low fences, and gazing at the welcome early blooms. Here if ever,
‘Winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring.’
A close cloud of Box-scent hangs over this garden, even in midwinter; sometimes the Box edgings grow until no one can walk between; then drastic measures have to be taken, and the rows look ragged for a time.
“An Old Worcester Garden.” Old Time Gardens by Alice Morse Earle, 1901.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941), an English novelist, became famous for her first book, Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), which was so immediately popular that it ran to twenty printings in the initial year of its publication. Couched in the form of a diary, it describes the free-spirited author’s efforts to become a gardener in the face of the mores of aristocratic society in provincial Germany and the duties imposed on her as the mistress of her husband’s large Pomeranian estate.
Elizabeth, a nom de plume devoid of a surname (her maiden name was Mary Annette Beauchamp), was forced to disguise her identity at the request of her domineering husband, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin, whom she refers to throughout her book as the “Man of Wrath.” Some readers today will object to her high-handed treatment of servants and censorious attitude toward most of her visitors. To her credit, “German Elizabeth,” as she became known to readers, scolds herself for being disagreeable when in pursuit of escape from the strictures of the Man of Wrath and the household responsibilities and social demands that take her away from her beloved garden:
The garden is the place I go to for refuge and shelter, not the house. In the house are duties and annoyances, servants to exhort and admonish, furniture, and meals; but out there blessings crowd around me at every step—it is there that I am sorry for the unkindness in me, for those selfish thoughts that are so much worse than they feel; it is there that all my sins and silliness are forgiven, there that I feel protected and at home, and every flower and weed is a friend and every tree a lover. When I have been vexed I run out to them for comfort, and when I have been angry without just cause, it is there that I find absolution. Did ever a woman have so many friends?
In addition to skirting the Man of Wrath’s disapproval of the solitary hours she spends in blissful retreat in the garden, sometimes surrounded by her little ones—“the April baby, the May baby, the June baby”—rather than inside overseeing the domestic staff and the workers who are restoring the large old nunnery that serves as their family castle, Elizabeth must overcome her horticultural ignorance and accomplish the creation of her German paradise in the face of the gardener’s stubborn insistence on laying out single plant varieties in regimented rows. The novice gardener can identify with her cheerful account of failed and successful experiments with different plant varieties and women readers with her spirit of subversive independence. We can all enjoy her joie de vivre as she revels in the scenery of nature when taking friends in a sleigh for a winter picnic beside the Baltic:
The Man of Wrath loathes picnics, and has no eye for nature and frozen seas, and is simply bored by a long drive through a forest that does not belong to him; a single turnip on his own place is more admirable in his eyes than the tallest, pinkest, straightest pine that ever reared its snow-crowned head against the setting sunlight. . . . He went once and only once to this particular place, and made us feel so small by his blasé behavior that I never invite him now. It is a beautiful spot, endless forest stretching along the shore as far as the eye can reach; and after driving through it for miles you come suddenly at the end of an avenue of arching trees, upon the glistening oily sea, with the orange-colored sails of distant fishing-smacks shining in the sunlight. Whenever I have been there it has been windless weather, and the silence so profound that I could hear my pulses beating. The humming of insects and the sudden scream of a jay are the only sounds in summer, and in winter the stillness is the stillness of death.
Continuing her career as a writer following the success of Elizabeth and Her German Garden, Arnim wrote several other semiautobiographical books, including The Solitary Summer (1899), April Baby’s Book of Tunes (1900), The Benefactress (1901), The Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight (1905), Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther (1907), and The Caravaners (1909).
More writer than gardener, as it turned out, this aristocratic woman of the world went on to publish The Pastor’s Wife (1914), Christine (1917), Christopher and Columbus (1919), In the Mountains (1920), Vera (1921), The Enchanted April (1922), Love (1925), Introduction to Sally (1926), Expiation (1929), Father (1931), The Jasmine Farm (1934), All the Dogs of My Life (1936) and Mr Skeffington (1940) before her death in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1941. Throughout her prolific literary career, her identity remained firmly associated with her hugely successful first book, and the title pages of all her subsequent ones are ascribed to “The author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden.”
Louise Beebe Wilder
Elizabeth von Arnim’s American contemporary Louise Beebe Wilder (1878–1938) brought the style of rapturously Romantic garden writing to an audience with different growing conditions from those of Germany or England. Unlike “German Elizabeth,” Wilder was anything but a novice gardener. She wrote nine garden books in all and also served as the editor of the journal of the Federated Garden Clubs of New York. Her passionate enthusiasm, vast knowledge of plants, and the verve with which she describes their aesthetic and sensory characteristics as well as their growth habits and climatic suitability have kept most of her books in print over the years. These include My Garden (1916), Colour in My Garden (1918), Adventures in My Garden and Rock Garden (1926), Pleasures & Problems of a Rock Garden (1928), The Fragrant Path: A Book About Sweet Scented Flowers and Leaves (1932), and Adventures with Hardy Bulbs (1936).
Wilder was extremely widely read and could summon as authorities many authors whose works touched on botany, horticulture, or the garden. She frequently consulted the herbalists John Gerard, who wrote the Great Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597), and John Evelyn, the author of Kalendarium Hortense (1664). Pliny, Shakespeare, Bacon, Montaigne, Horace Walpole, and even the prophet Muhammad could be counted on to embellish her words, and she constantly calls on Gertrude Jekyll as well as numerous other members of the intergenerational coterie of fellow garden writers to reinforce her opinions and advice.
My first edition of Colour in My Garden is a beautiful book with twenty-four color plates of Balderbrae—Wilder’s garden in Pomona, New York—painted by Anna Winegar over the course of a single year. Looking at them, I sense within the more formal design structure of Balderbrae the same kind of casual luxuriance that Hassam captured in his paintings of Celia Thaxter’s garden. Wilder’s vivid descriptions of the garden and its plants, however, make illustrations superfluous. To sample her evocative prose, you can read what she has to say about poppies:
The crepe-petalled Iceland poppy (Papaver nudicaule) that sows itself in my garden, springing up in the most unlikely nooks and crevices, has much of the airy charm of the annual sorts and decks itself in the loveliest colours: apricot and orange, buff, scarlet and white. I had from an English seedman this year a kind not too whimsically named Pearls of Dawn, for a rosy glow underlies the soft buffs and creams of its fragile petals.
She then contrasts its beauty with that of the Spanish poppy (P. rupifragum):
It has all the whimsical appeal of its delicately bold race and hoists its little snatches of gay colour on stems as thin as wire. But there is nothing frail about the solid tuft of leaves or the mighty tap root that, when you essay to get it out of the ground intact, seems to reach to China. This plant, too, is as
