Real estate agent Nick Millican comments over interior design for residential and commercial buildings. A flower show exhibition in Chelsea is committed to recreating a Roman-style garden using insights about the historic style from a preserved garden from Pompeii.

The exhibition is Newt’s entry into 2024’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show. How is it done? As with any property project, the first step was research and planning. Next, Nick Millican adds, in the case of the Roman-style garden, this started in August last year.

The team at the Newt studied Roman frescoes and, more importantly, the preserved garden in Pompeii’s House of Vettii, for insights on how the Romans planted their gardens. Nick Millican comments how Pompeii grants the most details for this project, as even the smallest details of a real Roman garden were preserved in the volcanic ash.

Knowledge of which plants can be observed in Pompeii’s ruins, combined with the knowledge of such on-staff experts as archaeologists, allow a stunning recreation of a Roman garden, carefully planted and tended for a showing, within the courtyard of the reconstructed Villa Ventorum in Somerset. And Nick Milican shares more information on this.

Overall, the final garden serves as a recreated first-century example of how form and function can be blended in design: the garden is beautiful and shows a place where, in Roman times, a home’s residents would have been able to relax; and functionally, the selection of plants serves as the historic equivalent to a medicine cabinet today. Nick Millican finally comments on how the medicinal herbs within the garden include a mulberry tree and Madonna lilies.