The eighteen richly illustrated chapters of this magisterial volume is the culmination of decades of collaboration. The genesis of this two-volume endeavor is a two-day conference on "Gardens of the Roman Empire" held in 1995 and spearheaded by the late Wilhelmina Jashemski, the scholar who founded the discipline of garden archaeology. She continued to manage the project until her death in 2007, after which her co-editors Kathryn L. Gleason, Kim J. Hartswick, and Amina-Aïcha Malek brought the book to completion.

The entire project is conceived as a two-volume work. Volume 1, under review here, is a traditional print volume, also available in digital pdf form. The eighteen chapters which cover the current and emerging trends in scholarship are to be complemented by a second volume, still in production, which promises to be an interactive digital catalogue of all known gardens throughout the Roman empire, organized geographically by areas (Europe; Asia; Africa).

The eight chapters of Part I treat the various types of gardens in ancient Rome categorized according to form and function. Gardens differed depending on whether they were connected to simple homes (Chapter 1, "The Garden in the Domus," by Eric Morvillez), lavish villas (Chapter 2, "The Roman Villa Garden," by Kim J. Hartswick and Chapter 3, "The Archaeology of Gardens in the Roman Villa," by Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis), temples or sacred groves (Chapter 5, "Temple Gardens and Sacred Groves," by Maureen Carroll), baths or palaestras (Chapter 6, "Gardens in Baths and Palaestras," by Janet DeLaine), gymnasia or schools (Chapter 7, "Gardens in Gymnasia, Schools, and Scholae," by Maureen Carroll), or cemeteries (Chapter 8, "Roman Tomb Gardens," by John Bodel). In these chapters, the authors present the evidence, both literary and archaeological, from across the Roman empire and across time. Despite the drive toward a typology of gardens, the authors in this section are careful to present the evidence as the product of a particular time and place. As Macaulay-Lewis concludes, "Most fundamentally, there is no single category such as a 'Roman villa garden'" (119).

Indeed, the study of gardens demands an extrapolation of the normative from the exceptional, but the gardens of ancient Rome even more so, because of the vicissitudes of preservation. Yet by developing a systematic archaeological method for recovering gardens, Jashemski allowed scholars to surmount this methodological obstacle and to harvest data from far beyond the sites so well preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius.

Thus, in Part III, the authors are able to describe the construction of Roman gardens (Chapter 14, "Constructing the Ancient Roman Garden," by Kathryn L. Gleason and Michele A. Palmer), the technologies for providing water (Chapter 15, "Water and Water Technology in Roman Gardens," by Gemma C. M. Jansen), the techniques of gardening (Chapter 16, "Gardening Practices and Techniques," by Wilhelmina Jashemski), and the plants themselves (Chapter 17, "Plants of the Roman Garden," by Wilhelmina Jashemski, Kathryn L. Gleason, and Michael Herchenbach) by recourse to scientific disciplines such as landscape architecture, hydrology, agronomy, agriculture, and the newly emerging field of archaeobotany. Jashemski ensured that the study of ancient Roman gardens is necessarily interdisciplinary and collaborative.

The great strength of this volume is its comprehensive approach to the study of gardens, which is consistently applied across all chapters. Complementing the archaeological research in Parts I and III are the five chapters of Part II that focus on the representations of gardens in Greek and Latin literature (Chapter 9, "Greek Literary Evidence for Roman Gardens," by Anthony R. Littlewood, and Chapter 10, "Representations of Gardens in Roman Literature," by K. Sara Myers) and in frescoes (Chapter 11, "Frescoes in Roman Gardens," by Bettina Bergmann), and the use of other plastic arts in gardens, such as mosaics (Chapter 12, "Mosaics and Nature in the Roman Domus," by Amina-Aïcha Malek) and sculpture. (Chapter 13, "Sculpture in Ancient Roman Gardens," by Kim J. Hartswick)

In these chapters, scholars gather the primary evidence and offer interpretations based on overarching trends. Scholars who rely chiefly on archaeological evidence supplement their definitions of garden spaces with literary texts, and those who rely on the wealth of representational evidence available in literature and frescoes likewise turn to physical evidence when appropriate (e.g., "A seaside villa landscape similar to that of Pollius Felix [subject of Statius' Silvae 2.2] is depicted on a wall painting from Pompeii" (271, with color illustration of a fresco from the Naples Museum).

All of the contributors are hampered by the methodological difficulties besetting the study of ancient Roman gardens, which are located in a specific place at a unique time, and which under the best of circumstances can only be approximated. Those inanimate garden elements which actually survive intact (statues; herms; ornaments) have almost always been moved, or removed from their original contexts; meanwhile, those animate garden elements which do not survive (the plants themselves) remain in situ but are highly inaccessible-if they survive at all. One may argue that frescoes provide a medium through which we may observe gardens most faithfully, because they provide the best-preserved representations of gardens. However, mosaics that frame discrete spaces through which one walks may come closer to retaining the experience of an ancient garden.

The title of the book occludes the inherent difficulty of the subject matter, for the Latin word hortus does not adequately express the variety of landscape and architectural forms at the core of Roman gardens. Thus, in the conclusion the editors include a brief discussion of key terms that were identified by Jashemski and that refer to specific aspects of gardens (482-488). The distinctly Roman hortus, any enclosure for plants, differs significantly from its plural, horti, the "complex assemblages of luxurious gardens" (483); paradeisos and its plural paradeisoi, generally regarded as royal gardens of Asia Minor, are words that also appear in the contexts of Egyptian tax documents (483); viridia/viridiarium/viridiaria are terms that refer to green spaces with specimen plants that may also have been sculpted into topiaries (484-486); the Greek term xystus and its plural, xysta, referred to colonnades or open walks bordered by plants and greenery (486).

As "gardens" is a capacious term in the title, so too is "Roman Empire," for the material covered in this book spans the whole of the Mediterranean, from Persia to Lusitania, from Homer to Palladius. Attention is paid both to elite garden forms and, as evidence allows, to ordinary gardens as well. Yet all of the manifestations of ancient Roman gardens that remain for us to study convey the aesthetic union of nature and culture that results in a living artifact that by necessity escapes our grasp. This volume comes as close as any can to putting the gardens of the Roman empire within reach.

Victoria Emma Pagán