“…it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man…”  wrote Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, in his essay Essay  “Of Gardens” (1597).  I agree with him.  When I visit a town for the first time, the first place I go to is the museum. The second place is the town’s botanical garden or public garden.

But you do not have to visit gardens in the real world to enjoy their peace and beauty. Human beings seem to have planted gardens for pleasure as well as food, as far back as written records go, and probably earlier, and archaeological excavations now pay attention to evidence for gardens as well as buildings. There are many “gardens” recorded in history as wall paintings or written descriptions, which you can enjoy as a virtual experience. These were not real gardens but gardens illustrating an ideal. Plants which flowered or fruited at different seasons could be shown together and there is a lot of symbolism involved in the plants chosen, which I am not qualified to go into. But they are as beautiful as any real garden. My personal favourites are the garden painted on the wall of the tomb of Nebamun, a middle–ranking official who lived in Thebes in Egypt (around 1350 BCE); the garden of King Alcinous, described in the Odyssey (probably composed 8^th century BCE but thought to have been set in the Late Bronze Age around the 12^th to 11^th centuries BCE); and the garden painted on the walls of the empress Livia’s (58BCE – 29CE) dining room at her villa at Prima Porta north of Rome.

The estates of wealthy Egyptians always had a walled garden where the owners could enjoy peace and quiet and cool shade. The painting of the garden of Nebamun shows a pond full of fish,  water birds, papyrus and lotus flowers, which is surrounded by trees and plants: dom palms, date palms, acacias, sycamores and mandrake plants. You can visit this garden online on the British Museum website, or in the Egyptian galleries at the museum itself. I love it because of the beautiful colours, and I am very fond of pools with water lilies. It is easy to imagine yourself sitting by the pond, shaded from the hot sun by the palm trees, trailing a hand in the cool water and smelling the scent of the lotus.

The garden of Alcinous, king of the Phaiacians on the island of Scheria was described by Homer in book VII of the Odyssey. It was four acres in extent, watered by two springs and warmed by a constant west wind. Much of it was an orchard, which, magically, produced fruit all year round, pomegranates, figs, grapes, olives, apples and pears, without ever suffering from blight or frost. Beyond the orchard there were flower gardens. Even in translation (alas, I have no Greek) the words of the description paint a beautiful picture of an ideal garden, warm, peaceful and perpetually fruitful. You can almost feel the warm wind, taste the wine from the grapes. The Project Gutenberg website has a selection of translations by different people.

Livia was the wife of Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. The dining room of her villa at Prima Porta was decorated with beautiful wall paintings of a garden surrounded by a low wall, with a wide variety of flowers, shrubs and trees, with birds perching in them, and garden furniture, drawn in exquisite detail – quinces, pomegranites, myrtles, oleanders, roses, daisies and many more. I have seen the frescos in a museum in Rome and they are beyond stunning. Google images will get you there – there are hundreds of them.

Take Bacon’s advice. If you are staying in, for whatever reason, refresh your spirits with a virtual visit to the gardens of our ancestors.