A small herb garden by the kitchen door can feel like a modern pleasure, but it is part of a very old tradition. For well over a thousand years, people have set aside special plots for fragrant, useful plants, and the shape of those gardens tells a story about how people lived, cooked, worshiped and studied the natural world. Georgia has its own chapter in that story.
Gardens of the ancient world
People have gathered and grown herbs since long before written history. In ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, herbs flavored food, scented homes and played a part in religious rites. Greek and Roman writers described hundreds of plants and their uses, and one first-century Greek work on plants, written by a physician named Dioscorides, was copied and consulted for well over a thousand years.
Monastery gardens
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, much of Europe’s garden knowledge was kept alive in monasteries. Monks and nuns grew herbs for the kitchen, the infirmary and the chapel, often in neat, rectangular beds inside walled enclosures. A famous early medieval drawing of an ideal monastery, known as the Plan of Saint Gall, includes a dedicated herb garden laid out in tidy beds near the infirmary.
Around the year 800, the emperor Charlemagne issued a decree, often called the Capitulare de villis, that listed the plants to be grown on royal estates. It included dozens of herbs that remain familiar today, among them sage, rosemary, fennel and mint.
Knot gardens and physic gardens
By the Renaissance, herb gardens had become art as well as practice. In Tudor England, knot gardens arranged low hedges of herbs into intricate interlacing patterns meant to be admired from above, often from an upstairs window. Plants such as thyme, hyssop and germander were trimmed into living ribbons.
At the same time, universities and scholars began creating physic gardens, collections of plants grown for study. The botanical garden at Padua, in Italy, founded in 1545, is often described as the oldest academic botanical garden still in its original location. In London, the Chelsea Physic Garden was established in 1673 by the city’s society of apothecaries.
A Georgia chapter: the Trustees’ Garden
When the colony of Georgia was founded in 1733, its leaders laid out an experimental garden in Savannah, known as the Trustees’ Garden, modeled in part on the Chelsea Physic Garden. The hope was to test which plants might thrive in the new colony. Mulberry trees were planted in support of a hoped-for silk industry, along with fruit trees, grapes, herbs and other plants brought from distant places. Not every experiment succeeded, and the silk dream faded, but the garden is remembered as one of the earliest public experimental gardens in the American colonies.
What the old gardens can teach us
Through all these centuries, a few ideas stayed constant. Herb gardens were close to the house, easy to reach and organized so each plant could be found and tended. Many included a path, a border and a place to sit. Even a few pots on a sunny step can borrow that wisdom. Group your herbs where you pass every day, label them, give yourself a place to pause and enjoy the scents of plants that people have loved for so long.