putting up walls

All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I.
An old friend from Rome sent me a photo of Livia's painted garden.  Livia Drusilla, the third (and last) wife of Augustus, owned this villa outside the city, which was rediscovered in the sixteenth century and identified in 1863.  Inside, scholars found this semi-subterranean room.  It was probably used as a triclinium, a room in which Roman elites enjoyed summer banquets while reclining on daybeds.  Its partially underground location would have acted as a sort of natural air conditioner, providing cool air in the withering heat of the Roman summer - and, having lived through Roman summers with no air conditioning, I can tell you that excessive heat impairs the appetite so integral to the convivium.


The room was decorated, however, as though its inhabitants were feasting upstairs, outside in the garden.  The four walls are frescoed with a depiction of a garden bursting with flowers: red cabbage roses, Roman chamomile, chrysanthemums, white and pink poppies.*  Violets and ferns grow at the base of the walls.

The mural also depicts holm oak, bay laurel, cypress, and the distinctive two-toned fruits of the strawberry tree, Arbutus unedo.  Birds are everywhere: roosting in the necks of trees, alighting on branches, aloft above our heads.  There are common black crows and precious, exotic songbirds encaged; a large white hen, which must be one of Livia's prophetic white chickens, scratches at the soil, while a slender bird, its feathers lit up as though by fire, flies above the quince.

Some of the plants might have contributed to the delicious feasts that the viewers would have enjoyed, like pomegranates, date palms, and golden glowing quince; others are purely ornamental, like the oleander (so insolently beautiful in its toxicity) which still lines the Via del Mare.

As much as the outside has been brought inside for the viewer's pleasure, however, it is also mediated by a series of walls, doubly (or triply?) protective: a light pink wall that seems to be built from stone and woven reeds, which separates us from most of the flowers and fruits, and another, closer wall of golden reeds - and then, of course, the wall on which we see the image.  We can see this garden, but we cannot get close to it.

In 1951, scholars excavated the walls of the garden room, and today it is installed in the National Roman Museum in Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne.

II.
One of my assignments this week has been to design a siteplan emphasizing "hardscaping," meaning walkways, terraces, staircases, walls, pools, etc.  The siteplan that I was given is an irregular lot, vaguely L-shaped, bordered on two sides by roads and by those above-ground telephone wires that must be one of the worst infrastructural ideas ever to hit suburbia.  There is a slight slope from front to back, so that retaining walls border the driveway and the garage must be at least partially underground.  In the back yard, a lone set of stairs juts off what is probably the family room.  That which I could not see I could still imagine: the stairs were wooden, the landscaping was simply lawn, the yard was mostly unused.

I'm not a huge fan of "hardscaping"; for me, the word connotates developers who don't know anything about plants but are happy to build an outdoor "room" - literally, with a fireplace, built-in grill, paving, speakers, lighting, and Sunbrella-upholstered furniture sized for NFL players, with some arborvitae (always spaced too tightly together) and "Knock Out" roses thrown in as an afterthought.

And yet.  I thought about one of the most successful design solutions for an imperfect site that I have ever seen: La Foce, the south Tuscan estate of Iris Origo, laid out by Cecil Pinsent.  Here the road is too close and the hill is quite steep; but the road is shielded by high, columnar cypresses, so that all you see is the valley and the mountain range beyond, as though you are cutting through the Val d'Orcia on a ship's prow.  The hillside is terraced so that every inch of space is used.  It is the rigor of the stone which shapes the site so successfully.  Perhaps we need not call it hardscaping.  Rather, it is the architecture of the place, all of a piece with the plant choices, just as bones go with flesh.

There are few walls in contemporary suburban gardens - fences, yes, but not walls. And this is a suburban yard, I thought, dreading my instructor's almost certain disapproval.  I brought out some of my garden books and flipped through pictures of Sissinghurst and other formal, walled gardens.  The most arresting photograph showed a steep hillside that might have cascaded, here (at Iford Manor) terraced neatly into lawns separated by stone stairs and walls.  The spaces so created were discrete and usable.  Most suburban yards match the McMansions to which they belong: so much space, yet people wind up using just one or two rooms.  Similarly, to drive around much of suburbia is to see vast, unused lawns.  I want to give my hypothetical owners a reason to step outside, a destination, a structure that compels them to walk as far as they can.  Walls: a surprising inspiration not to stop, but to keep going.

* "According to Gardens of Italy by Ann Laras, twenty-four species are represented, a beautiful record of desirable plants in the Roman garden c. first century B.C.: the strawberry tree, bay laurel (of course), oleander, holm oak, English oak, Cornelian cherry, myrtle, harts-tongue fern, early dog violet, crown daisy, stinking chamomile, Italian cypress, quince, stone pine, pomegranate, opium poppy, cabbage rose, and date palm."