An Island Garden

If you’re reading this, you know that we visited Celia Thaxter’s garden last week, after wanting to do so for many years. In a nutshell, the garden is located on Appledore, an island about 6 miles off the coast of Maine/New Hampshire. It is on an island managed by Cornell and UNH, and is only open for tours eight days each year; we were finally able to make all of the components of our lives come together to visit the garden this year!

The short version of the story is that Celia’s father opened a grand Victorian resort hotel on the island in the mid 1800’s, and she developed this garden over the course of many years, primarily to furnish fresh cut flowers for the hotel. She wrote about it in her book, “An Island Garden,” which was published in 1894, a few months before she died. The garden was abandoned for many decades, and then restored about 25 years ago; it is now planted and maintained by a group of volunteers (and UNH), exactly as Celia had maintained it. There are many paintings of this garden by impressionist artist Childe Hassam in museums around the world, and the book itself is available for purchase (or you can read it online at www.digital.library.upenn.edu/women/thaxter/garden/garden.html.)

For anyone who is a passionate gardener, this is definitely a trip worth taking! Just to get an idea of Celia Thaxter’s passion, go to the online version (or the print version) and read her interpretation of the thunderstorm hitting her island and garden, on page 105. In other parts of the story, she relates going outside at 4 AM in her Victorian nightdress to squish slugs and encase them in salt! It’s really quite a fun read, and can be handled cover to cover in a few hours.
On a practical note, there were some extraordinary flowers in the small garden, and I’m sure my photos don’t do them justice, but here’s a few of the shots.

If You Can't Stand the Heat.....

So we're starting what seems like our 100th day of 90+ degree heat in Atlanta today.....it's only 7:20 in the morning, and I'm just finishing up the watering, hoping to help things survive through this weather! Considering how miserable the heat has been, the plants are actually looking pretty good. Since they're just coming out of the drought from Hell, I guess they're all just used to it by now.

The crazy heat is the perfect justification for me to spend a few days at my family's home in NH right after the July 4 weekend. That and the fact that Celia Thaxter's garden is open!

If I haven't babbled about this garden before, here's the short version: Celia Thaxter was a poet and author who lived on Appledore Island (off the coast of NH) in the second half of the 1800's, where she ran a small hotel and had what was reputed to be a pretty fabulous garden. There are lots of details about the garden in her book, "An Island Garden," published in the 1890's. There are also lots of impressionist paintings of her gardens (many by Childe Hassam) in various museums and private collections, largely because that's the group of people she hung around with.

Fast forward......the island and garden are now owned by Cornell University, and over the course of the past many years, a group of dedicated volunteers has restored the garden to its original plan. It is open to visitors only five consecutive Thursdays per year, and I'm going to be there on one of them! I have wanted to do this for many years, and things never worked out. This year they have! I'm pretending not to notice that it involves taking a plane to a car to a boat to get there (a few hundred dollars later), and Frank hasn't directly asked how much we're spending for this little garden jaunt..... I'll definitely bring back photos!

And the added little enticement came when Mum emailed me a notice about the "Garden Party" at Fuller Gardens (http://www.fullergardens.org/) that (coincidentally) happens the evening before my boat ride. How can I not attend the garden party/fundraiser for one of my favorite gardens? I believe it's my duty to do so!