Akademos. Sacred groves were never actively planted, but simply existed from time immemorial and were "recognized" as sacred: they have no place in the history of gardens, save as a resort for contemplation and, at Plato's Academy, for intellectual discourse. By contrast, the olive trees in the Academy, watered by the river Cephissus, were planted, grown, it was said, from slips taken of the sacred olive at the Erechtheum. The temenos, or sacred ground, of the Academy was walled round, for ritual reasons, as pleasure gardens would be, for practical ones; within its precincts were buildings: small temples, shrines and tombs, in addition to that of the presiding hero. In 322 BC, Theophrastus, the father of botany, inherited Aristotle's garden, along with his scholars and his library; of the garden we know only that it had a walk, and that Theophrastus lectured there: it may have been in some respects a botanical garden with a scientific rather than recreational purpose. On his return to Athens in 306 BCE, the philosopher Epicurus founded The Garden, a school named for the garden he owned about halfway between the Stoa and the Academy that served as the school's meeting place; little is actually known of the ascetic philosopher's garden, though in cultural history it grew retrospectively in delight: of his garden at Geneva, Les Délices, Voltaire could exclaim, with more enthusiasm than history, "It is the palace of a philosopher with the gardens of Epicurus— it is a delicious retreat". Gardens of Adonis, under Syrian influence, were simple plantings of herbal seedlings grown in saucers and pots, which, when they collapsed in the heat of summer, were the signal for mourning for Adonis among his female adherents: these were not gardens in any general sense. Hellenistic gardens Though Harpalus, Alexander's successor at Babylon, grew some Greek plants in the royal palace and walks, mainland Greece, mother of democracy and Western cultural traditions, was not the mother of European gardens: the great Hellenistic garden was that of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Alexandria, a grand, walled paradise landscape that included the famous Library of Alexandria, part of the Musaeum. Water-powered automata and water organs featured in Hellenistic gardens, playthings devised by technicians such as Hero of Alexandria, who, not incidentally, also devised machinery for the stage. In late classical times the peristyle form became dominant in grand private houses. This was a paved courtyard, which