This chapter discusses the appearance of the peach in Roman Italy as a locally cultivated plant. The peach, a plant originating from the East, had reached the eastern Mediterranean sometime in the Hellenistic period via Persia, but it was introduced to Italy only in the late first century BC/start of the first century AD. The chapter discusses the archaeobotanical and other archaeological evidence related to the cultivation of the peach and examines a large early imperial fruit farm discovered in Rome in recent years as an example of financial investment in large-scale fruit cultivation. The archaeological evidence provided by this site suggests how Rome’s aggregate demand for fresh products created the right conditions in the early Julio-Claudian period for financial investment in irrigation technology and in recent horticultural introductions such as the peach.

This chapter focuses on the appropriation and transplantation of new plants encountered during military campaigns abroad. This phenomenon, which was not exclusive to Roman generals but had various antecedents in earlier civilizations, forcefully entered Roman discourse on imperialism when even trees were displayed as spoils of war during triumphal celebrations. In elite versions of agricultural history such as Pliny’s, both the horticultural products of Roman Italy and of its new ‘imperial’ imports were considered as somehow instances of Roman civilizing processes of so-called barbarian landscapes. The chapter also discusses the possible modes of diffusion of new plants and cultivars around the empire: wealthy landowners who had properties in Italy and in various provinces, the military, who had notable geographic mobility, and traders.

This book has investigated Roman fruit cultivation from a dual perspective: the ‘idea’ of arboriculture that can be found in the ancient literary texts and the ‘reality’ of arboriculture and horticulture more generally, as revealed by archaeological data. The various sections of this study have led the reader from the examination of how plants became means of elite self-representation and how literary texts discuss the engagement with the cultivation of fruit trees and transplantation of plants, to the archaeological and archaeobotanical record for arboriculture and the arrival and diffusion of new plants in Italy and the West. This journey has revealed the distinct and charged way in which arboriculture was used in elite discourse and the notable advances in horticultural practices that characterize the first century ad.

This chapter examines the changes in agricultural practices and the dispersal of new plants in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Gallic provinces after their incorporation into the Roman empire. It investigates the effects colonization may have had on agricultural practices. The provinces chosen as case studies were the object of large colonization programmes organized by Caesar and Augustus.Although the available archaeobotanical data for these regions is uneven, it is possible to detect in these provincial territories similar trends to those observed for Roman Italy: an increase, in the late first century BC, with notable peaks in the early first century AD, in the number and variety of horticultural produce available. The evidence from northern and northeastern France and the western Netherlands suggests a connection between the presence of the army and the import of new plant foods first, and the local cultivation of some of these new plants later. Such evidence offers a compelling picture for the diffusion of cultivation techniques and dietary changes that took place in the early empire.

The introduction presents the topic of the book, its aims and type of primary material examined, discussing the problems and limitations inherent to the archaeobotanical data available. It then gives an overview of the book structure and chapter content.

Chapter 8 discusses the archaeological evidence for cultivation choices made on provincial estates, trying to establish when large-scale arboriculture was a viable and appealing choice for growers. The case study of two farms in southern France suggests that even for modest colonial famers cultivating the grapevine and making wine for the market were attractive commercial choices. The fact that these cultivated a combination of wild and cultivated vines might be indicative of the limited opportunities they had in accessing plant cuttings and young vines from nurseries. The chapter concludes by comparing the Iberian and Gallic evidence with that available for Roman Britain, a region for which rich archaeobotanical datasets exists. The Roman era increased the range of plant foods consumed and allowed the acclimatization of certain plants into Britain; here, large-scale fruit cultivation seems to have occurred on larger estates, whose proprietors had access to capital, technical knowledge and markets with sufficient aggregate demand. Roman Britain shows quite clearly that the overall pattern in the distant provinces was not so different from the heartland of Roman agriculture.

This chapter focuses on grafting of fruit trees and the development of new cultivars of fruits, exploring the ways in which grafting came to occupy a prominent metaphorical and symbolic place in elite intellectual discourse. It is argued that such ideological constructs ultimately rested on the fact that grafting is a fundamental technique in arboriculture (since propagation of plants to maintain them true to type occurs by grafting). Grafting lent itself easily to be used as the symbol of the ingenuity and control humans could exercise over nature, but also as a possible source of hubris. The emphasis literary texts give to the involvement of prominent Roman families in the development and naming of new fruit varieties suggests that this symbolic discourse was rooted in practical considerations about the economic implications of running agricultural estates for market-oriented arboriculture.

Chapter 1 investigates how in the late Republic private gardens came to symbolize the qualities and cultural aspirations of their owners, essentially becoming a means for self-representation. This ideological development was the outcome of the blurring of boundaries between private and public architecture in terms of social and political significance. The chpater then focuses on two grand examples of garden planning that brought the symbolic use of green spaces into the political discourse and political competition: Lucullus’ Horti and Pompey’s Porticus. Plants displayed in a garden could convey specific meanings; when such plants were exotica imported from newly conquered lands, they spoke also of territorial conquests. The multi-layered cultural complexity of late Republican garden spaces was the basis on which horticulture and plant transplanting grew as an elite, ideologically charged activity.

Chapter 3 argues that the Augustan era was crucial for the development of commercial arboriculture and horticulture more generally. The interest of Augustan intellectuals in writing works on horticulture, the introduction of new fruits into Italy, the appearance of garden tombs and of specific terms to indicate types of cultivations, the wider application of water-lifting technology to irrigation, all point to a considerable development of horticulture and intensification of cultivations in the late first century BC and the early first century AD.While horticultural exploitation in Rome’s suburbium changed gear during the early principate, the chapter argues that further stimulus to investigate horticultural matters came also from land assignments to veterans in provincial territories and from wealthy landowners who were acquiring an increasing number of properties overseas. Identifying the best varieties to be cultivated commercially in the specific environmental conditions present in the provincial territories must have been of great interest to the farmer-colonists as it was for the Romanized local elites investing in cash crop cultivations.