Pompeii's ‘perfume garden' replanted as it was 2,000 years ago

Times

12-06-2025

A walled garden in Pompeii that once produced exquisite floral perfumes has been brought back to life as part of a campaign to recreate the daily life of the ancient Roman city.
The Garden of Hercules — named after a statue of the classical hero found there — has been replanted with 800 roses, 1,200 violets, rosemary and vines, as it was 2,000 years ago. Archaeologists excavating the city believe the owner of the garden once crushed flowers in olive oil and grape juice to create perfumes for sale before Pompeii was buried by ash and pumice during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD.
'Pompeii was full of gardens and they are crucial to understanding the city, hence recreating the Garden of Hercules,' Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the site director, said. Experts digging the garden in the 1950s first suspected its function when biological traces of roses were found. Since then, impressions left in the ground by vine trellises have been found and casts taken of holes in the earth have revealed that the roots of olive trees and vines were once present.
Research has shown that the owner of the property expanded the garden by buying and demolishing an adjacent building after an earthquake damaged the city in 62AD, just 17 years before Vesuvius wiped it out. Proof that perfume was produced was the discovery of a collection of glass perfume containers at the site.
Experts also found, and have recreated, an ingenious irrigation system which allowed slaves bringing water to decant it through a hole in the garden wall without entering from the street. The water flowed into channels that circulated around the planting beds. Large dolia — earthenware pots — were partly interred along the route of the channels with their apertures just above ground levels to act as reservoirs for water entering the irrigation system.
'If a gardener needed to give extra water to a plant, they could take it from a dolia,' said gardens historian Maurizio Bartolini, who worked on the replanting. Bartolini said he suspected the garden may have been used by its owner to experiment with new perfumes by combining roses, violets and rosemary, rather than produce scents for sale. 'It is 30 metres by 30 metres and possibly not large enough for full-scale production. You would need 2,000 roses to create 5cc of perfume,' he said.
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Bartolini said the flowers were either mixed with olive oil or juice from grapes harvested early. 'Those grapes would have the acidic content needed to fix the perfume of the flowers, but the scent would fade fast — you needed to wear it within a week,' he said. An inscription at the entrance states in Latin, 'Cras Credo', which translates as 'Credit will be offered tomorrow.'
Zuchtriegel said it was evidence of typical Pompeii humour. 'It reminds me of the sign I once saw in a Paris restaurant stating 'Everything is free tomorrow'. We also see the Pompeii humour in the graffiti and in official documents that include jokes about emperors,' he said. Zuchtriegel said the garden had once contained a small temple and an arbor to dine in the shade of during the summer. 'This was a productive place but also really beautiful,' he said.
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The reopening of the replanted garden this week follows an announcement in March that a wine grower will replant vines in Pompeii on the spot where a vineyard was once located. 'That is inside the city. We are also planting just outside the city on land seized from the mafia,' Zuchtriegel said.
'The green parts of Pompeii were once seen as a maintenance problem, almost separated from the archaeology. Now they are seen as an essential part of it,' he added.