According to an Hellenic historian, Nebuchadnezzar built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in the 6th century BC to make his wife, who was from a mountainous region of Iran, feel at home. In fact, he and other rulers of Mesopotamia before him (the first such gardens were probably at Nineveh) were seeking to impress a much wider audience, and the Babylon version made it on to the list of the Seven Wonders of the World.
The archeological evidence is limited, but these gardens very probably occupied a series of terraces of an enormous ziggurat that would have been visible from miles away. Stocked with exotic trees, plants and animals from the far-flung corners of the empire, given the paucity of rainfall they would have had to be irrigated with water raised from wells and the great rivers by devices such as the Archimedean Screw (which long predated the Greek scientist) and continuous chains of buckets.
All the great antique civilisations took an interest in cultivating their own gardens, but their forms and the significance attached to them varied considerably, as is demonstrated by this charming exhibition. It contains nearly 150 reliefs, marbles, bronzes, mosaics, frescoes, models of hydraulic devices and even rusty Roman garden tools that look startlingly like those that might turn up in a garden shed today.
If Mesopotamian hanging gardens were designed to project an image of majesty, riches and the conquest of nature, ancient Greek gardens were both more intimate, in harmony with their surroundings and more associated with religion. They had their origins in sacred groves, springs and rivers believed to be inhabited by gods and spirits, the haunts of nymphs and satyrs. They were not an urban phenomenon, but cultivated in the suburbs and the countryside.
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