Women Who Shaped Garden History
The earliest recorded gardens were places of both beauty and utility, and women played essential roles in tending them. In ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, women served as herbalists, priestesses of sacred groves, and keepers of household gardens that supplied food, medicine, and fragrance.
Our knowledge of women in ancient gardens is fragmentary, pieced together from tomb paintings, clay tablets, and the writings of male historians. Yet what survives tells a consistent story: women were deeply connected to the cultivation and use of plants, even when they were excluded from formal ownership of land.
In ancient Egypt, gardens were closely tied to religion and the afterlife. Temple gardens were maintained by both male and female workers, and tomb art shows women gathering lotus flowers, tending fruit trees, and preparing herbal medicines. The gardens of wealthy households, depicted in wall paintings from Thebes and elsewhere, included ornamental pools surrounded by date palms, sycamores, and papyrus. Women oversaw these gardens as part of the domestic sphere, and their knowledge of plants was passed down through generations.
Queen Hatshepsut's famous expedition to the Land of Punt, around 1470 BCE, brought back frankincense trees to be planted at her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri. This was one of the earliest recorded acts of plant collecting, and it was commissioned by a woman. The terraced gardens of her temple, though now barren, were once filled with myrrh trees and other aromatics.
In ancient Greece, women's relationship with gardens was often expressed through mythology. Persephone's abduction while gathering flowers, Demeter's power over harvests, and the nymphs' guardianship of springs and groves all reflect a cultural understanding of women as connected to the green world. In practice, Greek women of the household managed herb gardens and kitchen plots, and the Adonia — a festival honoring Adonis — involved women planting fast-growing seeds in pots on rooftops, a kind of ritual container gardening.
Roman women had somewhat more visible roles. Artemisia II of Caria (though technically a Hellenistic queen) was associated with the botanical study of the plant genus that bears her name, Artemisia. Roman matrons maintained elaborate household gardens, and wealthy women commissioned the viridaria (ornamental garden rooms) depicted in Pompeian frescoes. The elder Pliny records several women as knowledgeable about plants and their medicinal uses.
Across the ancient world, women were the primary practitioners of herbal medicine. This knowledge was overwhelmingly oral, and most of it has been lost. But the tradition of women as healers-through-plants would continue unbroken into the medieval period, forming the foundation for the convent gardens and physic gardens that became centers of botanical learning in Europe.