Book Review: Celia Thaxter's An Island Garden

For me, Celia Thaxter's An Island Garden was a surprising find that has now become one of the treasures of my bookshelf. I came to it accidentally. Standing in the aisle of a small, local bookstore, I opened to the first page of Thaxter's text, vaguely recalling her link to Sarah Orne Jewett, one of my favorite writers — and only slightly curious at the prospect of spending the afternoon with a "garden book." I read Thaxter's first paragraph, and I was hooked. Poetic, rich, and satisfying even in its simplicities and understated tones, the book may be one of the most important examples of American nature writing and local color literature.

Celia Thaxter (1835-1894) grew up and lived out her life on the remote Isles of Shoals, just off the shore of Maine. As a girl, some of New England's literary greats visited Thaxter's home. Her father's island Appledore House was one of the first resort hotels in the country, and its registers record the stays of Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Longfellow, and Childe Hassam, among others. As an adult, her parlor welcomed the likes of Sarah Orne Jewett, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Richard Henry Dana, who sat together by the garden and talked big ideas.

I learned something more about Thaxter by perusing her biography and her body of work. Interestingly enough, Thaxter is significantly linked to what we now know as ecofeminism. In the first issue of Audubon Magazine in 1887, she raged against women's collusion with abuses of nature through their support of the burgeoning feather trade and its connection to the fashion industry. The essay was titled "Woman's Heartlessness." Almost a century before the term ecofeminism was born, Thaxter began to consider, and to write about, the intersections of gender and the natural world. She looked carefully, she considered thoughtfully, her times and her environment, and she wrote with passion. Thus Thaxter was no isolationist in her love of nature. Her creative sensibility and her spiritual awareness combined with a moral imperative and an acute awareness of her historical moment and its dilemmas. She made important connections in her writing, and her work represents a substantial voice in late 19th century New England.

Thaxter's prose and poetry have been alternately overlooked and underrated by most literary scholars, but the most recent reprint of An Island Garden's 1894 edition, coming on the heels of a 1978 edition, perhaps signals an endurance of the work — and a newly strengthened recognition of her important place in American literary history, a willingness to more fully consider the aesthetic value of her work.

An Island Garden was written one year before Thaxter's death, and may be seen as the culmination of her life's experience in nature, and in the writing life. The book details the exact cultivation and care of her island garden, painting a portrait of this much-beloved landscape as it existed in 1893. This book maintains, as critic John Kingsbury has also described it, a remarkable practicality while also sustaining a great measure of literary quality.

In a seemingly remote and lonely setting, Thaxter developed a remarkably vibrant inner life. Her intense relationship with nature fostered and reflected this, and her writing is its material marker. The text reads part myth, part autobiography, part gardening guide, part poetry. Woven through and around unadorned description of the gardener's battle against slugs, and the comings and goings of local birds, are passages of pure fancy. And an almost mystical spiritual awakening. As well as a moral order. An intensely New England sensibility.
Thaxter begins her prologue:

At the Isles of Shoals, among the ledges of the largest island, Appledore, lies the small garden which in the following pages I have endeavored to describe. Ever since I could remember anything, flowers have been like dear friends to me, comforters, inspirers, powers to uplift and to cheer. A lonely child, living on the lighthouse island ten miles away from the mainland, every blade of grass that sprang out of the ground, every humbles weed, was precious in my sight.

Her childhood flowers, which she "worshiped like any Parsee," evoke for Thaxter a visual and spiritual poetry. And for Thaxter, there is more. She writes,

The dear flowers! Summer after summer they return to me, always young and fresh and beautiful; but so many of the friends who have watched them and loved them with me are gone, and they return no more . . . How deep, how unbroken is that silence! But because of tender memories of loving eyes that see them no more, my flowers are yet more beloved and tenderly cherished.

One almost recalls the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and the struggle against death, in these passages. In a 19th century culture where sudden and agonizing death is a continual specter, Thaxter's nature becomes metaphor, transcendence.

For Thaxter, nature is the very face of God, filled with mystical potentials: "In immortal rapture, I, another of his creatures, less obedient in fulfilling His laws of beauty than are these lovely beings, do humbly share, reflecting it with all the powers of my spirit and rejoicing in his work with an exceeding joy." Thaxter plays, throughout the text, with the lines of "nature," "God," "self," and "other." But her imagery is intensely spiritual, her tone reaches for the mystical, even in its most unadorned turns.

Thaxter writes this last text of her life apparently in response to the friends and visitors who visited her garden over the years, urging her to "tell how it is done." She writes to this audience of her late 19th century contemporaries, exulting, "I have written this book at last. Truly it contains the fruit of much sweet and bitter experience. Of what I speak I know, and of what I know I have freely given."

American Impressionist artist Childe Hassam rendered much of the spiritual and poetic beauty of Thaxter's garden text. His twelve watercolors were an important part of the initial publication of the book, and are at last fully recreated in the most recent addition. The originals are currently housed at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

Celia Thaxter's island garden was recreated in 1977 in its original spot, now near the Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island. John Kingsbury founded the Laboratory and has written the introduction to the book's most recent reprint, as lovingly recounting Thaxter's life as he has recreated her garden.

In summer, visitors to the coast of Maine can trek to see her own small, reimagined Eden. They can revisit her writing all year ‘round, reveling in Thaxter's enduring gift, her unique voice in 19th century nature writing.

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