Modern Pressed Flowers

Via dezeen, the timeless art of pressed flowers transformed into three dimensions by designer Ignacio Canales Aracil:

"The flowers are held together without any structure or glue, they stand and stick together as the straw in a hat after being dried and pressed all at once. The roughness of the process which requires lots of physical effort contrast with the delicacy and fragility of the finished sculpture."

Georgian Shrubberies and Google Ngrams

Shrubberies at Carlton House as engraved by Woollett, c. 1760

I work some in the eighteenth-century but tend to find it tiresome because this epoch more than any other gives rise to scholars who obsess over small details and like to argue about them.  One of these is--ahem--the origin of the "shrubbery".  Say it with me:  "shrubbery".  Now say it five times fast. shrubberyshrubberyshrubberyshrubberyshrubbery.  That's how it feels to be in a room with shrubbery scholars.  I KNOW! Like you, I thought shrubbery was invented by the Knights who say Ni!  Au contraire, mon frère.  You have much to learn.  

"Now think of the gaiety of a Shrubbery ! —unlike to the monastic melancholy of the old wood walks ; and herein you may plant all the neat trees I have before mentioned, with ponds at proper distances, for gold fish, and benches with Latin mottos—to puzzle the ladies; besides temples dedicated to the heathen gods!"   Just think of it!  Goldfish!  Heathen Temples!  Puzzling Ladies! Do read the whole of Horace Walpole's satire of the "Modern Taste" in gardening, c. 1780 here;  it's only a page long, with f's for s's adding to its delight. 

More enlightening is a description in "The complete fabulist" by G. Grey:  "In the quarters of a shrubbery, where deciduous plants and evergreens were intermingled with an air of negligence, it happened that a Rose grew not far from a Laurustinus." (also c. 1780; don't believe the Google books date as there is a known error on the book's frontispiece)

Or this of the shrubbery at the Leasowes, c. 1775:  "The scene now changes to an open lawn, where the path waves up to the house and shrubbery, laid out in taste, and agreeably bushed by clumps of evergreens and flowering shrubs; a small lawn in the midst, has a statue of Venus, well executed, and the pedestal gives us these beautiful lines..."

and a helpful summary is the description of the poet William Cowper's landscape at Weston (c. 1793):  "The shrubbery..was very generally admired, being a delightful little labyrinth, composed of flowering shrubs, and adorned with gravel walks, having convenient seats placed at appropriate distances."

So. Mixtures of evergreens and deciduous flowering shrubs arranged in a 'theatrical' style (by height, basically) adjacent to open lawn, winding walks, appropriately placed features to engage the eye, inspire the mind, and rest the body...that's basically it.  But the real reason I'm wading into the discussion of shrubberies--where believe me angels fear to tread--is to point out the usefulness of a new google tool for historians, garden or otherwise.

As if making the world's literature fully word-searchable for free wasn't enough, Google labs will now analyze the number of appearances of a word, or a combination of words, in literature over time, and call it an Ngram.  How much do we love Google?  According to today's New York Times, this opens up a a new field of linguistic and cultural investigation: culturomics.  Below is the appearance of the word 'shrubbery', which analysis I shall refer to forthwith as gardenhistoromics:  

 

You can see that the word 'shrubbery' is basically non-existent prior to 1750  (okay, there are five references listed 1700-1750 but I know all of them to be misdated; you do have to watch Google on the early dates),  with budding usage 1780ish (note the above references), and then really takes off in the early 1800s, which is basically when widely-published J.C. Loudon begins to not only codify the shrubbery as a garden feature, but to use the word as an alternate for 'shrub'.

That is the most obvious origin of the word, and so it is tempting to think it was just a simple linguistic analogue.  But here again the Ngram can help, because it can show two words at once.   I've confined the data in this set to between 1700-1800 so it isn't compressed by the huge spike in the nineteenth century.  It indicates a lack of correlation between the words, with 'shrub' (the plant, in red) clearly pre-dating 'shrubbery' (the garden feature, in blue), which in its time would have been New Word of the Year! like 'bromance' or 'webinar'.  Or 'culturomics'.  Note especially that 'shrub' usage actually drops BELOW 'shrubbery' usage between 1780-1790, the critical period for shrubberies and the approximate dates of the references I've quoted. Just 10 years.  What do we have here ladies and gentlemen?  A fad.

 
If you're saying things like, "but how is this affected by the increase in number of books published", then you have the mind of a scientist and you'll be happy to know that Google normalizes by the number of books published per year.  But also the data from the graph can be downloaded as csv files and corrected for any number of variables.  This is so cool.  

UPDATE:  Alert reader Adam has pointed out that this can also be affected by OCR errors, especially because of the whole 'is it an f or an s' issue in page scans of old literature.  I did make the assumption that such errors would affect 'fhrubs' and 'fhrubberies' equally; to do otherwise would require examining the individual files. 

Atomic Gardens

In March 1959 an unusual group of scientists, government officials, and lesser worthies assembled for a dinner party in the dining hall of the Royal Commonwealth Society, London. Unbeknownst to them, one of the courses was a strange strain of American peanuts: ‘NC 4x’, ‘North Carolina 4th generation X-rayed’ peanuts, produced from seeds that had been exposed to 18,500 roentgen units of x-rays in order to induce mutations. The irradiated peanuts were unusually large--big as almonds, according to those in attendance, outshowing the British groundnuts served alongside--and had reached the dining table through the generosity of their inventor Walter C. Gregory of North Carolina State College, who sent them as a gift to Mrs. Muriel Howorth, Eastbourne, enthusiast for all things atomic.

Disappointed with the reaction of her guests, who were less than appreciative of the great scientific achievement present at table, Muriel afterwards “began inspecting [the] uncooked nuts wondering what to do with them all…I had the idea to…pop an irradiated peanut in the sandy loam to see how this mutant grew.” The “Muriel Howorth” peanut (for she had already named it after herself) germinated in four days and was soon two feet high. She called the newspapers.

Almost immediately there were interviews and television appearances, AP reporters in the driveway and sightseers peering into the glasshouse to get a look at the plant. Its portrait was commissioned and put on display at the Walker Galleries in London. Garden writer Beverley Nichols came to call:

"Yesterday I held in my hands the most sensational plant in Britain.

It is the only one of its kind. Nothing of its sort has ever been seen in the country before.

To me it had all the romance of something from outer space.

It is the first ‘atomic’ peanut.

It is a lush, green plant and gives you a strange, almost alarming sense of thrusting power and lusty health.

It holds a glittering promise in its green leaves, the promise of victory over famine."

Muriel was a great former of societies (about 12, near as I can tell, over her lifetime..she was invariably President), and she immediately constituted the Atomic Gardening Society and published a manual, Atomic Gardening:

"I now felt that by some stroke of luck which is difficult to ascribe to chance, I had been given the opportunity—so much longed for—to bring science right into the homes of the people. I organized an ATOMIC GARDENING SOCIETY to co-ordinate and safeguard the interests of ATOMIC MUTATION EXPERIMENTERS who would work as one body to help scientists produce more food more quickly for more people, and progress horticultural mutation."

The Atomic Gardens grew out of post-WWII efforts to use the colossal energy of the atom for peaceful pursuits in medicine, biology, and agriculture.  'Gamma Gardens’ at national laboratories in the US as well as continental Europe and the USSR bombarded plants with radiation in hopes of producing mutated varieties of larger peanuts, disease resistant wheat, more sugary sugar maples, and African violets with three heads and a singular atomic entrepreneur named C.J. Speas irradiated seeds on his Tennessee farm and sold them to schoolchildren and housewives, among them Mrs. Muriel Howorth.

Atomic Gardens are my current research project, and will soon result in a publication as well as a presentation to take place on February 28, 2011 at the rescheduled (after last year’s volcanic ash debacle) study day on the Landscape of the 1950s. They are just recent enough that there are those still alive who may remember what was at least enough of a cultural moment to to form the plot device for Paul Zindel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.  

If you know anyone that participated, that was involved in laboratory research, or grew the seeds, or was a ‘Mutation Experimenter’, please get in touch…the history of one of gardening’s weirdest moments needs to be captured before it’s too late! (And if you want to hear more, sign up for the 1950s study day at the University of Bristol...)

A Girl's Garden, Robert Frost

Vincent van Gogh. Memory of the Garden at Etten (Women of Arles), 1888.  Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. 

I have been singing in my university's choir these past semesters, the only grown-up who joins the students (though any member of the university can do so) and delighting all the fall in this lesser known poem by Robert Frost, accompanied here by the van Gogh that seems to repeat its tale.  Music by Randall Thompson.

A neighbor of mine in the village
Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
A childlike thing.

One day she asked her father
To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
And he said, "Why not?"

In casting about for a corner
He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
And he said, "Just it."

And he said, "That ought to make you
An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength
On your slim-jim arm."

It was not enough of a garden
Her father said, to plow;
So she had to work it all by hand,
But she don't mind now.

She wheeled the dung in a wheelbarrow
Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
Her not-nice load,

And hid from anyone passing.
And then she begged the seed.
She says she thinks she planted one
Of all things but weed.

A hill each of potatoes,
Radishes, lettuce, peas,
Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
And even fruit trees.

And yes, she has long mistrusted
That a cider-apple
In bearing there today is hers,
Or at least may be.

Her crop was a miscellany
When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,
A great deal of none.

Now when she sees in the village
How village things go,
Just when it seems to come in right,
She says, "I know!

"It's as when I was a farmer..."
Oh never by way of advice!
And she never sins by telling the tale
To the same person twice.

The Garden History of Heiress Huguette Clark, Part Two

Sometime on their coast to coast travels, the family stopped in at the rootstock of their great wealth: Butte, Montana. They were photographed there around 1917; Huguette, age 11, and her 15 year old sister Andree. The girls were isolated together in their cocoon of wealth, and Huguette seems never to have recovered from her sister's death from meningitis just two years after the photo was taken.

They are standing at an outlook over Columbia Gardens, 68 acres which then-Senator William A. Clark purchased in 1899 and spent $125,000 to improve to serve as a family recreation park for the citizens of Butte.   

"During my late teens, I often danced the night away at the Columbia Gardens Pavilion. The Gardens, an oasis on the edge of a mining camp, was a magical place with hundreds of acres of gardens, lawns, and thrill rides. The Pavilion’s dance floor—the largest west of the Mississippi—occupied fifteen thousand square feet. An evening in that elaborate pavilion, with its many windows opening to the hanging flower baskets and surrounding gardens, was a delight. One danced to the live music of Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Guy Lombardo, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Harry James. America’s big bands were attracted to the nation’s Mining City and to its antithesis, the green lawns and gleaming white buildings of the Columbia Gardens." (Pat Williams, Drumlammon Views, Spring 2009)
  

Butte-Silver Bow Public Library


Clark is supposed to have been ungenerous, a hoarder rather than a sharer of his riches, but he was a local hero for making the Gardens as a retreat for citizens of a city "blasted by the poison fumes from the smelteries in the neighborhood....he [Clark] saw grass fade under the withering touch of the fumes and the branches of the green trees turn to gray, brittle fingers of the decaying body...the arsenic contaminated air of the busy city...to spend frequent afternoons in the groves of the Gardens is to enhance one's desire to live and to forget that Butte is such a terribly dusty, smoky, barren place."
   

from "Sights and Scenes and a Brief History of Columbia Gardens"

He did own the streetcar line that carried visitors to the garden, though (he owned all the streetcars in town) and there were 150,000 visitors the year it opened in 1899, and 375,000 in 1902 when Adolf H. Heilbronner  wrote "Sights and Scenes and a Brief History of Columbia Gardens" (available in its entirety at Google books).  Those visitors could traverse woodland walks with streamside "alluring spots", rustic seats and bridges; dine al fresco in the picnic grove, stop by the zoo and aviary, or visit the Chinese pagoda and the fish fountain.  They could ride a boat down a gigantic 'chute' and into the lake, play on the swings, see-saws and carousel, eat at the cafe, try their hand at the shooting gallery or see a moving picture show.  If more enamored of nature than attractions one could embark on a mountain climb into the Rockies, whose dramatic scenery hovered just behind. Soon, there was a baseball diamond (center field has never had a better view) and later a roller coaster.

from "Sights and Scenes and a Brief History of Columbia Gardens"

And yet even with all this, "...the overshadowing feature, so regarded by the great majority, is the immense floral display. Columbia Gardens, as a pleasure resort, is famed from sea to sea and from Labrador to the Rio Grande River and in foreign countries, as the home of the prettiest collection of flowers in the Northwest...today there are in the Gardens and hothouses more than 150,000 different kinds of growing plants, including most delicate products of the tropics, which are housed in the large glass nurseries. The hothouses are on the list of attractions most enjoyed by the visitors, for here are shown a variety of plants of the most classic order."

"In the hothouses are seeded the thousands of pansies that ultimately adorn the flower plots throughout the Gardens. This climate is congenial to the pansy, which, at the Gardens, grows to enormous size, some measuring as large as three inches in diameter. Fifteen thousand pansy plants were transplanted this season, which yielded millions of vari-colored blooms."

The children were allowed to pick the pansies on certain days, an event preserved as one of the many postcards of Columbia Gardens that can be found scattered around the web.

found at Penny Postcards from Montana

 The pansies were the primary component of the millions of flowers planted out into pictoral beds in a naive, folk-art style.  There was a gigantic harp, an anchor, US flags and a butterfly, all superintended by head gardener Victor Siegel, a German immigrant to Butte.

 
The butterfly was one of most remembered sights of Columbia Gardens, which were permanently closed on Labor Day in 1973 in spite of the strenuous objections of Butte residents.  The Anaconda Company, which had purchased the Gardens from Clark famiy heirs in 1928, wanted to expand their mine and took not only the Gardens but the neighborhoods that had over the century grown up around them.  In 2004, the city of Butte restored the butterfly, though they were unable to do so at its original location, which is now a mine pit.  


by darwinsbulldog at flickr

So were Huguette and Andree allowed to partake of the park's delights rather than just pose at its edge?  I think so...Clark was justly proud of his what he had made, one of several donations to the city including Montana Technical College and the Paul Clark home for orphaned boys, and said "The Columbia Gardens is my monument.  Of my many business enterprises it is the one I love best, and it is practically the only one on which I lose money."


It must have been a scandal, though:  Clarks only granddaughter, Katherine Culver Clark, had been photographed on the swings for Heilbronner's book.  She looks to be perhaps five in 1902....the same year that Andree was born to a new supposed bride who was younger than Clark's daughters.  Huguette did not follow until 1906.  It is unlikely that the town residents would have forgotten. 


Katherine Culver Clark on the Columbia Gardens Playground,
from Sights and Scenes of Columbia Gardens



The Garden History of Heiress Huguette Clark, Part One

There’s been a kerfuffle on the internet lately about Huguette Clark, the still-living daughter of a copper baron who was eligible for service in the Civil War, and who in spite of a great fortune that funds silent shuttered estates stays alone in a hospital at the age of one-hundred-and-four.

Her sudden celebrity has led to lawsuits against her attorney, accountant, and bankers for improperly handling her estimated $500 million fortune…some actions brought by distant relatives who have suddenly (conveniently) appeared on the scene. All of this seems unlikely to add happiness to an aged woman who long ago chose a deeply private, even reclusive, life for her own reasons.

A MSN piece by Bill Dedman has largely searched out Huguette’s biographical details in an online article that started the Huguette furor. I thought I’d see what remnants could be found of a gentler place:  the gardens she knew.

(The biographical details and dates in this piece are taken from Dedman’s article.)

Huguette’s first garden was Central Park itself. By the time she was born in 1906, her father had already made a fortune in the Montana copper mines, bought a senatorial seat, and lost his first wife. Speculation was rampant as to why the Senator was now building a massive new abode in New York City, but the answer became clear in 1904 when he acknowledged Anna, nee La Chapelle as his second ‘wife’, and the already two-year old Andree as his daughter. At the time of their unrecorded vows, he was 62 and she was 23. Their new house was a bombastic accretion that billowed from corner to corner of its its Fifth Avenue lot and had its own private coal train. No space was wasted on a garden, but right across the street was the Central Park of the early century. It is unlikely that Huguette was allowed to join the rabble on its newly installed playgrounds. But perhaps she was taken to sail boats at the Conservatory Water which was just down from the house.

The William C. Clark house at 5th and 77th in New York City (New York Historical Society)



Boats on the Conservatory Water at Central Park c. 1900 (wikimedia commons)

William C. Clark established the family’s bicoastal presence when he bought their Santa Barbara estate from Eleanor Graham, wife of a Tulsa oil man gone bust, in 1923. Huguette was 16. The 23 acre estate encompassed an Italianate house with extensive gardens, and its name, ‘Bellosguardo’, was probably chosen as much for its European cachet as for its translation--‘beautiful place’--though it did, and still does, command an astonishing Pacific view. New oil millionaires frequently used Italianate architecture, gardens, and art to cover backgrounds with more determination than education and draw attention away from boots still wet with the muck of the gusher fields. It was a way of joining themselves to the club of old, east coast money, whose self-assured members had taken on those lofty stylings. And besides, Edith Wharton, arbiter of all that was tasteful, had written of the real, Italian, Bellosguardo. It was a choice within easy reach, like naming your child after a movie star, or a president.



 

Bellosguardo Gardens c. 1920, from the USC Digital Archives

Before the Graham’s marriage went bad and their finances even worse, Bellosguardo had been abuzz with Santa Barbara social life and far more documentation exists of the garden from this era than that of the Clarks' own. Nevertheless, this is how Huguette would have initially known the place, with terracing and classical balustrades and faux-roman sculptures. Its setting, if not its architecture, is sublime. It may be the terrace below the house that can be seen in stills from In the days of Trajan, a silent film shot there in 1913 for which its classicism was ideal—Mrs. Graham was a lover of theatre and an early supporter of the film industry. (I haven’t been able to obtain this film, but see Silent Era Filmmaking by Robert Birchard). It also gives a glimpse of the lush semi-tropical plantings that were judged ‘a marvel of landscaping skill’, according to Santa Barbara historian Michael Redmon.



View of Bellosguardo c. 1920, from the USC Digital Archives



Still image from Days of Trajan (from Silent Era Filmmaking by Robert Birchard)



They had been created by Austin Strong, an associate of Francis Wilson (architect of the Graham’s villa) and a fascinating, peripatetic character who grew up in Hawaii, New Zealand, and in Samoa with his step-grandfather—none other than Robert Louis Stevenson. He studied landscape architecture at Harvard, designed Cornwall Park in Aukland and practiced briefly in California before chucking it all to become a playwright in 1905. The Graham’s gardens, those the Clarks knew for the first nearly ten years of their residence in the house, must have been one of his final commissions.



So though the reports about Huguette often feature prominently the house and garden in their current state (as below, they are conveniently visible from the air) it was the earlier landscape of Austin Strong, and the Francis Wilson house, that she may have known best.  They, not the existing house and garden, were the setting of her ill-fated marriage and would be torn down, for a fresh start in more ways than one, not long after.  More soon. 

Found Functions: Math in the Garden

 

Searching for fractals in the landscape is by now common, but Nikki Graziano, a student in both math and photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology has expanded the hunt to include functions.  When she "finds a function" in nature, she uses a graphing package to generate (something close to) its mathematical equivalent, and overlays it on the photograph for a new way of seeing.  (Thanks, Ryan!)

Cool Garden Rooms. And Prophetic Chickens..the Garden History of Livia Drusilla

The heat has broken, just today, at last.  But watching my garden go yellow with fever over these past three weeks of 100+ degrees and rotisserie winds has left me ready to burrow into the cool earth and thinking of the Villa Livia, where a windowless, subterranean room adorned with a cool blue sky and eternally unwilted plants served as a refuge from the Roman summer sun.    

Villa Livia is thought to be part of the dowry of the inimitable Livia Drusilla (58 BC-AD 29), wife of Octavian, mother of Tiberius, who wielded enormous though unofficial power during the Republican era.  Considered the model of the Roman matron, she was given the unusual freedom to handle her own finances and became the first woman to appear on provincial coinage in 16 BC.

 
Fifteen kilometers north of Rome, her suburban estate offered a commanding view of the Tiber valley as well as a place of relaxed entertaining--and subtle power-broking--for a woman who was said to avoid excessive jewelery or pretentious costume and to handsew clothes for her husband the emperor even while serving as his trusted political advisor.

And she kept chickens.  Famous white chickens.  AND she provided the storied laurel crowns of the champions of Rome.  Pliny's Natural History records the legend that on the day of Livia's marriage to Augustus an eagle flew over the garden of the villa and dropped its dinner into her lap:  a white chicken holding a branch of laurel in its beak.  Livia rescued the chicken, and planted the laurel.  The lone fowl became a chicken farm (the villa's nickname was 'white hens') and the laurel a lush grove whose branches crowned the heads of triumphant Roman generals. 

Was it the laurel's evergreenery that inspired the everblooming underground garden?  Its illusory landscape covered all four arms of the soothingly cool room, depicting birds, small fruiting trees and flowering plants in simultaneous bloom.  According to Gardens of Italy by Ann Laras, twenty-four species are represented, a beautiful record of desirable plants in the Roman garden c. first century B.C.:  the strawberry tree, bay laurel (of course), oleander, holm oak, English oak, Cornelian cherry, myrtle, harts-tongue fern, early dog violet, crown daisy, stinking chamomile, Italian cypress, quince, stone pine, pomegranate, opium poppy, cabbage rose, and date palm.   The underground garden room was discovered in 1863 and the frescoes removed in 1955 to the National Museum in Rome.    The rest of Livia's landscape--a peristyle garden, a broad terrace, and perhaps hanging gardens watered by her personal connection to the aqueduct (true luxury)--is currently under excavation. 

photos from Wikimedia commons. 
See the white hen?

Both of Livia Drusilla's wedding day gifts were portentous.   Because the laurel sprig she planted had flourished, it became customary for each Caesar to plant their own laurel at the Villa Livia after a triumph, and it was said that before the death of a prince his laurel tree was observed to wilt and wither. According to Suetonius' Lives of the Twelve Caesars, soon before the demise of Nero--Livia's great-grandson and the last of the race of Caesars--not only the laurels but the beautiful white hens gave up the ghost:

"Now the forest was dried to the very roots, and all the pullets were dead, to the very last."  

Also the temple of the Caesars was struck with lightning and the heads of the statues all fell off at once.  But really it was the chickens.  Chickens as harbingers of apocalypse.  I like that.

When there is no There there

(the "gardens of William Morris" at the Red House, Bexleyheath. 

Little is known of Morris' actual garden at the site.)

I've had several occasions lately to ponder what makes a historic garden 'real'.  In less transient forms of art, made in the comparatively eternal (to gardens at least) mediums of paint and stone the difference between a 'real' and a 'fake' can be readily distinguished and doesn't change over time.  What is done by Picasso is always Picasso.  But if Picasso made a garden, and it fell into disrepair, and a hundred years later (or two or three) it was re-created, is it still a Picasso?

What would never be accepted in a painting or a sculpture must be accepted in the will-o-the-wisp world of the garden, simply because there is no other choice.   If we didn't re-create historic gardens, didn't renew them, or replant them, sometimes even re-imagine them, we wouldn't have any.  They go away too soon, through the insensitivity of subsequent owners or of their own accord and the will of nature to return to the wild, or as the scientist in me reminds, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, that of the ever-increasing entropy.  (Thus an inevitable emphasis in garden history on garden buildings, because they stay, at least sometimes.)

(The Turkish tent at Painshill Park in Surrey has been both re-created and re-sited, its original location being now in other ownership)

But the task of the garden historian is, perhaps even more than to renew or replant or re-imagine, to re-interpret, because in the garden art as in all others there is no point but to be understood.  A plant may be appreciated, even experienced, but a planting scheme can be understood, and a delicate bridge formed to the past--swaying though it may be with uncertainty--to the designer of the scheme and the owner of the house and their fashions and failings and taste and their reasons for being and planting the garden.  Why make a garden?  Why re-make one?

(At the Philbrook museum in my hometown of Tulsa, the nouveau riche owner once had yuccas planted in his Italianate parterres.  Should they still be there?)

The difference between an homage and a forgery--a fake--is what the work is said to be.  The student who paints a 'Picasso' to learn a style is simply admiring until he claims that his own hand is that of his master.  The best way to keep a historic garden real is to simply be honest about what is known and what is not, and what has been changed or altered or remade.

Too often at historic properties the fact that the garden isn't completely "real" is treated as an unsavoury secret, offered up--a bit shamefacedly--by a guide only when the visitor enquires, as if in some sort of admission of guilt. 

The missed opportunity is to interpret the past by celebrating its renewal, uncertain as that may be. 

The Moor Park Apricot, part 1

Today, I bought a Moor Park apricot for my garden.

"It was only the spring twelvemonth before Mr. Norris's death that we put in the apricot against the stable wall, which is now grown such a noble tree, and getting to such perfection, sir," addressing herself then to Dr. Grant.

"The tree thrives well, beyond a doubt, madam," replied Dr. Grant. "The soil is good; and I never pass it without regretting that the fruit should be so little worth the trouble of gathering."

"Sir, it is a Moor Park, we bought it as a Moor Park, and it cost us--that is, it was a present from Sir Thomas, but I saw the bill--and I know it cost seven shillings, and was charged as a Moor Park."

"You were imposed on, ma'am," replied Dr. Grant: "these potatoes have as much the flavour of a Moor Park apricot as the fruit from that tree. It is an insipid fruit at the best; but a good apricot is eatable, which none from my garden are."

"The truth is, ma'am," said Mrs. Grant, pretending to whisper across the table to Mrs. Norris, "that Dr. Grant hardly knows what the natural taste of our apricot is: he is scarcely ever indulged with one, for it is so valuable a fruit; with a little assistance, and ours is such a remarkably large, fair sort, that what with early tarts and preserves, my cook contrives to get them all."

(Jane Austen, Mansfield Park; engraving from Pomona Londinensis by William Hooker, 1818)

Today, I bought an apricot for my garden.
It cost $19.99, and was charged as a Moor Park.

Emily Dickinson's Herbarium

My nosegays are for Captives

Dim – long expectant eyes –

Fingers denied the plucking,

Patient till Paradise –

To such, if they sh'd whisper

Of morning and the moor –

They bear no other errand,

And I, no other prayer.

I remember once telling a friend who was getting a PhD in English literature that Emily Dickinson was my favorite poet.  She literally sniffed.  It was the first time I realized that not everyone thought as highly of  the belle of Amherst as I did, and that claiming her as a favorite apparently marked me as a bit provincial and unenlightened.

Provincial or not, all 1,789 of her poems will be read chronologically as part of The New York Botanical Garden's new Exhibit, “Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers".  The NYBG are not the first to think of the close connections between Emily's poetry and the garden; she was better known in her own community as a gardener/botanist than as a poet, and there are at least a couple of books that have previously explored the same ideas (see Emily Dickinson's Gardens: A Celebration of a Poet and Gardener by Marta McDowell, and The Gardens of Emily Dickinson by Judith Farr).

The exhibit, which includes a recreation of Emily's garden (or a least the sort of garden she might have had, since firm historical information isn't available), as well as pairings of flowering plants with the poems that give them mention, will also include Emily's herbarium of over 400 plants, now in the collection of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. 

If you can't get to New York you can turn online the pages of the book Emily started at age fourteen, when she wrote to her friend Abiah Root (I want a friend named Abiah Root!) that "...most all the girls are making one. If you do, perhaps I can make some additions to it from flowers growing around here."

It's the most beautiful herbarium I've ever seen; meticulous, beautifully arranged, carefully notated in a small intense hand.  I chose one of her early poems--in spite of its imperfect rhyme--to accompany this post because so many of the pressings are arranged as nosegays rather than as botanical specimens; perhaps like those Emily was wont to send along with poems to friends.   Artfully placed stems and stalks seem destined to occupy a buttonhole rather than butcher's paper.

Of particular poignancy are the botanical specimens forwarded by friends to this woman who lived in virtual seclusion for much of her life:  a leaf from Heidelburg castle, a fern from the Elysian fields in Greece, a stalk from the Garden of Gethsemane. 

They are generally one to a page, unlike Emily's own collections, which lie at close quarters nearly--but not quite--claustrophobic, with a compression of detail that leaves one breathless but not quite faint, which is just the feeling I always get from her poetry . A sun-faded copy still sits on my bedside table, ignoring sniffs from those who know better.