At the heart of the Roman home stood the hortus, a modest kitchen garden providing vegetables, fruit, and herbs essential to daily life. These plots were intensively cultivated, often bounded by walls that both sheltered plants and created a private outdoor room. For wealthier households, the peristyle garden became distinctive: a colonnaded courtyard adorned with clipped box hedges, fountains, and painted backdrops that blurred the line between built space and planted landscape. Archaeological finds at Pompeii and Herculaneum reveal how carefully these spaces were designed to integrate art, architecture, and horticulture, creating stage-like settings for leisure and dining.
Roman gardeners embraced order and geometry. Beds were laid out in regular patterns, paths aligned with axial views, and plants trained into shapes that reinforced the architectural framework. At the same time, they delighted in abundance. Vines, roses, cypresses, and laurels lent colour and fragrance, while fruit trees – figs, apples, pears, and pomegranates – combined beauty with utility. The Romans also developed a taste for exotic species imported through their empire, from plane trees admired for their shade to peacocks roaming in ornamental parks.
