This chapter focuses on grafting of fruit trees and the development of new cultivars of fruits, exploring the ways in which grafting came to occupy a prominent metaphorical and symbolic place in elite intellectual discourse. It is argued that such ideological constructs ultimately rested on the fact that grafting is a fundamental technique in arboriculture (since propagation of plants to maintain them true to type occurs by grafting). Grafting lent itself easily to be used as the symbol of the ingenuity and control humans could exercise over nature, but also as a possible source of hubris. The emphasis literary texts give to the involvement of prominent Roman families in the development and naming of new fruit varieties suggests that this symbolic discourse was rooted in practical considerations about the economic implications of running agricultural estates for market-oriented arboriculture.

Chapter 1 investigates how in the late Republic private gardens came to symbolize the qualities and cultural aspirations of their owners, essentially becoming a means for self-representation. This ideological development was the outcome of the blurring of boundaries between private and public architecture in terms of social and political significance. The chpater then focuses on two grand examples of garden planning that brought the symbolic use of green spaces into the political discourse and political competition: Lucullus’ Horti and Pompey’s Porticus. Plants displayed in a garden could convey specific meanings; when such plants were exotica imported from newly conquered lands, they spoke also of territorial conquests. The multi-layered cultural complexity of late Republican garden spaces was the basis on which horticulture and plant transplanting grew as an elite, ideologically charged activity.