Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
A new Roman garden and mosaic has been unveiled at Butser Ancient Farm, an open-air museum in East Hampshire that hosts a number of historical building recon-structions, spanning from prehistory through to the early medieval period.
The garden was funded as a legacy, and in memory, of Joan Rundle, a long-time volunteer of the museum who had a special interest in Roman plants, and its opening coincided with the 20th anniversary of the construction of Butser’s Roman Villa, which is based on the Sparsholt Roman Villa found near Winchester (see CA 12 for more on the villa, and CA 188 to read about the reconstruction). The new garden features elements inspired by ancient Roman gardens, including sweet chestnut pergolas, stone benches, urns, raised flower beds, and paths surfaced with opus signinum.
Commenting on how the garden was designed, Kathryn Bingham, a Butser Ancient Farm volunteer, said: ‘It’s been fascinating to research and explore the types of plants the Romans used and brought to this country almost 2,000 years ago, many of which we still use for the same purposes today. One of my favourite features in the garden is the rosemary hedging: not only does it smell beautiful and attract the bees and butterflies, but it was also an important herb in Roman times, known as the herb of memory and the renewal of energy. Washing with rosemary was said to be a natural method of keeping one’s youthful looks, and scholars would wear garlands of rosemary on their heads to improve their studies.’
The focus of the garden, though, is a circular mosaic 6m in diameter, which was created by a team of volunteers using approximately 10,000 real Roman tesserae (above). The tiles were recovered from a Roman villa complex in the 1970s during the construction of the M4 motorway near Swindon, and were donated to Butser Ancient Farm last year. Its eight-pointed star imagery is an expanded version of the central roundel from the Sparsholt Villa mosaic (also recreated at Butser), with a new design in the centre of the star inspired by its garden setting.
To celebrate the villa reconstruction’s 20th anniversary, a Roman household shrine known as a lararium has been added to the complex, created by Isabel Young, a lecturer at the Royal College of Art.
Text: Kathryn Krakowka / Image: © Butser Ancient Farm
You must be logged in to post a comment.