted by photos) it is really precious furnishing to the scholars a large quantity of information and it is still a valid help to the research, that today is largely based on the excavations.
However also excavating was not so easy. Apart of anything else it was a just beginning technique, but in the first half of the 1900 some notable researches had been done, like the one around the III cent. B.C. temple of Ephaestus that was excavated and studied by Prof. Thomson. Then others have been done and among this I like to cite the I cent. B.C. park of the Fishbourne villa, the residence of a Breton king. The accurate excavation of Dr. Cunliffe found the trenches that had been made in the clayey soil to prepare a bed of peat and fertile ground for setting the plants. Thus he succeded to perfectly reconstruct the flowerbeds shape.
And the works are still going on and this is due to a small but genial group of pioneer archaeologists like Prof. Jashemski, who with her study and her excavation’s techniques practiced for 30 years in the Campanian area has now opened a new perspective to this branch of the archaeology and has given a strong impulse to the research.
For all she has found today we know more about ancient gardens and gardening techniques and, as a consequence, discoveries emerge every day and complete our knowledge of those ancient places of delights. Now we can even reconstruct them.

Bibliography
Scientific popularization
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI - Dossier: I giardini nell'antichità in Archeo nº 69, November, pp. 50-97