Long before they became part of the familiar Dutch landscape, these flowers travelled north with the Romans. Some were introduced to our region by Roman hands; others spread on a large scale as a result of Roman influence. Today, they seem almost anonymous: flowering in ditches, fields and along the roadsides of the Netherlands. Yet each carries a quiet memory of movement, exchange and empire.

In Flores Romani, Bas Meeuws brings these seemingly ordinary plants back into a Roman world. Arranged as delicate still lifes, they are placed in Roman vessels and pots, photographed at Museum Kam in Nijmegen. Some of these objects travelled north from Italy; others were made locally, in the northern provinces of the Roman Empire. Together, flowers and vessels form a dialogue between the living and the archaeological, between what has endured and what has disappeared.

The backgrounds were photographed in Xanten, Germany, using historically authentic walls from a Roman inn, a private dwelling and a bathhouse. These fragments of architecture become silent stages for the flowers, connecting them to the world in which they first took root.

The result is an encounter across two thousand years. Familiar flowers become witnesses to a distant past, while ancient vessels hold a landscape that is still flowering today. Flores Romani invites us to look again at the ordinary and to recognise, hidden within it, the traces of a Roman past.