34 paolo squatriti
have better chances of long-term acceptance. In the obscure labor of selection and
popularization, women are the protagonists, because of their culinary roles (Gentilcore,
2010: 59; Kingsbury, 2009). In the Roman Empire, a few diva-importers like Lucullus
could make an unfamiliar plant fashionable among those whose food was more display
than subsistence, but the presence of Roman soldiers appears to have played a bigger
role in this phase of the Mediterranean Exchange and in botanical innovation. Like
cities, military camps were centers of consumption that stimulated importations and
also modifications of local land use, and therefore often of local vegetation. If some
plants reached new landscapes by design, in pursuit of the legions or to add luster and
longevity to the reputations of statesmen who brought them “back” from their tours
of duty, others moved within a market system. Commercial nurseries shipped seed-
lings in special pots called ollae perforatae, which have been found in some numbers
in Tyrrhenian Italy and in Britain and are as close as the pre-modern world got to
Wardian cases (Macauley Lewis, 2006).
Still more plants travelled in the Roman Mediterranean by mistake, as often
happens: in the late 1800s Guthrie-Smith chronicled the alarmingly-swift plant inva-
sions in northern New Zealand, the result of imperial exchanges not unlike those
which Romanization catalyzed in the Mediterranean (Guthrie-Smith, 1999). Long
before the Romans, the dissemination of such now-common, indeed naturalized,
“weeds” as corncockle and knapweed across the Neolithic Mediterranean testify to
the inadvertent role agriculturalists played in creating Mediterranean assemblages of
plants (Allen, 2009: 222; Le Floc’h, 1991: 69). In the Roman era, seeds could be
unwittingly included in a North African cargo of grain destined for faraway consumers,
or caught on the hairs of Balkan animals with a similar destiny. Roads, an innovation
in many regions of the empire, are where adventive species cluster, and it is often
along such artificial habitats that they migrate (Sykora, 1990: 44). Unintended out-
comes are as important as intended ones in the history of Mediterranean vegetation.
An exemplification of how this might have happened comes from nineteenth-
century Languedoc. Montpellier was then a major center of scientific botany, so the
effects on local flora of the opening in 1695 of the Lez canal, improving the city’s
connection with the sea, were chronicled with special assiduity. From the eighteenth
century, the regular arrival of foreign wool, made possible by the canal, and the local
technique of spreading the wool out to dry in suburban fields, after a preliminary hot
water wash that many seeds found most agreeable, brought a rising tide of exotic spe-
cies to the region. By 1813, 13 new species had colonized Montpellier’s environs; by
1853, 386 new species; and by 1859, 458. However, from the late 1800s, changes in
the wool industry brought rapid regression among the invaders, so that by 1910 a
mere 10 still lived in the area, and six in 1950. Only a Latin American wetland grass
(Ludwigia uruguayensis) managed to spread beyond Montpellier, especially along
rivers and in the Camargue, becoming an impediment to boats, and qualifying as a
pest (Le Floc’h, 1991: 74–75, with graph on 429). In the long run, it seems, acciden-
tal botanical tourists have a hard time making their way among the tough natives in
the Mediterranean. But that does not mean the pre-adapted cannot succeed.
That the Roman empire sustained ecological bridges between previously- unconnected
corners of the Mediterranean, thereby facilitating the movement of plants among them,
is further shown by the quite abrupt return to more localized botanical systems as
Roman power faded in the fifth century. The de-Mediterraneanization of the northern