Greek Gardens - Minoan Gardens

Minoan Gardens

Before the coming of proto-Greeks into the Aegean, Minoan culture represented gardens, in the form of subtly tamed wild-seeming landscapes, shown in frescoes, notably in a stylised floral sacred landscape with some Egyptianising features represented in fragments of a Middle Minoan fresco at Amnisos, northeast of Knossos. In the east wing of the palace at Phaistos, Maria Shaw believes, fissures and tool-trimmed holes may once have been planted. In the post-Minoan world, Mycenaean art concentrates on human interactions, where the natural world takes a lessened role, and following the collapse of Mycenaean palace-culture and the loss of the literacy connected with it, pleasure gardens are unlikely to have been a feature of the "Greek Dark Age".