Roman gardens

Vandana s. talikoti

The garden was a place of peace and tranquillity – a refuge from urban life – and a place filled with religious and symbolic meanings. As Roman culture developed and became increasingly influenced by foreign civilizations through trade, the use of gardens expanded and gardens ultimately thrived in Ancient Rome.

What are Roman gardens..?

Roman gardens were influenced by Egyptian, Persian, and Greek gardening techniques.

Parts of a Roman Garden Private Roman gardens were generally separated into three parts. The first, the xystus, was a terrace that served as an open air drawing room and connected to the home via a covered portico. The xystus overlooked the lower garden, or ambulation. The ambulation consisted of a variety of flowers, trees, and other foliage and served as an ideal milieu for a leisurely stroll after a meal, some mild conversation, or other Roman recreation activities. The gestation was a shaded avenue where the master of a home could ride horseback or be carried by his slaves. It generally encircled the ambulation, or was constructed as a separate oval shaped space.

Xystus was the Greek architectural term for the covered portico of the gymnasium, in which the exercises took place during the winter or in rainy weather

Ambulation: walking from place to place

Uses Gardens were not reserved for the extremely wealthy. Excavations in Pompeii show that gardens attaching to residences were scaled down to meet the space constraints of the home of the average Roman. Modified versions of Roman garden designs were adopted in Roman settlements in Africa, Gaul, and Britannia.

Formal Garden A formal garden is a garden whose plantings, paths, pools, fountains etc. follow a definite plan. The garden is neatly trimmed, often symmetrical, which emphasizes the geometrical forms. This type of garden is particularly suitable to the gardens of old houses. Formal garden design is one of the oldest in the world. This is because formality is a general and privileged tradition in all Western, Middle Eastern and Eastern Cultures. This garden is balanced on every side and has perfectly pruned borders that surround beds. Flowers are constantly blossoming and well manicured. The most popular part of the formal garden are the topiary plants. These plants are clipped into the geometric shapes or various shapes of fish, animals and other objects. They also contain statues and other ornamentation. Garden paths and garden benches are common in a formal garden. A focal point is very essential in this garden, which can be a fountain or a pool.

Below are mentioned the golden rules for formal garden design: geometry viewpoint linkage pattern balance symmetry vista

Roman garden is a Landscape garden design, which was introduced in England in the

beginning of 18th century. It is also called as English landscape park. This English garden had become popular all over the Europe, which replaced the 17th century, symmetrical and formal style garden, "Garden a la francaise". It had become the principal garden style of Europe. English gardens represent the ideal nature view and were very much inspired by the paintings of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorraine. Generally, in an English garden, there may be a lake or pond, establishing rolling lawns opposite the tree groves and structures of bridges, ruins and some other architecture.

• Rome, comparatively late in developing the new form of gardens, was also behind Florence in ornamenting her gardens with statues. It was the man who made Rome’s future.

• The Belvedere court was at that time for practical purposes greater than it is now, for the corridors and corner rooms where the statues are had not then been made. In the vast space there was a garden, which the ambassadors from Venice, who were left there for a while in 1523, described in glowing colours.

Belvedere garden court at the Vatican

On the façade he had antique pillars set, with their pediments and capitals. In the renaissance sketch, which shows the gardens in an unfinished state, there are statues on the longer side placed opposite one another in two rows, and the short sides are filled in with open colonnades, sarcophagi treated like friezes, and other fragments of reliefs, and below these are pieces of the Ara Pacis, let into the walls,

a garden structure within the colossal semicircular niche, with a loggia on the top, giving the finest possible view over landscape and town. On both sides of the garden there were colonnades, open on the inside, but walled in outside so as to give that feeling of seclusion which the garden needed, In the middle the Pope had an antique shell fountain set up in the second year. The length of 306 metres was given to Bramante, and he chose to have the comparatively narrow width of 75 metres, because of the situation of the somewhat high terraces; seen from below the width seemed quite the right proportion

COURT OF THE BELVEDERE, ROME—SITE-PLAN

Roman mosaic gardens The Villa Romana del Casale (Sicilian: Villa Rumana dû Casali) is a Roman villa built in the first quarter of the 4th century and located about 3 km outside the town of Piazza Armerina, Sicily, southern Italy. Containing the richest, largest and most complex collection of Roman mosaics in the world,[1] it is one of 44 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Italy.[2]

"Early Roman mosaics belonged to the floor";[2] except in Nero's Domus Aurea,[3] there is little evidence of ambitious wall mosaics before the Christian period, even at Pompeii and surrounding sites, where their chances of survival were better than elsewhere. The famous Alexander Mosaic (c. 100) from Pompeii, arguably the finest pre-Christian mosaic to survive, was a floor, and the main use of vertical mosaics there is in places unsuitable for frescos, such as fountains, baths and garden architecture

• Roman Renaissance gardens | GardenVisit.com, the garden landscape guide http://www.gardenvisit.com/history_theory/library_online_ebooks/ml_got..

reference

• Patrick Bowe,. Gardens of the Roman World. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. ISBN 0-89236-740-7

• Wikipedia

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