Estate Living Magazine The Slow Movement - Issue 39 March 2019 | Page 42

C O M M U N I T Y
L I V I N G
THE GARDEN PERGOLA:
ANCIENT
AND
AFRICAN
‘Pergola’ might be the one word more than any other in the language of gardening that gets us
thinking of hot, quiet, lazy Mediterranean afternoons heavy with the scent of newly cut grass;
afternoons filled with family and Chianti, fresh basil, and rich, ripe tomatoes anointed with the
thickest, finest olive oil.
Consider this passage from The Lady in the
Palazzo: At Home in Umbria by Marlena de
Blasi:
It was Don Paolo’s birthday and all the
people of the village were gathered in the
piazza to celebrate him. The band played,
the wine flowed, the children danced, and,
as he stood for a moment alone under the
pergola, a little girl approached the beloved
priest.
‘But Don Paolo, are you not happy?’ she
asked him.
‘Of course I am happy,’ he assured the little
girl.
‘Why, then, aren’t you crying?’
Even more than the ‘piazza’ in there, it’s that
‘pergola’ that makes Ms de Blasi’s passage
so evocative, that places the scene so
perfectly in its own particular part of Italy –
and, since it puts everything into a cultural
context, too, it even helps us understand
the little girl’s question.
Make the pergola African again
Italy isn’t the only country in the world
where long summer afternoons tend to
become hot and lazy, and, while the word
‘pergola’ is Italian, they probably didn’t
invent it. It’s more likely an African original.
Proof of this comes from the world’s oldest
known garden plan, which dates back to
Egypt in about 1400 BCE, and which shows
that visitors would have entered the garden
of one of the grandees at the High Court
of Thebes through … you guessed it … a
sheltering pergola.
And that makes sense. The pergola’s
welcoming shade would’ve lifted the
simple act of entering the garden into one
of entering a cooling piece of paradise.
Although, to be sure, pergolas would’ve
been more than just entryways for the
Egyptians: they’d have been invaluable
supports for many of the crops they
considered irreplaceable – grapes, for
example, or pomegranates or figs.
But what is a pergola?
A pergola is almost any open-sided
structure in the garden that’s designed to