Columella's Living Hedge: The Roman Gardening Book

Abstract

The subject of this essay is not Roman gardens, their reconstruction or restoration, but Roman gardening. This must be found on the page, and specifically in the work of Columella, who has more to say on this aspect of Country Life than the rest of Classical Antiquity put together — literally more, in quantity, but also, and more to the point, more to the point.Reference to Columella's Garden always means the poem of 436 hexameters that bursts into the prose De re rustica as Book 10. It appears on its own in a cluster of manuscripts, and has regularly been read as a free-standing composition. In this paper, I resist this sin of excerption, to explore the role of gardening on Columella's farm.

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