A distinction is made between Greek gardens, made in ancient Greece, and Hellenistic gardens, made under the influence of Greek culture in late classical times. Little is known about either. 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. to observe, "For all practical purposes there appear to have been no gardens of any sort in Greek city homes, beyond perhaps a few pots with plants." Aside from vegetable plots and orchards, Ridgway found some literary and a small amount of archaeological evidence for public, or semi-public gardens linked to sanctuaries. In fifth- and fourth-century Athens, some public places were planted with trees, as Plato directed in his Laws, "The fountains of water, whether of rivers or springs, shall be ornamented with plantings and buildings for beauty", though he does not offer details. In 1936, the surroundings of the Temple of Hephaestus at Athens were excavated to bare rock, in which rectangular planting pits were identified, which ran round three sides of the temple but not across its front and were lined up with the columns of the temple. In their bases were the shattered remains of flower pots in which layered stems had been rooted; however, associated coins show that the first of these plantings had been made not before the third century BC. By that time, in mainland Greece and Ionia, the influence of Achaemenid Persia was paramount in humanly-tended gardens, but in the previous century, of Alexander the Great, Plutarch observed that as a boy he would inquire of Persian visitors to his father's court in Macedon, about Persian roads and military organization, but never of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; Herodotus, who probably visited Babylon in the mid-fifth century, does not mention the hanging gardens. Xenophon, under Achaemenid Persian influence, planted a grove upon his return to Athens. The myth, set in Macedon, of Silenus discovered drunken by Midas can be dated to the Hellenistic period simply from its setting, a rose garden. In Athens, the first private pleasure gardens appear in literary sources in the fourth century. The Academy had its site in an ancient grove of plane trees sacred to an obscure archaic hero,