Roman Gardens, Introduction to World Gardens
A new focus on ancient and existing world gardens—and their impact on food—starting this month with Ancient Rome.
Good morning! Tomorrow I’m going to shift things a bit and going forward I’ll showcase a culture and their gardens for a month every Wednesday. Then as time allows, I’ll also include recipes (that I find delicious) to go along with the culture in focus for the month.
This month I’m diving into ancient Rome and the gardens, sculpture, design and especially the plants used by the Romans.
The source of my idea
When I was in college I took an Ancient Roman class. My professor was an older man with an eyepatch and a belief in not giving A’s to everyone, no matter how many complaints faced him after giving out graded papers. The first time I got a C on a paper on Romans and Barbarians from him, I scheduled one of the only appointments of my life with a professor and asked him why the low grade? He asked me what my major was. When I said computer science, he said easy. Just treat writing like a program. Create an introduction, body, and conclusion. Then for each idea I have in the body, create a paragraph and back it up with my interpretation of the evidence. I know this isn’t the hardest thing in the world to comprehend but he made it seem so much like scaffolding and logic that I sat down one Saturday and did each paragraph, sentence and word step by step until I was done. Then I rewrote it. I got an A.
Along a similar thought process, I’ve been bouncing back and forth between various ideas for this substack for awhile. I realized that I simply need a framework to focus on, and I can always iterate and move along a different trajectory as needed.
Stay tuned and can’t wait to share what I have tomorrow!
-Lorraine
Looking forward to it, Lorraine.