My dissertation, Cultivating Empire in Ancient Roman Gardens: Unearthing the Tangled Relationship between Plants and their Gardeners, is focused on the rapid blossoming of a new cross-Mediterranean plant trade, burgeoning horticultural innovation, and rise of a new gardener class in the first centuries BCE and CE. Centered on questions of plant agency, I develop a new plant-centric approach for the study of ancient Roman gardens by identifying and exploring the entangled relationship between ornamental plants and their enslaved, freed, and free gardeners—a group of non-elites that has largely been ignored. To this end, the project is interdisciplinary, drawing on gardeners’ funerary inscriptions, textual descriptions of gardeners and plants, archaeological and archaeobotanical evidence from excavated gardens and garden representations. I also utilize comparative case studies, including interviews with contemporary Italian gardeners and designers, and documentation of pre-industrial free and enslaved garden labor in early modern Italian gardens and American Antebellum plantations. My work is directly informed by my experience as a garden archaeologist working in the Bay of Naples region, where my colleagues and I have developed and implemented some of the newest garden archaeology methodologies, such as plaster sampling for pollen (our team is the first to implement this method in Italy) and Lidar scanning of preserved garden contouring.