THE GAEDEN AND ITS DEVELOPMENT. 405 



Sides of the Tiber with the luxurious gardens and country villas of the 

 rich. Pliny in his letters mentions many quite quaint peculiarities— 

 for example, the clipping of trees so as to form figures of animals was 

 already practiced— but we do not get from him a picture of the state 

 of horticultural art as a whole. This makes all the more valuable the 

 representation of a garden found not far from Rome, at Prima Porta, 

 in the villa of Livia, the wife of the Emperor Augustus. The paint- 

 ing covers continuously all four walls of the room and places us, after 

 the st^^le of the modern panoramas, in the midst of the groves of a 

 garden. The room itself is conceived as an open quadrangle sur- 

 rounded by a garden scheme excellently portra5^ed in perspective upon 

 the wall. The quadrangle is first surrounded by a strip of grass plot 

 about 3 meters wide, separated from the spectator onh^ b}'^ a golden 

 lattice work about a foot high. At the outer edge the limit of the 

 grass plot is marked by an open marble balustrade a meter in height. 

 Immediately behind this rises all around a thick grove, which excludes 

 any glimpse from without into the inclosed marble quadrangle. This 

 grove is made up of laurels, quinces, pomegranates, cy])resses, and 

 date palms, whose green crowns are depicted against the blue sk}- with 

 extraordinarv truth to nature. In their shade grows a thicket of roses, 

 poppies, and other flowers, which lean over the marble balustrade. 

 Besides this, single low -growing plants are seen at regular distances 

 in the grass plot: ferns, flower-de-luce, and conifers. This garden 

 spot, entirely shut ofl' from the world, breathes a noble simplicity such 

 as would hardly have been expected from Pliny's description. 



Judging from the absence of fantastic elements and theatrical effect, 

 this fresco doubtless gives us an actual representation of a scene in a 

 large park. From similar paintings we obtain from Pompeii informa- 

 tion, belonging to the same or a somewhat earlier time, concerning 

 what the well-to-do middle classes could eflect in the way of gardens 

 in the interior of their houses. Among the Romans the living rooms 

 were grouped around two courts placed one behind the other, of which 

 the anterior one, the atrium, is a Roman invention, while the second 

 one, the peristylium, is a peculiarity of the house plan which the 

 Romans borrowed from the Greeks. It is the peristylium that inter- 

 ests us in this connection, because, on account of the existence of a 

 second court, it could be regularly transformed into a garden. This 

 quadrate garden closely adapted itself to the plan of the house and 

 formed its termination. Its characteristic appearance was due to the 

 fact that it was surrounded by a colonnade. All traces of the plants 

 grown in the Pompeiian house garden have, of course, disappeared, 

 but we can still determine its arrangement from the walks covered 

 with mosaic plaster. It was regularly divided by two intersecting 

 walks into four quadrants of equal size. Upon these grew excellent 

 rose and myrtle bushes, lilies as well as crocuses, violets and the other 



