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Whether you’re grooming a postage stamp-sized yard in suburban Chicago or the vast lawns surrounding the Palace of Versailles, a day spent in the garden is the closest man can get to paradise. Or, at least, spending a day outside watching your wife dig in the flowerbeds and weed her tomatoes is paradise; I’m sure as heck not getting humus under my nails (that last crack will probably cost me a fresh salad this weekend–Quam honestus patior!).

Anyway, lying in a hammock and sipping my lemonade, I recalled a bit of Latin from a long-ago seminar: Pingues hortos quae cura colendi ornaret. But where was it from–I hate falling back on Google for things I know are in my own memory–so a little puzzling was in order; it’s clearly part of a hexameter, and Virgil’s Georgics seems obvious. But would you have thought to look in Book IV–the one on beekeeping?

Forsitan et, pingues hortos quae cura colendi
ornaret, canerem, biferique rosaria Paesti,
quoque modo potis gauderent intiba rivis
et virides apio ripae, tortusque per herbam
cresceret in ventrem cucumis; nec sera comantem
narcissum aut flexi tacuissem vimen acanthi
pallentesque hederas et amantes litora myrtos. (IV.118-124)

Virgil paints a beautiful picture of “twice-flowering Paestum"–a rural town that lay near the modern Amalfi coast of Salerno south of Naples. He starts at the river, where the endives (intiba) glory in the river they drink from. Students should note how Virgil joins potis–technically a passive participle–with the noun rivis when the subject intiba is the one doing the drinking; this economy of words in describing a verbal action is a common trick of his. Next we move out to the ripae green with parsley (apium), and then further away the bulging (cresceret in ventrem) cucumbers twisted through the brush.

Sera in line 122 is interesting; a neuter plural accusative after comantem, probably best translated in English by an adverb ("late-flowering"). Virgil doesn’t just list a few flowers in these final lines, he carefully places epithets and focuses on details: It’s not the Acanthus which gets the focus, it’s the flower’s supple stem (flexi is a transferred epithet); the pale color of the ivy gets the emphatic first position in the last line, a structure prepeated at the end of the line with “shore-loving myrtles".

This passage–like so much of the Georgics–is a true joy for an attentive reader. The whole poem is a seamless weave of such fine threads, a work that really rewards extended reading and rumination. I bet I haven’t read that passage in over ten years, and yet that scrap about pingues hortos still haunted me and led me to a forgotten treasure. VIrgil truly was a brilliant writer.