Garden Crops and Gardens

Despite their focus on urban life, Greeks loved plants and flowers, and grew them ornamentally in gardens (Figure 13.15). Unlike Roman or modern gardens, Greek gardens were not attached to houses, but were simply small, accessible plots of land,

Figure 13.15 Ancient Greek gardens: (top) detail of a krater by the Meidias Painter (British Museum, London E224), showing top-grafted tree; (bottom) women picking quinces, Attic red figured vase.

Often situated along roads and surrounded by trees. They also differed from our gardens in that they contained mostly ‘economic’ plants, but grown in an ornamental way. Just as Greeks were partial to grid-planned towns and rural landscapes where this was possible, they also preferred grid-planned gardens: timber or fruit trees arranged in orderly rows, sometimes with vines or other climbing plants growing up them and flowers growing in between, protected by the shade from the burning summer sun. Flowers, such as roses, violets and lilies, also had economic uses, for perfume, garlands and flavouring.

Small garden plots were one of the few settings in which small-scale irrigation might have been possible, using a spring, well or cistern, perhaps in combination with

Figure 13.16 Dry garden (xeriko bostani) for summer vegetables in Methana in the 1980s.

Some kind of water-lifting device, such as the shadufs mentioned in the ‘Attic Stelai’ above (Figure 13.3). This would have allowed the cultivation of cucumbers, flax, greens and other vegetable crops over the hot summer. However, judicious use of ploughed fallow on deep soils would allow the summer vegetables to exploit two years of rainfall, if planted far apart and constantly weeded (Figure 13.16). Theo-phrastos (Historia Plantarum 2.7.5; De Causis Plantarum 3.16.3, 4) describes the technique of ‘dusting’ dry-farmed summer vegetables, which seems to be similar to the dry gardens (xerika bostania) of modern Greek farmers.