through these long chords of color, and filled the room with an atmosphere which made it seem like living in a rainbow.”
“The Altar and the Shrine.” Watercolor by Childe Hassam. An Island Garden by Celia Thaxter, 1895. Collection of The New York Society Library.
Alice Morse Earle
Alice Morse Earle’s (1851–1911) career as an American garden writer coincided with the rise of the Colonial Revival movement in the 1890s. For Earle, a social and cultural historian, the Colonial Revival, which had been sparked by the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, was more than a period style to be copied; the period it recalled was one to be celebrated for its simple virtues and agreeable customs. It is true that, beyond being an appreciation of the mores of the country’s early settlers, the Colonial Revival was a nativist response to the admission of approximately a million immigrants annually into the United States. Although Earle was not immune from the prejudices of other Wasps, her attitude toward immigrants was merely patronizing as opposed to xenophobic.
In such books as Customs and Fashions in Old New England (1893), Colonial Dames and Goodwives (1895), Colonial Days in Old New York (1896), Costume of Colonial Times (1894), Home Life in Colonial Days (1898), and Child Life in Colonial Days (1899), Earle conveyed with rosy pen the customs of the bygone period that was her subject. Besides being a celebration of colonial horticulture, Old Time Gardens (1901) contains much garden and plant lore. Its focus is broader than the beauty of colonial gardens, white-picket-fenced enclosures resembling an English cottage garden in size and appearance. Earle wrote about the fine gardens of her own day, including the Hunnewell topiary gardens overlooking Lake Waban in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and the gardens at Yaddo, the Sarasota Springs estate that Spencer Trask converted into an artists’ retreat in 1900 as a gift to his wife, Katrina. Regarding the latter, Earle writes that the Yaddo Rose Garden “formed a happy surprise to the garden’s mistress” when unveiled at its dedication. She praises its “quality of expression, of significance, [which] may be seen in many a smaller and simpler garden, even in a tiny cottage plot.” She adds that “you can perceive, through the care bestowed upon it, and its responsive blossoming, a something which shows the life of the garden owners; you know that they are thoughtful, kindly, beauty-loving, home-loving.”
My copy of Old Time Gardens, one of an edition of three hundred and fifty copies printed on special paper, contains a number of beautiful photogravures. Together they constitute a portfolio of American gardens at the turn of the twentieth century, before two world wars, changing economic conditions, altered career expectations for women, an emphasis on sports recreation, and modernist functionalism diminished the loving care once lavished on them. The peaceful charm of the gardens depicted in these illustrations—with lush, box-bordered flower beds; sundials; balustraded terraces; and rose-covered pergolas—evokes that idyllic moment in the history of American landscape design when the Arts and Crafts and Colonial Revival movements, combined with the influence of Italian Renaissance villas, made many gardens in this country rival contemporary ones in England.
“Garden at Mount Vernon-on-the-Potomac. Home of George Washington.” Old Time Gardens by Alice Morse Earle, 1901.
Like Thaxter, Earle had a literary bent, and Old Time Gardens is laced with many quotations and verses of poetry. Here, in words reminiscent of Thaxter’s, she singles out the poppy for poetic praise:
There is something very fine about a Poppy, in the extraordinary combination of boldness of color and great size with its slender delicacy of stem, the grace of the set of the beautiful buds, the fine turn of the flower as it opens, and the wonderful airiness of poise of so heavy a flower. The silkiness of tissue of the petals, and their semi-transparency in some colors, and the delicate fringes of some varieties, are great charms.
Each crumpled crêpe-like leaf is soft as silk;
Long, long ago the children saw them there,
Scarlet and rose, with fringes white as milk,
And called them ‘shawls for fairies’ dainty wear’;
They were not finer, those laid safe away
In that low attic, neath the brown, warm eaves.
And when the flowers have shed, oh, so lightly! their silken petals, there is still another beauty, a seed vessel of such classic shape that it wears a crown.
It is not surprising that Earle devotes an entire chapter to “Childhood in a Garden.” She promoted her belief that “the intense enjoyment of nature is a sixth sense” with this explanation:
We are not born with this good gift, nor do we often acquire it in later life; it comes through our rearing. The fullness of delight in a garden is the bequest of childhood spent in a garden. No study or possession of flowers in mature years can afford gratification equal to that conferred by childish associations with them; by the sudden recollection of flower lore, the memory of child friendships, the recalling of games or toys made of flowers; you cannot explain it; it seems a concentration, an extract of all the sunshine and beauty of those happy summers of our lives when the whole day and every day was spent among flowers. The sober have grown up knowing not when ‘the summer comes with bee and flower.’
Recalling her own childhood in the garden in “ ‘little cubby houses’ under the close-growing stems of Lilac and Syringa, with an old thick shawl outspread on the damp earth for a carpet,” she says:
Let us peer into these garden thickets at these happy little girls, fantastic in the garden dress. Their hair is hung thick with Dandelion curls, made from pale green opal-tinted stems that have grown long under shrubbery and Box borders. Around their necks are childish wampum, strings of Dandelion beads or Daisy chains. More delicate wreaths for the neck and hair were made from the blossoms of the Four-o’clock or the petals of Phlox or Lilacs, threaded with pretty alteration of color. Fuchsias were hung at the ears for eardrops, green leaves were pinned with leaf stems into little caps and bonnets and aprons, Foxgloves made dainty children’s gloves. Truly the garden-bred child went in gay attire.
There were sensory as well as sartorial experiences to be savored. Earle confides, “I never walk through an old garden without wishing to nibble and browse the leaves and stems which I ate as a child, without sucking a drop of honey from certain flowers. I do it not with intent, but I waken to realization with the petal of Trumpet of Honeysuckle in my hand and its drop of ambrosia on my lips.”
“The Children’s Garden.” Old Time Gardens by Alice Morse Earle, 1901.
Calling our attention to one illustration, she writes:
[This] is a glimpse of a Box-edged garden in Worcester, whose blossoming has been a delight to me every summer of my entire life. In my childhood this home was that of flower-loving neighbors who had an established and constant system of exchange with my mother and other neighbors of flowers, plants, seeds, slips, and bulbs. The garden was serene with an atmosphere of worthy old age; you wondered how any man so old could so constantly plant, weed, prune, and hoe until you saw how he loved his flowers, and how his wife loved them. The Roses, Peonies, and Flower de Luce in this garden were sixty years old, and the Box also; the shrubs are almost trees. . . . Here bloom Crocuses, Snowdrops, Grape Hyacinths, and sometimes Tulips, before any neighbor has a blossom and scarce a leaf. On a Sunday
