Chard remains

In our old vegetable patch in suburban Melbourne, past the wire fence and white-picket gate, not far from the thicket of rocket leaves, sat the Lucullus chard. Delicious fresh or steamed with sesame seeds, and quick to grow and ripen, it was hardy, self-sufficient and very reliable.

And rightly so. Lucullus Chard is named for one of the most talented and determined statesmen of Rome: Lucius Lucinius Lucullus. And not only a soldier: he was also the owner of the Greco-Roman world's most magnificent gardens.

You wouldn't have picked Lucullus for a garden-lover - like many Roman soldiers, he seemed more into scorched earth than loamy soil. As a youth, he caught the eyes of elder statesmen when he accused one Servilius (who'd charged his father with extortion) of crimes against Rome. The Romans were impressed. ''They delighted,'' wrote Plutarch, ''to see young men as eagerly attacking injustice, as good dogs do wild beasts.'' Lucullus threw himself into his studies, quickly gaining mastery in rhetoric and the liberal arts.

This single-mindedness continued abroad. When he docked in Egypt, the Hellenic King Ptolemy XII (Cleopatra's dad) treated Lucullus to sumptuous quarters, feasts and gifts - but Lucullus ate sparingly and declined the rich offerings. He even avoided the wonders of Egypt. ''It was for a man of no business and much curiosity to see such things,'' Plutarch wrote, ''not for him who had left his commander in the field.'' Lucius had business and he meant to finish it.

Perhaps young Lucullus was a little too single-minded. Eventually, the brash general (''naturally unsociable'', commented Plutarch) found himself estranged from his own army - the very same battle-hardened soldiers he'd led to glory and spoils. Meanwhile, back in Rome, the daggers were out. Envious tribunes were attacking him as a greedy warmonger, ''who for empire and riches, prolonged the war'', Plutarch wrote. Lucius found himself relieved of command and surrounded by soldiers who neither respected nor obeyed him. His star waned, while Pompey's waxed.

But Lucullus wasn't deprived of his wealth. By taxing and plundering the tyrannies of the Levant, he had grown rich. Instead of clinging to authority, or scheming in secret, he retired to a life of splendour and scholarship. He pursued pleasure with the same vigour he showed in vanquishing tyrants. He was a connoisseur of fine dishes and wines, and always ate in abundance.

And also Lucius built his gardens, on the Pincian Hill. At that point, they were unprecedented in the Greco-Roman world. He had exotic plants brought from overseas (according to legend, Lucullus brought the cherry to Italy). With fountains, topiary, spacious courtyards, aviary, paintings and sculptures, the estate afforded Lucullus his own little world of greenery, gastronomic delight and artistry. Dense thickets opened up to grand colonnades framed by firs. This wasn't simply a garden - it was a fantasy land of opulence and ease, conceived and maintained by highly-efficient Roman minds.

From the topiary and box hedges to the pipes and hydraulics, Lucullus's estate was an emblem of triumph. Everything worked well because it was paved-over, boxed in, dug up. The birds were caged in, the shrubs were pruned, the water was piped. In this, he was not unusual for his era and class. Writing in 1770, the English garden-enthusiast George Mason summed this up nicely: ''It cannot be supposed that the Romans were incapable of distinguishing real beauty in a landscape; but mistaken notions of power and grandeur perpetually intervened.'' General Lucius Lucullus was conquering the landscape and everything in it.

The aim of war, as the great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz put it, is the ''submission of the enemy to our will.'' And fundamentally, this means appropriating the enemy; making him the means to one's ends. Lucullus wasn't trying to destroy the shrubs he pruned or the mountains he drilled. He was attempting to ''disarm'' them, as Clausewitz put it. Wild, barbaric nature was tamed by wherewithal, engineering, brute strength and will.

His gardens became an expression of his well-known desire for glory.

It is interesting to reflect on what might have become of Lucullus's gardens had the great general tended to them himself. Perhaps a little less emphasis on militaristic mechanism and a little more on artful organism. As so many of us know: it's harder to fashion living emblems to one's grandiosity when dealing personally with ravenous possums, fungal diseases or drought.

Yes, the Lucullus chard does grow like clockwork - the general would've approved. But sometimes we seek a certain vital novelty instead: the surprise, reverie and bafflement provoked by the modest amateur garden.