Inner petals of a rose (Rosa sp.)
Inner petals of a rose (Rosa sp.)
It’s early October and across the Eastern Seaboard and adjoining states the annual fall planting race is off and running. Spreading like a wave from the eastern to western coasts of America and Canada, the planting urge advances along with the chill in the autumn air and the changing leaves. Old-timers are consulting their calendars and thumbing well-worn copies of the venerated Old Farmer’s Almanac, looking up suitable planting days and checking weather forecasts. All are digging up their flower beds to stuff in tulips, daffodils, crocuses, and other popular bulbs.
Once the daytime highs hit sixty degrees Fahrenheit or a bit lower, this seems to be the right time to add bulbs, ensuring colorful blooms the following April, May, or June. The same autumn rituals also occur in gardens across Western Europe. Bulbs, tubers, and corms add fresh, new spring colors, a vibrant rebirth after the long, cold monotony of winter whites and naked brown branches. It’s all a bit ironic when you consider the history of hunting and gathering.
Ten thousand years ago our distant ancestors used sharpened and fire-hardened digging sticks of wood for planting and harvesting wild, edible bulbs. People living around the Mediterranean still eat the bulbs of the wild relatives of our grape hyacinths (Muscari), and tribes in Oregon still think that slow-baked blue quamash (Camassia) taste like sweet potatoes. Today, we use cherished worn garden trowels to put domesticated bulbs into the soil to feed our sense of the aesthetic, creating the seasonal yet ephemeral beauty of flowers.
We live in an era in which most of us appreciate a seasonal bed of ornamental flowers without feeling it’s a waste of land that should have been used to grow more food. It wasn’t always that way, and some prominent cultures on this planet still don’t see much value in a garden of the pretty but inedible. Where and how often did our species stop gobbling roots and shoots long enough to think, “This would look nice growing around my hut?” Which cultures and civilizations were the earliest to encourage flower hunting and growing for their own sake, and what have we inherited from them? We’ll soon find out.
Our primate ancestors foraged for flowers and fruits as part of their omnivorous diets. No doubt our own sweet-tooth preferences began with these flower- and fruit-munching ancestors. We can reasonably imagine our hominid ancestors of 6 million years ago pausing by a patch of scented and colorful flowers, gently picking one, and sucking out its sweet nectar just as children do today with Japanese honeysuckles.
The use of digging sticks may predate that of stone tools, but because they are less durable, they did not leave a record. Sticks were widely used in Mesoamerica to dig out underground roots and flower bulbs, poke out burrowing animals, or search for tasty insect larvae. While these sticks remained in use by the Kooris of Australia well into the twentieth century, Europeans, Asians, and Africans replaced them with the hoe and their draft-animal-powered plows.
Did the invention of digging tools open the door to agriculture first, and gardening later? I believe it did. Hunting and gathering were gender-skewed in early nomadic cultures. Women were frequently the gatherers of all plant materials for food, medicines, clothing, cordage, and containers. Women typically prepared plants and animals as food, so it is almost assured that the first farmers and gardeners were women.
Cultures that never invented, or borrowed, agricultural technology never created ornamental gardens. Examples of such nongardening societies include, but are not limited, to the !Kung people (San) of the Kalahari Desert, the Kayapó of Brazil, the Australian Kooris, and pastoralists such as the Maasai (or Masai) of Kenya and Tanzania. No culture with agriculture develops pleasure gardens unless the collective belly is full. Estimates range widely, but perhaps these people ate as many as five thousand calories per day. Modern dieters take note: consuming two thousand calories per day, a supposed “ideal” food intake, is based upon our largely sedentary, couch-potato society, one that does not chase down and kill ferocious, large animals. People do not waste limited arable land on beautiful but needless luxuries (flowers) unless they are well fed at the moment and their granaries are full. Fertile soil is a precious resource not to be wasted on potted pretties.
With the advent of agriculture by the world’s earliest civilizations in the Fertile Crescent region between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, these cultures had time left for relaxation and more creative projects. Plants with attractive flowers were grown first as crops (flax, chickpea, lentil, and bitter vetch) in the Fertile Crescent. However, the earliest and most important food crops were wild grasses domesticated in the region (emmer wheat, einkorn, and barley), all of which have nonshowy, small, wind-pollinated flowers. Both grain grasses and legumes were likely planted in rows, making them easier to tend and harvest. This may have been the forerunner of linear gardens or border designs.
To be clear, we need to contrast what seems to be a universal human appreciation of flowers in extinct hunter-gatherer societies versus what happened once small camps became villages, then cities with flourishing early civilizations. An interesting similarity exists between the Kooris in Australia, who never developed agriculture, and some of our Amerindian tribes that domesticated a few species (corn, tobacco, beans, and squash). Both isolated cultures have wide-ranging myths and tales about animals but few if any flower myths or stories. A few traditional peoples spoke about the origin of flowers that are strange looking (red-flowered mistletoes and red waratah bouquets), or vegetable foods (tropical water lilies). These and other nonagrarian societies speak of red flowers as signifying spilled blood, understandable in nomadic hunting cultures. In contrast is the compelling history from ancient to modern times of civilizations repeatedly using agricultural knowledge to support gardening for pleasure. First we must ask ourselves, What makes us want to grow a lily in a pot?
One way to think about our attraction to the beauty and gestalt of flowers is to consider what may have occurred in our distant hominid past. Flowers and fruits are not so unlike in how we perceive them. Both open flowers and ripe fruits have bright colors (saturated yellows, orange, reds, blues) making them stand out from the contrasting but homogeneous backdrops of green leaves or brown soils. We see and smell them from a distance. We easily associate their shapes, colors, and scents with gustatory experiences and pleasure. When we bite into fruits or flowers, their sweetness fills our mouths, and soon other flavors take hold. Some flowers smell just like ripe fruits, and vice versa, because they have overlapping scent and flavor chemistries. This may explain why we, as a species, are highly attracted, perhaps innately, to flowers even though they are not usually nutritious or a satisfying meal.
Some psychologists and anthropologists insist that flowers produce immediate and long-term effects on human emotions and social behaviors and may even enhance memory formation. This has been demonstrated in controlled studies, as we’ll explore later. It’s perhaps not a stretch to realize that flowers may also target their beauty and charms at us, not just insects, birds, or bats. Plants may be seducing us to do their bidding, making us serve their sedentary sex lives. In the distant past, insects unknowingly selected for those flowers that were colorful, the showiest and most rewarding. Over the last four centuries, the artificial evolution of flowers via human meddling in plant affairs has changed many wildflowers into domesticated gardening favorites. Artificial selection was rapid because the emerging sciences of economic and reproductive botany helped define plant geography and sexuality. However, human selection and the placement of flowering plants in urban gardens are much, much older.
The most ancient civilizations of Assyria, Babylonia, and Sumeria, along the Fertile Crescent (about ten thousand years ago), had gardens, likely lavish ones, for their ruling elites in their palaces and temples. Recorded historical details about these gardens are mostly wanting, so we must rely upon meager evidence later interpreted by archaeologists following their excavations. At Tell Hassuna, downstream from the ancient city of Nineveh, on the river Tigris (modern Iraq), there are deposits of layer upon layer of agricultural discards. Similar finds have been excavated at Tell Halaf, Arpachiya, and other sites. Their agricultural plantings may have included small yard or kitchen gardens. Even the warlike Assyrians enjoyed and created gardens. Inscriptions tell of Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I (ruled 1114–1076 BC), who conquered foreign lands, then returned with cedar, likkarin, and algum (sandalwood and cypress) trees, establishing a sort of early botanical garden with trees from faraway lands.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest work of literature that has survived (engraved on clay tablets in cuneiform found at Kuyunjik), is a detailed description of an idealized sacred vineyard. It could also have been a garden. The epic poem describes a landscape garden or parklike area, including a cedar mount and sanctuary where the gods dwelt.
The use of flowering plants in Egypt reaches into remote antiquity and continues fervently to the present day. Since the days of the pharaohs, the Egyptians were skilled herbalists, using plants in gardening, bouquets and garlands, flavoring foods, and in flower-based perfumes, cosmetics, and medicines. A carved ivory panel on a casket from the king’s tomb shows the boy king Tutankhamen and his queen holding floral bouquets in a stylized setting.
In a hot, dry climate such as ancient Egypt’s what could feel better than sitting in the shade of a large sycamore fig (Ficus sycomorus) growing at the center of one’s walled courtyard garden? However, let’s first consider those large gardens associated with temples such as those at Karnak or Luxor. They must have been truly spectacular, based on the detailed and elaborate paintings found on tomb and temple walls. We also know some details about the private gardens of wealthier Egyptians. They cultivated formal gardens harboring ornamental plants along with a few edible, fruit-bearing kinds. Trees were planted in tidy, straight rows and flowers arranged in square beds or along straight borders. A rectilinear geometry prevailed, as illustrated in the colorful tomb paintings.
An amazing Egyptian garden was created by Nebamun, a scribe for King Thutmose IV (c. 1400 BC), who lived in ancient Thebes. He constructed his courtyard garden around existing large trees. His tomb paintings reveal two date palms towering over his pink, mud-brick house. In many homes of this period the garden predominates and the house is often reduced to a portico. In the tomb of Nebamun (c. 1380 BC), a wall painting shows a fish pond with floating water-lily flowers. Nearby is a flowering border with associated trees: sycamore, carica figs, and fruiting date palms. Hathor, the sycamore goddess, is shown carrying figs to accompany Nebamun into the afterlife.
A splendid Theban residence garden was that of Ineni, a master builder for King Thutmose I (1528–1510 BC). The tomb walls were not expansive enough to reveal the entire garden layout, but Ineni made certain there was a hieroglyphic accounting of its splendor: 170 date palms; 120 dom palms; 73 sycamore figs; 12 unidentified vines; 31 persea trees (Mimusops laurifolia); 2 moringa trees; 16 carob trees; a Christ’s-thorn (Paliurus spina-christi); 10 tamarisk trees; 2 myrtles; and a few others. Whomever Ineni enslaved, they must have been kept busy watering those plantings using the shaduf, a ceramic pot affixed to a long pole attached to a stand and pivot point. Shadufs are still commonly used today across the Egyptian countryside for raising water. Numerous tomb paintings suggest that the ancient Egyptians adored their flowers. We find the scented, blue and white water lilies (Nymphaea) in their pools. Much later, the Egyptians acquired the pink-and-white Indian lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) by trading with the East. The borders of herbs at the gardens’ edges included cornflower and opium poppies. Also depicted is the mandrake, whose showy yellow fruits would have complemented the blue of the cornflowers and the crimson poppies. This pattern of yellow, blue, and red was a popular herbaceous border in these ancient gardens.
Several exotic (nonnative) plants from distant lands were purposefully brought to Egyptian gardens. The pomegranate tree provided lush red flowers as well as tart, juicy fruits. Other trees included the persea tree and the Egyptian garden favorite, the sycamore fig. Somewhat later, olive trees were added, as seen in garden paintings. Ancient royals such as Queen Hatshepsut had a taste for exotic flowering plants. She brought one type of incense tree to her temple garden at Deir el-Bahri. Some pharaohs demonstrated horticultural interests, such as the far-ranging expeditions of Thutmose III in Asia Minor. Unfortunately, we have few records of what the presumably lavish gardens associated with most Egyptian royal palaces may have looked like.
The Egyptians also had sufficient space to plant small herb gardens. Fragrant chamomile, with its small white and yellow flowers, was commonly grown and was used to anoint the mummified body of Rameses II. From a trash dump excavated at the sacred animal necropolis at Saqqara, numerous medicinal herbs, now grown for their attractive flowers, have been found. These include acacia, apricot, basil, chrysanthemum, Egyptian plum, flax, pomegranate, and ashwagandha (Withania somnifera). Yes, the ancient Egyptians were master gardeners, but they had serious competitors a continent away, and each knew nothing of the other’s existence.
The earliest gardens in China are as old as the most ancient Egyptian gardens. The significance of flowers in Chinese culture is reflected in names from antiquity, such as hua, the word for flower. The ideal garden became a “timeless paradise” as a retreat for scholars and hermits alike. Among the most cherished flowers grown in Chinese gardens since antiquity are chrysanthemums, gardenias, forsythias, magnolias, pinks, rhododendrons, roses, and wisterias. The earliest Chinese monograph on the chrysanthemum dates from the start of the twelfth century. Many of the cultivated flowers of China are tree flowers, such as peach, plum, camellia, magnolia, and tree peony. At this same time in the West, there was little more than the rose. Flowers of peach, chrysanthemum, lotus, peony, magnolia, and tiger lily have been grown in Chinese gardens since at least 800 to 1000 BC, as early as the Chou Dynasty. The rest of the flowers we’ve come to associate with Chinese gardens were already in widespread use by AD 1000 in the Song Dynasty. Indeed, domesticated garden blooms have a long association with Chinese culture, mirrored in its rich arts and literature traditions. China’s floriculture and agriculture contributed ginseng, the camellias, azaleas and rhododendrons, mulberries, the persimmon, rice, tea, and all the various kinds of Citrus fruits to the rest of the world.
A favorite place among my travels is the faithful replica of an ancient, yet relatively late in China’s long history, private garden. The Lan Su Chinese Garden (“garden of awakening orchids”) in downtown Portland, Oregon, encloses a full, walled city block. This garden reproduces a tranquil and contemplative environment with its replicated home, courtyard gardens, and a scholar’s study. It is modeled after a Chinese Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) home in Suzhou, a city in Jiangsu Province. Here, are still pools, carved and natural limestone rocks, flowering trees, water lilies, colorful carp, pebbled walkways with inset mosaic art, and dividing stone walls.
Asian gardens are more meditative and less reliant on big, bold blooms than are gardens devised by Western civilizations. Here, flowering plants are understood as beautiful even when they are barren, appreciated equally for their leaves and stems. The use of nonflowering elements is seen especially in the ways Chinese gardens use decorative rocks and boulders. The large, water-eroded boulders in some Chinese gardens are the famous Taihu stones from the lake of the same name. They are gnarled, full of jagged holes, and said to look like goblins or strange beasts. Mostly, they seem to represent distant, ragged mountain vistas. Nothing exactly like the Taihu stones appears in other gardens around the world. Wealthy Chinese went to great efforts to dredge them out of lake bottoms or to “repurpose” them from older gardens.
The Lan Su garden re-creation represents a spiritual utopia for a wealthy Chinese family of this era. This soothing place, with every detail masterfully designed, allowed the family to escape the worries of everyday life. Here, they could meditate and rest, becoming refreshed and energized by connecting with a stylized version of nature. A visit to Lan Su always has a profoundly calming effect on me, makes me slow down and take notice of minute and graceful details of this confined and scripted version of idealized nature from ancient China. Digital camera in hand, I pause and compose tranquil scenes through the viewfinder.
Masterful examples of Chinese public gardens are found in the West Lake region of Hangzhou, or the imperial family compound and retreat at Chengde, north of the Great Wall. Other famous garden sites are the Yuyuan gardens in Shanghai, or the Shi Zi Lin, the “stone lion grove,” in Suzhou. In Shi Zi Lin we find an elegant, small courtyard with typical elements used in many Chinese gardens of this period. This little landscape contained carefully set mosaic pavements of shiny black and white stones, a raised, octagonal stone planter surrounding a cherry tree, a gourd-shaped doorway, ornate filigreed windows, large natural rocks set in place, and various living bamboos.
If these examples seem a bit claustrophobic or confined, it is because their designers tried to shrink the great outdoors, immense landscapes of mountain chains, rivers, and lakes into small, human-scale habitations. This ingenious attempt to miniaturize nature also included the use of mirrors and zigzag paths to make the garden spaces appear larger and longer than they actually were. The gardens are divided or compartmentalized by the clever use of white, gray, or red walls, with borders and shallow pools. Bamboo thickets and trees cast shadows onto walls that are also part of the intended design. The famous “moon doors” and windows in the shape of fans, leaves, vases, a pomegranate fruit, or a stylized flower are common. Objects are framed and outlined, with fanciful depictions of flowers, birds, and mythical animals, such as dragons. Another aspect of miniaturization is the elaborate p’ un’ tsoi, little trees and shrubs grown in ceramic planters, comparable to Japanese containerized bonsai. In China, favorite garden flowers are treasured for their symbolic meanings in art, literature, and society. The peony represents springtime, health, distinction, and passing one’s school exams. Flowering plums represent happiness and friendships. In China, the shrubs that we call magnolias are known as jade halls, so they were planted close to buildings.
American gardens have been greatly enriched by ancient and modern Chinese horticulture. The Chinese were the first to import and develop fruit trees (cherries, pears, peaches, and plums) from Persia (now Iran) or other Mediterranean countries. These trees were imported by caravans along the famous Silk Road, extending four thousand miles from China to the Mediterranean, especially during the Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220). The Chinese turned these fruit and timber trees, once used to make furniture, into blossoming ornamentals. We have also benefited from the Chinese love of early-flowering native trees and shrubs. This includes their deciduous magnolias and the wintersweet (Chimonanthus), which are often in bloom before March 21. The Chinese adored flowering sprigs of wintersweet as hair ornaments, and they were also used to perfume linen cupboards. It’s the Chinese who gave the world the moutan, or tree peony, flowering crab apple, daylily, camellia, and daphne as domesticated plants. Do you admire or perhaps grow tea roses? The Chinese grew them because their aroma reminded them of drinking tea. Lastly, would we recognize the exquisite impressionistic paintings of Claude Monet without his lovely Chinese wisterias?
Some of the flowers most revered by the Chinese have never been popular in the West or in Japan. In China, one of the hardy native Cymbidium orchids is a symbol of spring, and the plants are still grown by the millions each year in ornamental pots. The Chinese love these orchids for their fragrant flowers (not sweet but with coumarins, chemicals evoking the scent of a freshly mown lawn), and for their undulating leaves (common in classic Chinese paintings). We don’t care much for this terrestrial orchid in the West. Its flowers are too small and drab for our tastes. The Chinese are also charmed by the edible persimmon (Diospyros kaki) because its dark, gnarled branches and twigs are covered in delicate, velvety, white blossoms each spring. They plant these trees in traditional courtyards. But all we want is their softened, delicious orange fruits in autumn.
Later expeditions to China by Europeans brought more plants the Chinese admired and immortalized in their landscape paintings and poetry but infrequently domesticated. These included the wild rhododendrons, various lilies, primroses, roses, silenes, and carnations that would be used in the West as breeding stock for hybrid blooms. The list goes on and on, but in America the flower poems and tales that we cherish come instead from two great ancient civilizations that developed in the Mediterranean basin.
Roaming the hills of mainland Greece, the Greek isles, or the scrublands of Israel in a year when the rains come, one is awed by the brilliant displays of wildflowers: Adonis, Anemone, Anthyllis, Cistus, Cyclamen, Iris, Nerium, Papaver, Prunus, and Ranunculus. Many of these plants have bloodred or deep purple flowers visited by pollinating beetles and are the stuff of classic Greek and Roman lore. Several of our favorite garden blooms gave rise to myths in which the hero becomes a flower, or his blood stains a blossom we know and love (e.g., narcissus, peony, hyacinth, Ajax delphinium, windflower).
Classical Greco-Roman mythology comprises a body of myths that has insinuated itself into Western art. This includes the tales found within the Homeric epics (the Iliad and the Odyssey), along with the written tragedies of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. As the Romans adopted and absorbed Greek myths, their poets, such as Ovid, wrote about the gods and goddesses and their earthly encounters with flowers.
The windflower, genus Anemone, in the buttercup family, is a common red, pink, blue, and purple garden flower native to Europe and Asia. Windflowers, along with unrelated fragrant, resin-bearing trees gathered for incense, are the subjects of Greek myths such as the one about Myrrha, Aphrodite, and Adonis: The queen of Cyprus claimed that her daughter, Myrrha, was more beautiful than the goddess of love, Aphrodite. The goddess was understandably outraged. She caused Myrrha to lust after her father, King Cinyras. Myrrha drugged her father every night and subsequently became pregnant. The king tried to execute his daughter and chased her across many of the Mediterranean lands. In turn, Aphrodite changed Myrrha into the first myrrh tree (Commiphora myrrha), the source of the resin myrrh burned as incense in the Holy Land. King Cinyras attacked the tree with his sword and a ravishing baby boy fell out. Aphrodite claimed the boy and named him Adonis. As a beautiful young man, Adonis became Aphrodite’s lover, but was also desired by Persephone the goddess of the underworld and spring growth.
Gored by a wild boar during a hunt, poor Adonis died at a tender age. The love-struck Aphrodite cried over his corpse. Her immortal tears mixed with the blood pouring from his wounds and turned it into flowering crown anemone plants (Anemone coronaria), with their red sepals and nearly black stamens. For millennia, Greek women swooned over the legend of the beautiful Adonis. The Adonia were summer festivals celebrated in Greek towns during late July after all the spring wildflowers had dried up in the summer heat. The female celebrants (often courtesans and prostitutes) carried pots of sprouted seeds or cut flowers to the festival, which included loud partying and drinking binges. Later, the dried seedlings and withered blossoms were tossed into the ocean on a spring morning, in remembrance of the sea-born but lovesick Aphrodite, and the myth of returning the dead Adonis to Aphrodite.
Curiously, the men of classical Greece seemed largely uninterested in private pleasure gardens, unlike the later aristocrats of imperial Rome. The beloved Greek myths addressed the origins of agriculture (e.g., Hades and Persephone), but so do the myths of all ancient agrarian societies. Think of the almost universal Garden of Eden story told by Semitic-speaking peoples. But the Greek myths had two unique features adopted by the later Romans: First, the Greeks viewed useful trees (for timber, spices, resins, food, etc.) as feminine, representing the metamorphoses of beautiful females (Phyllis, Myrrha, Daphne, and others) into graceful, woody plants. Second, herbs bearing colorful or fragrant blossoms were more masculine in nature. They represented the transformations of males (usually but not always “pretty boys,” including Orchis, Hyacinthus, Narcissus, and Adonis). However, these wildflowers were and still are common weeds appearing in agricultural fields throughout the Mediterranean. In many of the extinct religions of this region, people believed that flowers appeared the spring after a human male was sacrificed. If the flowers had any further use in the culture, it was in perfumes or as adornment for people or sacrificial animals at religious festivals.
The only major deity in the Greek pantheon to own a nice garden was the ever-unpopular goddess Hera, with her tree of golden apples in the Hesperides garden. As for Hades’s attempt to garden and beautify the underworld, his Elysian fields weren’t exactly pleasant or pretty places. They were envisioned as wastelands choked with one or more species of asphodels (Asphodelus, drab relatives of true lilies). In Greece, asphodels were typically associated with fallow and infertile places. Even wild goats don’t care to eat them. No, the Roman Empire was the place to visit, or look to, for gardening inspiration and innovations.
The cataclysmic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, only five miles from modern Naples, Italy, on August 24 of AD 79 buried the prosperous coastal Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, killing an estimated sixteen thousand people. Here frozen instantaneously in time are remarkable, although gruesome, casts of bodies in pumice and tufa ash, along with homes, intact art, and possessions. Homes of these wealthy Roman citizens were architectural and cultural marvels. Frescoes and intricately colored tile mosaics on floors and courtyard walls depict elaborate and verdant garden scenes. Delicate ivy (Hedera) and stylized grapevines along with other woody climbers were used as decorative elements. Most of the homes of Pompeii and Herculaneum had beautiful gardens. Typically, these mansions had central, open-air courtyards surrounded by Greek peristyles (columns). The gardens also had porticos (covered walkways), with spacious atria (large open spaces) allowing light and air to enter the buildings.
Some houses had a garden nymphaeum, with its fountain and a monument within an artificial grotto consecrated to the water nymphs. This sanctuary was filled with flowering plants, sculptures, stone fountains, balustrades, and fresco paintings that were uncannily three-dimensional. These trompe l’oeil depictions tricked the viewer into believing that two dimensions could become three, giving people the illusion that they could walk into a larger, more sumptuous garden.
Wealthy Romans adored water effects. Their ponds contained aquatic plants including water lilies, reeds, and rushes and were well stocked with colorful fish. Conquering Romans brought both the blue and the white water lilies from Egypt. The surviving paintings and mosaics provide evidence that Romans were fond of oleanders, myrtles, and bay laurels, grown mostly for their ornamental and scented foliage but also for their flowers. Preserved tree branches have been identified as examples of olive, lemon, and apple trees grown inside the atrium of one home. When these trees bloomed in spring, that atrium would have been colorful as well as pleasantly fragrant. Such was the country-villa lifestyle of the Roman elite, wealthy merchants, senators, and emperors.
Ornamental gardening, in ancient cultures, universally began as a pastime of the powerful nobility, or wealthy few, performed on a large scale at first. Imagine the expense of a lavish personal garden inside crowded imperial Rome. The epigrammatist Martial (c. 38–c. 102), of Nero’s Rome, complained that his own garden was so small and crowded that his violets couldn’t smile, and his figs were frightened to expand. The Roman elite could afford to import beautiful plants or engage in abundant leisure-time pursuits that became our own gardening traditions.
The Romans had quite a taste for the sort of kitschy garden ornaments many of us still fancy today, including balls, obelisks, pyramids, spirals, and those often grotesque little ceramic statues and figurines. Pliny’s Natural History and Martial gave credit to Roman citizen Cnaeus Matius Calvinus for introducing the first topiary sculptures into Roman gardens. Woody plants typically used for ancient and modern topiary pruning include the European box (Buxus sempervirens), bay laurel (Laurus nobilis), holly (Ilex spp.), myrtles (Eugenia or Myrtus), common privet (Ligustrum), and yews (Taxus spp). Pause and give a moment of thanks to Roman citizen Cnaeus as your boat drifts past the hippopotamus, pig, poodle, bear, elephant, and other living topiary sculptures outside Disneyland’s beloved “It’s a Small World” theme park ride since its opening in 1966. I knew it well, having grown up in Southern California only a few miles from Walt Disney’s original Magic Kingdom.
We can draw a simple lesson from these ancient cultures, their appreciation of flowers, and how they gardened. If a culture had agriculture and a polytheistic religion, several of their deities were often associated with local wildflowers. Within each culture a flower became associated with an aspect of agriculture (e.g., narcissus and wild gladiolus), or irrigation water for the crops (e.g., water lily and lotus). Many of these plants moved across the Old World via cultural diffusion. As a wild shrub, the pomegranate grows only in central northern Africa (Libya), yet potted pomegranates and their crimson blossoms in artworks and on porcelain pots are associated with several dynasties in ancient China.
Imperial Rome fell in the fifth century, and gardening for pleasure in Western Europe went into a similar decline until much later in the Middle Ages and later during the Renaissance. The standard reason given by historians of gardening and the history of cultivated flowers is that pleasure gardening and the excessive use of flowers at banquets and weddings were associated with pagan degeneracy of the emperor(s) and the aristocracy. Flowers were only for church altars, or as medicines, and flower culture, such as it was, and flowers retreated inside walled monastery gardens. The people of Western Europe descend from many Roman colonies. We will see how they once again acquired a love of flowers, but first let’s cross the Atlantic and witness the rise and fall of a genuine but surprising flower-adoring culture.
When it comes to the Aztecs, actually the Mexica of the Triple Alliance in central Mexico (c. 1300–1521), we seem to think only of the brutality during the sixteenth century when Spanish conquistadors took the last Aztec emperor, Moctezuma II (Montezuma), prisoner. We also imagine the horrific bloody rituals atop tall step-pyramids such as the Aztec Templo Mayor (Main Temple) in Mexico City. This site, among others, was used for human sacrifices. It’s likely that these honored sacrificial victims wore floral garlands. The Aztecs were avid gardeners. Flowers formed a huge part of their culture. They planted and grew flowers in profusion, especially in their capital, Tenochtitlán, the incredible island city in the middle of former Lake Texcoco. That island is now mostly covered over, merely part of the sprawling Mexico City suburbs. Hundreds of years ago the island had urban gardens for commoners along with royal temple gardens constructed by the Aztec nobility. The Aztec culture gave Spanish conquerors garden flowers we now take for granted, many of which later spread into Europe and India.
How do we know that the Aztecs grew flowers? The greater part of Aztec lyric poetry praised and described true marigolds (Tagetes spp.), dahlias (Dahlia spp.), tube roses (Polianthes), zinnias (Zinnia), and other blossoms of the subtropics, mountain pine forests, and deserts within their empire. The Aztecs may also have used bromeliads, cacti, and yuccas in their color-coordinated public and private gardens.
When Hernán Cortés, with his six hundred foot soldiers and fifteen horsemen, invaded Tenochtitlán in mid-August 1521, the Spaniards couldn’t believe their eyes. Not only did the Aztec capital have an estimated population of fifteen thousand households, it was a unique garden paradise. The architectural splendor, wide, straight roads, canals, ponds, and bridges were unlike anything in Spain at the time. Even the battle-hardened Cortés was moved to describe the Aztec gardens in the nearby Aztec city of Chalco:
Gardens are the largest, freshest, and most beautiful that were ever seen. They have a circuit of two leagues [six miles] and through the middle flows a pleasant stream of water. At distances of two bow-shots are buildings surrounded by grounds planted with fruit trees of various kinds, with many shrubs and odorous flowers. Truly the whole place is wonderful for its pleasantness and its extent.
The Aztec historian Ixtlilxóchitl described the garden splendors of King Nezahualcoyotl of the neighboring city-state Texcoco. The king of Ixtapan had a taste for elaborate mazes, outdoor baths, irrigation canals, numerous fountains, square flower beds with marigolds, various trees, and plantings that included over two thousand pines. Many different flowers, especially scented blooms, and trees, both local and those imported from far away, were used in garden design. Moctezuma I decreed the establishment of an extensive botanical garden at Oaxtepec. Entire shrubs and small trees, with their root balls wrapped in mats, were collected, transported, then planted in his royal garden.
Created by the Aztecs, and a World Heritage site since 1987, the famous floating gardens of Xochimilco still exist. An extensive system of canals was first created at the former Lago de Texcoco, a natural lake within the Valley of Mexico. Only vestiges of ancient Lake Texcoco exist, as salt marshes, three miles east of present-day Mexico City. When the Aztecs built their capital on an islet near the western edge of Lake Texcoco, they began to farm. The island was small but they ingeniously expanded the area available for growing crops by turning part of the lake into new arable land. Branches from a native juniper tree of the marshes, the ahuejote, were cut and tied together forming large rafts onto which lake-bed mud and soil were heaped. The rafts sank and new rafts were constructed atop them. More and more soil rafts, forming artificial islands, were constructed. Vegetable and flower crops were planted on these “floating gardens,” known in Spanish as chinampas, a unique agricultural technique devised by the pre-Hispanic peoples of the region a thousand years ago. Although many have been lost to urbanization or soccer fields, the remaining chinampas are actively cultivated today, filled with ornamental bougainvilleas, cacti, dahlias, and even dwarf bonsai trees. They are one of the most productive and sustainable farmlands anywhere in the world.
From nine massive docks, two hundred small, nonmotorized, wide, flat-bottomed boats called trajineras float along the calm waters of the canals. In the past they moved goods, but today they carry thousands of Mexico City weekend visitors and tourists from many countries. Looking like wide-bodied, roofed gondolas, they are whimsically painted with every color imaginable in floral and geometric designs. Historically, they were decorated with arches of living flowers and branches of ahuejote juniper trees. Each vessel is equipped with a long wooden table and chairs for eating and drinking. The floating gardens of Xochimilco have a party atmosphere, especially on weekends and holidays when there seem to be more boats than open water. Nevertheless, charm is mixed in with all the commercialism. Here you can buy flowers for your sweetheart from a woman paddling by in a small canoe or be serenaded by floating loud mariachi bands or attempt to be romantic while lazily cruising along the surreal waterways.
Drawing upon garden designs first developed in the ancient cities of western Asia (Iran) and Roman influences surviving in North Africa, the Muslims quickly developed their own unique gardening styles. The most important flower in the Persian garden is the rose. The Persians’ name for the rose, gul, is also their generic word for “flower.” Fruit trees became integral and major features in all Islamic gardens, especially orange and other citrus trees imported from India and China. Their blossoms would have added a heady sweetness to the Persian nights. The city of Isfahan became famous for its tulips, while other parts of Persia were known for their crown imperialis, jasmine, narcissi, orange buttercups, stocks, and violets. Persian roses were domesticated and gardened early and were likely derived from the native rose (Rosa foetida). Early rose varieties had petals that were orange on one side and yellow on the other, so Iran is the source of all our yellow roses, sent originally by the caliph (ruler) to his allies in Granada, Spain, while it was ruled by the Moors. Hollyhocks, jasmines, lilacs, calendulas, and pomegranates were among the earliest flowers grown in Islamic gardens. Interestingly, elaborate mosaic-like patterns were set in the ground using pebbles or tiles. Artificial plants including trees made of metal and precious stones were also “planted” here. Ponds or pools were central to elaborate Persian garden designs.
North African Islamic gardening reached its peak, not in Morocco, but when the Persian gardening styles returned to Spain under the Moors. The most famous of these Spanish Islamic gardens was the Medina Az-Zahra near Seville. It boasted marble-terraced hillsides and walkways paved with mosaic tiles. Myrtle hedges divided the garden into smaller and smaller rectilinear units. Fountains embellished with gold and precious stones completed the exquisite garden setting. A common feature of these gardens were sunken flower beds and places for trees, but lawns were not in use. Whenever flowers were grown, they were usually contained, growing in large earthenware pots.
For the final great period of Islamic gardening we turn to India and the Moghul gardens. These were spectacular places, usually not less than fifty acres. Ancient Indian gardens often included a central pavilion and a rectangular lake with four irrigation canals, often lined majestically with blue tiles. Many waterfalls and long-roofed pergolas supporting flowering and fruiting vines including grapes are noted in their descriptions. The gardens created by Emperor Babur (of Samarkand) were especially ostentatious and magnificent. In India, although it’s not gardening per se, in a later chapter we will encounter floral motifs in marble, along with Diwali festivals and cows wearing colorful garlands of marigold blossoms, part of human devotional and artistic traditions.
The spread of Islam throughout the Fertile Crescent and then into Persia and Turkey provided an introduction to a garden culture that all Muslims could share. This explains the broad diffusion of flowers domesticated in Persia to Turkey (e.g., tulips, jasmine, lilacs, horse chestnuts), throughout Arabian trade routes, east to India, west throughout the Christian Mediterranean, and finally into northern Europe, when Turkey allowed trade with the ship-going infidels.
Just as Islam stimulated an interest in gardens throughout western Asia, the influence of the Chinese garden reached across to the islands of the Pacific. Asian gardens are indeed different from those created in the West. Pleasure landscapes didn’t reach Japan until the sixth century and were strongly influenced by Chinese and Korean cultures. Early Japanese gardens used many flowering shrubs, especially azaleas, peonies, and camellias, favored by the Chinese. The earliest Japanese gardens were bright with flowers, but this was not lasting. The classical Japanese garden that expresses the Japanese love of nature dates from the tenth to twelfth centuries. These artificial landscapes (based on idealized landscape paintings) also offered open-air living spaces. Depending upon time and culture, it was perfectly acceptable, and desirable, to make ornamental gardens without vividly colored flowers. To create such an intimate, walled-in private garden, you don’t need colorful, smelly flowers unless you like them.
The oldest symbolic element of early Japanese gardens was the horai, a supposed island where tortoises, cranes, and immortals lived. In such gardens only “auspicious” plants, such as pine, bamboo, and plum, were allowed. Decorative rocks were also used in an entirely different way in Japanese compared to Chinese gardens. In abstract or dry landscape gardens, rocks were grouped and often laid on sand, often arranged in “auspicious” numbers, odd groupings of three, five, or seven. Plants were often clustered in these numbers as well. From the 1720s onward Japanese gardens came under a second influence of Chinese landscape paintings. Ironically, European gardens were at the same time falling under the influence of European landscape paintings.
Many Japanese gardens contained water elements; ponds, streams, and waterfalls were often traversed with elegant high-arched wooden or stone bridges. Stepping-stones were dominant themes in garden ponds. Clipped and exaggerated cone-bearing shrubs and trees dominated these managed landscapes, made to look like the gnarled and twisted wind-sculpted trees on far-off islands. Some flowering trees (e.g., plums and cherries) were used, but remained in the minority. Color mainly came from the various nuanced shades of leaves, especially in autumn, including from the now-famous Japanese maples. Japanese gardens in public botanic gardens in the United States are deceptive and often inauthentic. They combine a number of Japanese landscape styles used and abandoned over several centuries.
The fates of European gardens, garden designs, and styles following the end of the Roman Empire are complicated and not easy to summarize. As in Japan and China, landscape styles and preferences changed a great deal and in varying ways over fifteen hundred years. As in Japan, some garden motifs in Europe never incorporated what we recognize today as “flower beds” or trees with big, fragrant blossoms. Examples of shifts in garden sensibilities included highly formal but stereotyped knot or parterre gardens, found especially in France and England. These plantings consisted of tightly clipped hedges with gravel paths, and usually no flowers at all. These gardens utilized heavily trained shrubs (clipped or wired into formal shapes) of European boxwood (Buxus sempervirens). Some ancient Roman gardening tricks (e.g., topiary) carried on in gardens in some countries but grew unfashionable in others.
Trade and commerce between European countries and Muslim neighbors introduced “garden favorites,” such as the beloved tulips. New garden darlings included the lilacs and horse chestnuts. Elsewhere, we will discuss the tulip craze in Holland during the mid-seventeenth century. Colonization of the western hemisphere and Asia added many more species, but this trend occurred slowly at first, or in fits and starts. The Tradescant family of London (John Tradescant the Elder [c. 1570s–1638] and his son, the Younger [1608–62]) were notable for collecting and moving plants around the globe. John the Elder was gardener to England’s King Charles I. Father and son were the first to grow exotic fruits, including pineapples and nectarines, in Europe and introduced red columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) to the gardens at Hampton Court. For a time ornamental flowering plants from North America were highly favored by the English aristocracy and other wealthy gardeners, until it became easier for collectors to plunder China for its plants in the nineteenth century. Limited trade with temperate Asia, including central China, before the 1700s gave Europeans their first true chrysanthemums and the daylilies (Hemerocallis). The age of Spanish conquest brought the dahlia, tuberose, nasturtium, and the true marigold to the New World.
Once the industrial revolution began to accelerate in England and Western Europe, new maritime and horticultural technology made it possible for garden novelties to arrive faster and more dependably. Governments and entrepreneurs found it easier to plan expeditions just for collecting exotic plants. From the nineteenth through the earlier decades of the twentieth century, the number of plants available for use in ornamental gardens in Europe increased annually compared to the sporadic and unreliable arrival of dahlias, tulips, and tuberoses in centuries past. Modern horticultural trade and commerce had begun in earnest.
When Europeans entered South America, Africa, and Asia, they came to stay. The age of imperialism fostered trading posts. Seeds, bulbs, and tubers are dormant but durable packets of life and easily shipped. They can survive for months on a sailing ship if kept away from sunlight, seawater, black rats, and cockroaches. The famous mutiny on the Bounty occurred, in part, because the breadfruit saplings on board received more freshwater and better care than the crew! Not a plant was lost until the ship’s officers and unlucky botanists were set adrift in the Pacific Ocean. By the nineteenth century, some of the most beautiful orchids, bromeliads, and other jewels of tropical forests were transported overseas to European nurseries in protective iron-and-glass Wardian cases, precursors of the modern terrarium.
As in Japan and China, big, ornate, and expensive ornamental gardens in Europe were primarily hobbies of royal families and aristocrats, until they were claimed by captains of industry, bankers, and a rising middle class. The camellias, magnolias, and rhododendrons of temperate Asia were fashionable because they framed that great status symbol, the country estate. Glasshouses stocked with the flowering gems of tropical forests reflected good taste and the ability of the nobility and private citizens to influence horticulture and scientific thought via botanical gardens. A generation of wealthy collectors eagerly shared their orchids, vines, and carnivorous plants with Charles Darwin upon his request.
In America, however, eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century pleasure gardens and private parks were more likely to reflect nationalistic, intellectual, and egalitarian themes.
We can learn a great deal about America’s passion for gardening, even empire-building and the birth of our nation, by visiting Washington’s Mount Vernon, Jefferson’s Monticello, and Madison’s Montpelier, and even the small farm created by frugal John Adams called Peacefield. Our founding fathers were all avid gardeners and amateur botanists. They used flowering trees and shrubs to beautify their private landscapes. Revolutionary and visionary Benjamin Franklin believed that agriculture was the only honest path for any nation to acquire wealth. He placed plants at the heart of the country’s struggle to emerge independent and free from British rule. Franklin knew that America, with its natural resources, could become self-sufficient, and to this end he experimented with grains and other crops in his Philadelphia garden. Surprisingly, the creation of the American nation, gardens, agriculture, landscapes, and protection of nature are all intertwined. One symbol of the new nation was the Liberty Tree, an ancient American elm that grew in the Boston town common. From its branches, an effigy of Andrew Oliver, the hated Stamp Act tax collector, was hung in protest by the angry colonists.
During the American War of Independence, General George Washington continued his private affairs and correspondence, which included directing gardeners at work on his majestic Mount Vernon estate bordering the Potomac River. He directed the planting of diverse and native tree species including stately white pines, tulip poplars, alabaster dogwood, aspen, black gum, maples, honey locust, mountain laurels, sassafras with their yellow blooms, and red cedars. His five-hundred-acre, landscaped property established a national trend and exemplified gardening in this period. It was an American garden, where imported British trees were not welcomed. Washington’s towering pines and red cedars were a reflection of a defiant, strong, and vigorous young United States of America.
Standing upon the wide “vegetable terrace” of Jefferson’s Monticello estate, one notices the sweeping lawns edged by the encroaching forest of hardwoods set against the panoramic vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Even the orderly rows of squashes, gourds, and cabbages are somehow majestic and stirring. A late-October visit to Monticello offers the visual splendor of an arboreal ocean of reds, oranges, yellows, and browns from red maples, oaks, hickories and tulip poplars. The orchard comprises orderly rows of fruit trees, including apples, pears, and cherries, and lawns are bordered by ribbons of flowers from native and exotic species. Jefferson, as scientist and reluctant politician, was as adept in his garden plantings as in his stirring founding words in the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson, Washington, and Madison all purchased plants from John Bartram, a famous eighteenth-century American farmer and well-known plant collector. With the British obsession with gardens, many native American plants were collected and introduced into English landscapes by Bartram’s efforts. Over four decades Bartram sent hundreds of large wooden crates overflowing with seeds and plant cuttings to Peter Collinson, a wealthy English merchant. America’s Eastern flora transformed European parks. The American trees that flooded British estates benefited from Bartram’s plant evangelism. Plants and ideas were exchanged actively across the Atlantic. Englishman Joseph Banks added thousands of plants from Africa, temperate Australia, and the Far East to Britain, and many of those plants arrived in America as part of the cross-Atlantic exchange. In fact, the charmingly traditional look of our oldest Southern gardens, so incomplete without crape myrtles, owes a lot to the acumen of Europeans collecting plants in Asia.
Many American gardening traditions and styles can be traced directly to post–Roman Empire gardens in Western and Mediterranean Europe, especially Italy. After all, they gave us the concept of green mown lawns, fanciful topiary shapes, floral clocks, and other creations. America ultimately inherited French, British, and Dutch-Belgian concepts of garden design, and their formality, while American plant collectors and entrepreneurs (including the father-and-son team of John and William Bartram) exchanged native American flowering plants for European and Asian favorites. Thanks to the Bartrams, Europeans received over two hundred species to grow in their gardens, including mountain laurels (Kalmia), the huge bull bay (Magnolia grandiflora), and that infinite curiosity the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula). In reverse, William Bartram’s friendship with the French botanist André Michaux (1746–1802) probably encouraged America’s importation of Asian camellias, silk trees (Albizia julibrissin), and our long fascination with the crape myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica).
Today, thumbing through the pages of any gardening catalog is a feast, until all that glamorous eye candy in the color photographs starts to blur together. Thousands of flower varieties derived from hundreds of plant species are for sale. Garden catalogs are exercises in one-upmanship as companies vie to produce the next best-of-show winning combination of ruffled petals and unusual shapes and colors. How did we get to where we are now? How did your grandmother’s garden of Cosmos or carnations (Dianthus) turn into extravaganzas of unusual plant breeding and artificial selection? We will explore this in an upcoming chapter.
American gardens of the earliest, prerevolutionary colonists were far simpler in design, hosting relatively few flowers with mostly hardy vegetables, and a few medicinal herbs. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries American citizens had become more experimental, even daring, with their garden plots, especially in colonial Willamsburg, New York State, and areas around Boston. In New England, these gardens were similar to the English cottage gardens in which flowering shrubs, such as roses, were mixed with annuals, perennials, and various vegetables. More formal public and larger private gardens were likely to be united around a design theme of rectilinear geometries defined by clipped, formal, low hedges. Flower beds and scattered trees (both European and American species) followed the “French-Italianate” style. Away from the main buildings larger expanses of lawns were interspersed with native American trees producing park styles (think of New York City’s expansive Central Park) that we have kept and admired to this very day.
The major trend in American gardening from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries has been a long and gradual shift away from Roman and European designs. Today, some city fathers still want our public gardens to be more formal than Versailles or Hampton Court. Others wish public spaces to be relaxing, inviting us to linger, in the style of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), best known for his design of Central Park in Manhattan. American gardens now embrace more naturalistic designs, since most of us can’t afford to employ a staff of full-time professional gardeners. We have commercial mowing and pruning companies “for the aged” who can no longer care for their properties, while workaholics and soccer moms are rarely at home or in the garden. To save on water bills, we’ve created xeriscape rock and cactus gardens. Even so, America remains a country of innovative gardeners and we adhere to various gardening fads. Since World War II we have added color gardens, scented gardens for the visually impaired (with plant identifications in braille), community gardens, container gardens, hanging gardens, herb gardens, roof gardens, victory gardens, fairy gardens, and feng shui gardens. These landscapes demand careful attention to appropriate species and reflect the passions of amateur horticulturists. For the career-oriented with little time for gardening, flowers selected may be limited to those that flourish best in pots or hastily dug flower beds. Most are annuals or tropical plants that will die with the autumn frosts, such as Impatiens. They are purchased almost full grown at nurseries and hardware franchises because we seem to lack the time or patience these days to grow our own zinnias and marigolds from seeds. As noted in the beginning of this chapter, tulip and daffodil bulbs are easy to obtain and can be planted on one autumn day if the weather is nice.
Speaking of fads, a somewhat messy natural or wild look is now in vogue. Organic is in for gardens. Some brave souls have even dug up their difficult-to-maintain chemically fueled green lawns and replaced them with enticing low-maintenance flowering meadows (following the lead of the late Dame Miriam Rothschild on her Ashton Wold UK estate). Many gardeners have created diverse and wonderful wildlife gardens for birds, bees, butterflies, and bats. You can have your wildlife garden certified by the National Wildlife Federation and proudly proclaim your nature garden to passersby with official signage. Recently, specialized pollinator gardens have emerged where flower-visiting insects and hummingbirds dine on nectar and pollen, often mating and reproducing in season. Some working couples and partners have now decided to spend some of their after-work leisure hours relaxing in the Datura- and jasmine-scented air of their very own “moonlight and fragrance” garden. I want one of these!