Throughout history and across cultures, gardens, as a form of landscape, have come to be understood as a powerful setting in which societies embed a series of beliefs, myths, and fictions. A garden may well be a physical place, but it also has the potential to transcend its physicality through the actions that take place there and the meanings these actions produce. However, as John Dixon Hunt (2004) has argued, we tend to be drawn more towards origin stories of gardens – focusing on initiation of sites and original designs or ideological aims of the architect, rather than later (and potentially divergent) experiences. Indeed, gardens provide a particularly interesting and richer, perhaps even more ambiguous, object of reception study since their ephemeral natures inherently invites a multiplicity of experiences and attitudes.

In this spirit, this talk will highlight the use of garden space in acts of commemoration from two seemingly disparate cultural and temporal contexts – the Mausoleum of Augustus and the Founder’s Garden at Temple University – and I will explore how an ancient Roman tomb, re-imagined in the sixteenth century as a sculpture garden, can help us consider the ways in which the Founder’s Garden mediates between past and present, real and imaginary, and natural and monumental.

Dr. Victoria Austen is the Robert Oden Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow in Innovation in the Humanities and Classics at Carleton College. She received her PhD from King's College London in 2020, and previously held a teaching position at the University of Winnipeg; her monograph "Analysing the Boundaries of the Roman Garden: (Re)Framing the Hortus)" was published in March 2023 as part of Bloomsbury's Ancient Environments series.