their opposing but ultimately complementary theories resulted in a style that made a virtue of formal structure as a foil for loosely composed “garden pictures.” In this way these important late-nineteenth-century garden writers can be said to have assisted in the redirection of English garden style at a critical time when vast estate grounds were beginning to become a thing of the past.
Watercolor by Childe Hassam. Frontispiece, An Island Garden by Celia Thaxter, 1895. Collection of The New York Society Library.
Rhapsodists in the Garden
Paradise is a synonym for garden, and the garden is often a paradise in the minds of those whose happiest hours are spent in one. In the case of certain garden writers this is a state that gives rise to ecstatic description. Theirs is a passion we experience with vicarious enthusiasm, an infectious rapture that makes us believe that gardeners are perhaps the happiest of all mortals.
Celia Thaxter
Celia Thaxter (1835–1894) spent almost her entire life on the coast of Maine where her father, Thomas Laighton, was a lighthouse keeper. After her marriage at the age of fifteen, she and her husband, Levi Thaxter, ran Laighton’s summer hotel, Appledore House, on one of the Isles of Shoals; and it was here that she created and cultivated with a never-flagging passion the garden she describes in An Island Garden (1895). Although Thaxter thought of herself primarily as a poet and was certainly a prolific one, her verse has not stood the test of time very well. This much-loved book, however, is an enduring classic.
Each spring, after spreading rich barnyard compost on top of the thin soil of Appledore’s rocky bluffs, Thaxter planted a garden. Only fifteen by fifty feet in size with nine geometrical flower beds, its profusion of summer annuals, propagated from seed in her winter home on the mainland, gave it a riotous grandeur. This fecund display is matched by Thaxter’s prose, which often verges on the euphoric.
Because of her childhood love affair with plants and nature, Thaxter found her gardener’s destiny early in life. Her book, like Jekyll’s Wood and Garden, recounts a formative story, when as a “lonely child living on a lighthouse island ten miles away from the mainland, every blade that sprang out of the ground, every humblest weed, was precious in my sight, and I began a little garden when not more than five years old.” Thaxter was hardly a lonely woman, however, for Appledore Hotel, where she presided as hostess, served for many years as a popular New England artists’ and writers’ summer colony. The guests included such luminaries as Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, Longfellow, William Morris Hunt, and Childe Hassam, whose watercolor paintings of Thaxter’s garden were reproduced as chromolithograph illustrations in An Island Garden.
Although her profuse garden offered an abundance of painterly scenes—it could perhaps be best characterized as an American Impressionist garden, as Hassam’s illustrations amply testify—Thaxter does not speak about the art of garden design per se. Hers is a spiritual prose as she writes of her own passionate responses to the ways in which plants perform and of the extremes to which she will go in nurturing them. A poppy seed is “the merest atom of matter, hardly visible a speck, a pin’s point in bulk, but within it is imprisoned a spirit of beauty ineffable, which will break its bonds and emerge from the dark ground and blossom in a splendor so dazzling as to baffle all powers of description. The Genie in the Arabian tale is not half so astonishing.” She then sums up her possession of a green thumb in one word, LOVE. This is the motive force that causes her to fill wooden boxes with well-rotted manure into which she nestles the cut eggshells with pricked bottoms that will serve as the containers in which her precious poppy seeds will germinate, after which she will gently place the delicate roots of the seedlings in the ground.
Love, however, does not extend to Thaxter’s garden enemies—“the cutworm, the wire-worm, the pansy-worm, the thrip, the rose-beetle, the aphis, the mildew, and many more, but worst of all the loathsome slug, a slimy, shapeless creature that devours every fair and exquisite thing in the garden.” To combat this despicable garden marauder, “the flower lover must seek these with unflagging energy, and if possible exterminate the whole.” It takes considerable wiliness to wage war on these nocturnal raiders. Thaxter tells us how at sunset she heaps air-slaked lime in rings around her flower beds as a barrier to the slug. Night patrol is also needed to conquer this determined pest, and she confesses how on “many a solemn midnight have I stolen from my bed to visit my cherished treasures by the pale glimpse of the moon, that I might be quite sure that the protecting rings were still strong enough to save them.” She also combats this obnoxious terrestrial mollusk with salt; however, afraid that salt, like lime, may prove injurious to her tender plants, she removes both in the morning when the slug has gone back into hiding beneath the ground. As an extra precaution to make sure they escape injury, as the ocean air and dew might dissolve these toxic substances into the soil, she collars her most beloved “pets” with rings of cut pasteboard and places her lime and salt on these.
“The Garden in its Glory.” Watercolor by Childe Hassam. An Island Garden by Celia Thaxter, 1895. Collection of The New York Society Library.
Thaxter suddenly becomes excited by advice from a friend on the mainland who, anticipating the advocates of biological pest control, tells her that toads like to dine on slugs. She immediately responds, “In the name of the Prophet, Toads!” and soon receives by mail boat a box with sixty of them. They grow fat and multiply, and the next summer she imports ninety more. But toads, too, have their enemies—dogs and rats—and so the ranks of these garden warriors diminish. Nevertheless Thaxter manages to keep a sufficient number at work in the garden destroying slugs and insects, and therefore feels compelled to suggest that “every gardener should treat [the toad] with utmost hospitality . . . and, should he wander away from [the premises] to go so far as to exercise gentle force in bringing him back to the regions where his services may be of the greatest utility.”
Although Thaxter’s garden was haphazardly planned in terms of color combinations, her focus on the individual flower shows a remarkable level of aesthetic discrimination. Examining a California poppy, she has this to say:
The stems and fine thread-like leaves are smooth and cool gray-green, as if to temper the fire of the blossoms, which are smooth also, unlike almost all other poppies, that are crumpled past endurance in their close green buds, and make one feel as if they could not wait to break out of the calyx and loosen their petals to the sun, to be soothed into even tranquility of beauty by the touches of the air. Every cool gray-green leaf is tipped with a tiny line of red, every flower-bud wears a little pale-green cap like an elf. Nothing could be more picturesque than this fairy cap, and nothing more charming than to watch the blossom push it off and spread its yellow petals, slowly rounding to the perfect cup. . . . It is held upright on a straight and polished stem, its petals curving upward and outward into the cup of light, pure gold with a lustrous satin sheen; a rich orange is painted on the gold, drawn in infinitely fine lines to a point in the centre of the edge of each petal, so that the effect is that of a diamond of flame in a cup of gold. It is not enough that the powdery anthers are orange bordered with gold; they are whirled about the very heart of the flower like a revolving Catherine-wheel of fire. In the centre of the anthers is a shining point of warm sea-green, a last consummate touch which makes the beauty of the blossom supreme.
It is not surprising to learn that Thaxter’s garden was mainly a cutting garden for the flowers she arranged with exquisite care, placing them in orchestrated ranges of hue and tint in her music room. One visitor to Appledore House remarked, “I have never seen such realized possibilities
