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Chapter Three: American
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American 0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 166 8/10/10 1:44:54 PM 167 A The Poetics of the American Garden America was founded on the traditions of other cultures, and the customs and forms of those societies were transported to new soil. The great plantations of the South and the country estates of the North retained from their European antecedents either the axial formality of the seventeenth-century Renaissance garden or the serpentine contours of the eighteenth-century picturesque landscape. What altered these conventions in the course of time was an American idea about individuality and man’s relationship to the vast wilderness; also, there was the memory of the tradition of subsistence gardening practiced by the first settlers, who planted seeds that were their treasures from the Old World. In nineteenth-century New England, where even the humblest house was set apart from the village by its own circle of green, a singular style of American garden emerged in a natural fashion. Without the protection of walls or courtyards, the house stood alone, facing the wilderness beyond , and the garden—a mixture of flowers, vegetables, and herbs—fringed the house and the dooryards formlessly, its outer edges merging with the open landscape of the countryside. These gardens were part of the domestic environment, a private domain planted for personal use and enjoyment, rather than for public approbation. Writing less programmatically about Nature than did Alexander Pope in some of his Epistles to Several Persons in eighteenth-century England, nineteenth -century New England writers developed a poetics for a simplified and indigenous manner of cultivation by describing their own surroundings in esFacing page: Alan Ward, Chinese moon gate, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden, Seal Harbor, Maine. 0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 167 8/10/10 1:44:54 PM [44.197.251.102] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:44 GMT) c h a p t e r t h r e e 168 says, novels, memoirs, and notebooks. The more complex civilization became, the more these writers recognized the plain beauty of informal compositions. Three of them—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Celia Thaxter, and Sarah Orne Jewett —are also connected by their summers on Appledore Island, ten miles off the coast of Maine. This was where Thaxter lived and carved out her garden from a scruffy seaside wilderness. For the visitors, Hawthorne and Jewett, that island in the Isles of Shoals contributed to their universal experience of the New England landscape—“this stern and wild scene, which has precisely the same characteristics now as two hundred years ago,” Hawthorne wrote in 1852 in his American Note-Books. For Hawthorne, the revelation about gardens had come ten years earlier, when he married Sophia Peabody and moved to the Old Manse by the river in Concord, Massachusetts. The gambrel-roofed house was set at the end of an allée of Balm-of-Gilead trees, and, wrote Hawthorne, “when we chance to observe a passing traveler though the sunshine and shadow of this long avenue, his figure appears too dim and remote to disturb the sense of blissful seclusion.” Having already rejected the cooperative agrarian venture of the Transcendentalists after a year at Brook Farm, in 1841, Hawthorne thrived on the privacy of his “sacred precincts” where he observed the lushness of vegetation on his daily walks. For Hawthorne, the apple orchard provided the transition from the wilderness to the garden: these trees of a domestic character had lost what he called “the wild nature of the forest-tree.” He gives a detailed account of bean vines “with green leaves clambering up the poles,” and went on to describe delicate blossoms and tender beans hiding in the foliage and how hummingbirds were attracted to the blossoms of one variety of bean. Summer squash became sculptures in the shapes of urns and vases with scalloped edges. He lists the procession of flowers: the first appearance of roses and a wild orchid, the pink Arethusa, that grows in the swampy meadows. On another occasion, he made a bouquet from the “amphibious tribe” of wildflowers at the riverside : a white lily, a blue pickerel weed, and a cardinal flower. Without design or form, the garden “that skirted the avenue of the manse” contained a collection of individual plants, and because they were few, each one became “an object of special interest.” The toil of planting enhanced appreciation of and added zest to the harvest. And as for weeds, those tenacious enemies sown by the wind, he even wondered, in the...