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 of color! The fine harmonic sense of the woman and artist and poet thrilled 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.