UM Professor Emerita
Unearthed the Gardens of Pompeii

Wilhelmina Jashemski with her book The Gardens of Pompeii, date unknown

Faculty profile, based on an interview by Kelly Blake On the day I went to interview the renowned scholar Wilhelmina Feemster Jashemski, professor emerita from the UM Department of History, the region was experiencing an intense “nor’easter” storm with wind gusts up to 60 mph. When I arrived at her house, she welcomed me and expressed concern about me driving in such weather. “It’s really dangerous,” she said in voice made gravelly by her 96 years. “Fortunately, all of my trees have big tap roots, so they are impervious to wind.” With that statement, she instantly communicated her sensitivity to the people and the natural world around her. This quality, I would discover, is one of the key elements of Dr. Jashemski’s illustrious career, much of which was spent gathering archaeological evidence of the gardens and horticultural practices of the ancient city of Pompeii.

Dr. Jashemski was not trained as an archaeologist. She came to the University of Maryland in 1946 as an ancient historian, and her scholarship in this area, focusing on Roman constitutional government, garnered great respect after the publication of her first book in 1950. She was looking for a new research topic when her husband, Stanley Jashemski, suggested, “You love gardens, and the Romans loved gardens, why don’t you research Roman gardens?” Wilhelmina replied gleefully, “That sounds like too much fun to be a serious subject for research.” As every academician knows, finding a research subject that is worthy of exploration yet remains unexplored is a cause for great celebration, and after checking the literature on her own, and then with her dissertation advisor, Dr. Jashemski came to the conclusion that indeed no one had ever seriously studied Roman gardens before.

Breaking New Ground in Archaeology

Dr. Jashemski and her husband Stanley, a physicist, first went to the

“I am writing my memoirs now,” Jashemski says. “The archaeologists told me I should do it when they gave me the gold medal because my work was unique, that I really created a new field.”

Pompeii region in 1955. She had begun her exploration in Egypt where she knew there had been a tradition of gardens, to see if they had influenced the Roman gardens. She then scheduled one day each at the ancient sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum. “I thought then that I would simply read the excavation reports that had been published and then go and see the places that were obviously gardens and that I could write a book from that,” she says with a chuckle. It didn’t take long for her to realize that she would need to unearth the evidence herself, because very little had been written about gardens. “I knew they had peristyles [a colonnade that surrounds a courtyard] with soil in them and I thought they surely were planted and that the big open spaces were planted.”

Going Where No Non-Italian Went Before

In 1961, the Superintendency of Archaeology of Pompeii invited her to excavate a garden. “Up until then, there had never been a non-Italian excavate at Pompeii,” Jashemski says proudly. There were also very few women in the fields of ancient history and archaeology in general. Although Jashemski recalls that many of her UM colleagues at the time found her research subject “something sort of silly,” she also remembers what Frank Brown, who was the director of the American Academy in Rome and a preeminent archaeologist at that time, said about her credentials. “You’ve got the best possible preparation. You’ve got all those years of Latin and Greek and ancient history. You understand the people and what their lives were like, so you’ll be able to interpret what you’ll find. So many archaeologists dig and don’t even realize what their looking at.”

Wilhelmina and Stanley traveled to Pompeii every summer for more than 20 years. They established a large interdisciplinary network of scholars who contributed expertise, and developed close relationships with their team of Italian workers, many of whom were farmers with a vast knowledge of local growing traditions. “The only requirement made when they asked me to excavate at Pompeii was that I hire Italians,” Wilhelmina explains. “It was right after the war, you see, and there was no work. The only work they had all year was the work we gave them, and they thought we overpaid them!”

Discovering the Garden's Role Through Interdisciplinary Research

Once they pulled out weeds, wildflowers, and other debris and got down to the A.D. 79 level, there were breaks in the lapilli (the volcanic debris left by Mt. Vesuvius) where trees had once protruded. They made plaster casts of these spaces, as was done for the spaces left from bodies that had been trapped by the volcanic eruption. They unearthed statues and mosaic fountains, garden furniture and trompe l’oeil paintings that made gardens appear larger by creating the illusion that they extended into the countryside. “The Romans loved the aesthetic value of gardens,” Jashemski says. “Even in the most inelegant, one-room houses, half of the space would be devoted to a garden.”

Dr. Jashemski credits her husband Stanley with also suggesting many useful approaches to collecting tangible evidence of gardens, including the soil analysis that revealed pollen from plants, such as olive and fig trees. “I couldn’t have done it without him,” she says, recounting all the things he contributed, including photographic documentation, payroll, and surveying and mapping the garden sites. Jashemski estimates that more than 50 experts in various scientific fields contributed to her study, which culminated in the publication of her landmark book The Gardens of Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Villas Destroyed by Vesuvius in 1979. She published a second volume in 1993, as well as The Natural History of Pompeii in 2002, among others.

Leaving a Legacy of Scholarly Innovation and Collaboration

Jashemski is recognized today for her role in creating a new academic discipline referred to as garden archaeology, which was previously not part of the repertoire of ancient historians. She was honored with the Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement by the Archaeological Institute of America in 1996. “I am writing my memoirs now,” Jashemski says. “The archaeologists told me I should do it when they gave me the gold medal because my work was unique, that I really created a new field.”

Jashemski continues to publish on the subject of Roman gardens; The Gardens of the Roman Empire, which Jashemski edited and contributed two chapters for, will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year. As she approaches 97, she still recalls vivid details of breakthroughs at Pompeii, or of the enduring friendships she made with Italian colleagues and UM graduate students whom she mentored. She has made arrangements in her will to leave her Silver Spring home (and its lovely garden) to the UM School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. The “Stanley and Wilhelmina Jashemski Study Center” will be used to house the school’s distinguished visiting professor, and continue to serve as a gathering place for the scholarly community Jashemski has so carefully cultivated during her 61-year relationship with the university.