The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  Each of Mrs. Delany’s flower mosaicks is a portrait, highly individual, full of personality, the bloom posed as a human figure might be positioned in a painter’s portrait. In the dream-like, luminous atmosphere of memory, imagination, and mourning, the flowers have something of the feel of self-portraits as well. The flowers are like dancers. Like daydreamers. Like women blinking in silent adoration. Like children playing. Like queens reigning or divas belting out their arias. Like courtesans lying on bedclothes. Like girls hanging their heads in shame. Like, like, like. Along with the scissors, the scalpel, the bodkin, the tweezers, the mosaicks make use of one of the main tools of the poet: simile. By comparing one thing to another, a simile leaves the original as it is – say, just a flower – but it also states what that is like, making a threshold into another world.

  When Mrs. D. picked up her scissors, grief was the chief prompt. After her beloved Dean Delany’s death in 1768, which followed the death of her sister, Anne, in 1761, she wrote that she considered each of her flower portraits to be “an employment and amusement, to supply the loss of those that had formerly been delightful to me; but had lost their power of pleasing; being depriv’d of that friend, whose partial approbation was my pride, and had stampt a value on them.”5 By “those” she meant Anne and the stopping of their lively, vital correspondence. By “friend” she meant the Dean, in the eighteenth-century sense of friendship that was familial. He was absolutely the friend that a husband can become. She was bereft of the spark of his approbation and encouragement and deprived of that sturdy sounding board that Anne had provided all their lives.

  Patrick Delany had not been one of those family-assigned eighteenth-century aristocratic mates. She’d already had one of those as a teenager, and it had almost deformed her emotionally. For her second marriage (and her second life), she decamped from England to live in Ireland, though she maintained her house in London and her ties to family and friends. With Patrick her life metamorphosed from something brittle and sometimes desperate into an existence that was softer and more expansive.

  He was born on March 15, 1685, in Rathkrea, Queen’s County, Ireland, the son of a servant to an Irish judge. Educated in Athy, County Kildare, his intelligence won him a place at Trinity College, where he was much loved and admired.6 He was not part of the aristocracy, but part of an emerging meritocracy. He wrote many turgid sermons and some hopeful poetry. He was too earnest to be really witty, although he was a great pal of Jonathan Swift, the wit of his age. Swift described him to Alexander Pope in a 1730 letter as “a man of the easyest and best conversation I ever met with in this Island, a very good listener, a right reasoner, neither too silent nor talkative … but hath too many acquaintance.” A vastly social man, Delany loved entertaining, which is how he met Mary. Friends had brought her along to dinner at his Dublin house, Delville. But Delany was already engaged to the very wealthy Margaret Tennison.7 Mary would hear about him in subtle, casual inquiries, sometimes through Jonathan Swift, throughout the twelve years of this marriage. Then Margaret Tennison died. Mary was forty-three; Patrick was sixty-one. She was at a point in her life when wit fizzled, irony paled, and she was ready to fall in love with earnestness. In the spring of 1743 Patrick Delany tracked her down and popped the question.

  Mrs. Delany throve for twenty-three years in her marriage to the Dean – embroidering, mounting shells in grottoes, raising a herd of deer, drawing, painting, redecorating, and entertaining all who passed through Dublin, from influential bishops to the extravagant Lennox sisters, daughters of the Duke of Richmond. And it was at Delville that gardening became a true devotion. By refusing to level the contours of the estate, she preserved the twisting paths through the woods and downplayed the ordered parterres and allées that Patrick Delany and his friend Richard Helsham had spent a fortune on. (Their garden debt was mocked by Swift: “And when you’ve been at vast expenses / in whims, parterres, canals and fences, / Your assets fail …”)8 Instead, Mrs. D. designed natural theatres to show off her flowers and spaces to share with women friends, such as a “Pearly Bower”9 (a sheltered arbor planted with flowers) for her sister Anne.

  By the time she was widowed at sixty-eight, she had been loved candidly and clear-sightedly, not in a blur of romance but in clarity of observation, with true acceptance. It was not a sweeping love but a lucid love, or, as Dean Delany would write in a poem to her, twelve whole years after their wedding, “My pride, my life, my bliss, my care!”10 When the Dean died, she knew as a stout Christian that she would meet him in the next world. But she was still on earth, recuperating from his last years. After a grueling extended lawsuit and professional complications, the Dean’s reputation had been narrowly snatched back from a precipice, with a huge physical toll on the elderly clergyman. So after the lawyers came the doctors, the repeated trips to the spa at Bath to take the waters, the blisterings, the bleedings – all the brutal methods of eighteenth-century medicine that could kill you.

  Mrs. D.’s letters reveal her to be an absolute wreck in the first years of her widowhood. She was dislocated, indecisive, and heavily reliant on the presence of her friend the Duchess Dowager, generous and considerate and eccentric and a widow herself. She no doubt understood the vigor unique to mourning. It’s an emotional workout as much as an emotional drain. The Duchess, about fifteen years younger than Mary, must have understood that a shadow of an idea could slip into place as the new routines of widowhood and the bustle of reconnecting friendships increased, understood that her house and her interests were providing for her friend a feeling of safety as, very, very slowly, Mary woke from her stupor of grief and held a piece of black paper behind that first geranium, emphasizing the plant’s profile, its silhouette. In the embrace of Bulstrode the inchoate inventor of collage, or the Flora Delanica, as she wryly called her group of botanical concoctions, played around with her papers, scissors, scalpel, and paste – filling in an atmosphere of absence with color.

  The mosaicks unveil the vision of a person who was not remotely interested in simplification, or the lessening of experience in order to smooth out the contrariness of its elements. Mary Delany took her scissors and she got it all, every single wisp in her field of vision. She was determined to find out the dimensions and names of things. On nearly every flower she would write the Latin name, and often the vernacular name and the place and the date the work was executed. These notations combine elements of botanical labels and the headings of diary entries. They are botany and reflection both.

  We know so much about Mrs. D. because she wrote a partial memoir in mid-life, and she also wrote thousands of pages of letters to her relatives and friends, and occasionally to names we still recognize, emblems of the eighteenth century. But mostly she wrote to her younger sister Anne. These letters entwine like the tendrils on the climbing flowers she loved to render. Intense and caring, the sisters had a mutual snap of communication, that feeling of knowing how one felt in the other’s skin. Mary, the older sister who lived in London society and the world of the court, had a horror of private or personal information coming to light. She destroyed many of the letters she received and, in her bossy older-sister-ish way, advised the younger Anne to do the same.

  … I believe I have burnt this week an hundred of your letters: how unwillingly did I commit to the flames those testimonies of your tender friendship! but I have preserved more than double their number, which I shall take with me as so many charms. I thought it prudent to destroy letters that mentioned particular affairs of particular people, or family business.11

  But Anne, who led a much more retiring life in the small town of Gloucester with their mother, didn’t share Mary’s fear of exposure. She disobeyed her older sibling’s advice, quietly, just as she disobeyed other sisterly injunctions, such as how she should conduct herself as a fiancée or how she should raise her children. She kept for posterity Mary’s lively, opinionated missives, written in her lucid, utterly readable hand.

  There are more than three thousand pages of t
hese epistles, and they are as layered as the collages themselves, full of squiggles and loops and interconnections of information, family ties, and juicy portraits of scandalous, modest, aristocratic, servile, and artistic figures. They don’t present a complete record of her artistic efforts, but they do contain intermittent references to her works and clues to her process. Glints of her nascent creative life surface and go underground and surface again in hints, dropped fragments, and passionate descriptions. Written with an eye for a button or a piece of lace, in a narrative joie de vivre, they’re emotional and social outpourings with breezy opinions and the details of living that allow one to drink in the brewed quotidian existence of the eighteenth century. She wrote down what she ate and with whom, where she went and with whom, and above all what everyone wore. She described the dresses, the waistcoats, the fabrics, the rooms and stairwells, the wildflowers, domestic flowers, cold remedies, bloodlettings, cats, clerics, gossips, suitors, satirists, artists, botanists, and royals. She could size up an individual in the flick of an eyelash, then go to her desk and write it down. “Up comes the gentleman,” she wrote of a caller, “so spruce and so finical you would have sworn he had been just taken out of a box of cotton.”12

  Given Mrs. D.’s penchant for burning evidence, there are obviously many fewer surviving letters from her sister Anne. Those that endure are calm and softly witty; their self-possessed tone implies a woman with intelligent reserve. Anne passed on the letters she had squirreled away to her daughter, Mary Dewes Port (1746–1814). Mary Port gave them to her daughter Georgina, who was Mrs. Delany’s charge and companion in late life. Georgina Mary Ann Port Waddington (1771–1850) in turn gave them to her daughter, Augusta. Augusta Waddington Hall, Lady Llanover (1802–96), transcribed and edited the letters, which were published in six volumes as The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany: With Interesting Reminiscences of King George the Third and Queen Charlotte, by Richard Bentley, Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty (Queen Victoria), in 1861 and 1862.

  Sarah Chauncey Woolsey (1835–1905), best known for her children’s book What Katy Did (written under the name of Susan Coolidge), edited The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mrs. Delany into a compact two volumes for North American audiences, published in 1879, and R. Brimley Johnson (1867–1932) used Lady Llanover’s edition as the basis of Mrs. Delany at Court and Among the Wits in 1925. But not Woolsey or Johnson or Emily Morse Symonds (1860–1936), who, under the name of George Paston, compiled Mrs. Delany (Mary Granville): A Memoir 1700–1788 in 1900,13 or John St. Clair Muriel (1909–75), who wrote the biography Mrs. Delany under the name of Simon Dewes in 1940, are much responsible for what we know about her now.14

  Lady Llanover’s monumental effort at editing the volumes of letters still influences all who are interested in Mrs. Delany, including Ruth Hayden, her living descendant and author of Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers. In that book’s dedication, Hayden thanks her children and late husband for tolerating her obsession with her ancestor, and I find myself thanking her, too. At the age of eighty-six she showed me how to feed currants to a robin from my bare hand in the garden of her small house in Bath, just as Patrick Delany had shown his reticent but opinionated wife Mary two hundred and forty–odd years earlier in the garden of their house outside Dublin. But the newest way to learn about Mrs. D. is through the renaissance in recent scholarship about her. Harvard garden historian Mark Laird and Walters Art Museum curator Alicia Weisberg-Roberts gathered essays from thirteen scholars in Mrs. Delany and Her Circle. Deploying expertise from historians, art historians, botanists, paper specialists, and experts in textiles and crafts, the essays probe, tickle, tease out the social, aesthetic, and scientific sources and mysteries of her work. Yet all who investigate the life of Mrs. Delany owe a debt to Lady Llanover. As Weisberg-Roberts reminded me, “These scholars are like Lady Llanover’s grandchildren.”15

  Bursting from the bright spirit that wrote those volumes of letters come the flowers themselves, made by two hands that had seventy-two years of flexion in other crafts, and by eyes that had seventy-two years of pure noticing. As Mrs. D. embarked on her great work of art, she was in a position, as we all are at a certain time of life, to review, to respond, to re-evaluate all that has happened – and to revive. Bluestocking writer and reformer Hannah More, after visiting Mrs. Delany when she was in her eighties, wrote that the old artist still had “that tenderness of heart which people are supposed to lose, and generally do lose in a very advanced age.”16 Mrs. Delany’s flowers contain that tenderness. How did she keep hold of it? Can such a great talent behave like a seed? How can it lie dormant for so long? We all know the truism: people who seem to spring into artistic action were, in fact, quietly preparing for years.

  { BUD }

  Scarlet Geranium and Lobelia cardinalis

  Bulstrode 1773

  Verso inscribed “first essay”

  (illustration credit 1.1)

  I saw my first flower mosaick at three o’clock on Saturday, September 27, 1986, at the Morgan Library in New York City, after an elderly guard (at least I viewed him as elderly then) eyed me suspiciously as he checked my coat. There, in the beige gallery off the dimly lit foyer, glowed one hundred and ten of the flowers. They had been sent across the Atlantic from the British Museum. The gallery was as underlit as a room beneath the ocean. The handful of viewers almost swam from flower to flower, as though snorkeling to discover coral glimmering through another element. And these were only a tenth of them, emanating from a place beyond sex and beyond death but thoroughly of both.17

  I was thirty-nine and had published two books of poetry. Those flowers had the carefully crafted but mysterious quality of the poems I most admired. I went around the show twice, not methodically but flowing across the gallery from frame to frame. I could not get over the dexterity, the eyesight, and the fine muscle coordination that had produced them. I was hooked, I was sunk. My grandmother and my great-grandmother, whose ordinary needlework talents I exalt, would have loved them.

  I felt nearly ashamed about how deeply I swooned over her work, because the botanicals seemed almost fuddy-duddy. Somebody like Georges Braque or Pablo Picasso probably would have hated them. They were not shiny, abstract, or hanging in the Museum of Modern Art. They were not avant-garde, even in their own day. They were derrière-garde, and not even technically collages. Collage, I’d been taught, was a twentieth-century invention, supposedly a lot more involved than Mrs. D.’s pasting of paper on paper. Now one might even view Mrs. Delany as a mixed media artist, since she painted on the papers and occasionally added dried leaves as well.

  How I wished I loved in my heart the art I could love in my mind. Big, bold, epic, symphonic. But I love the small, the miniature, the detailed, the complex: the tiny, boundaried world that has its sources in handiwork. Handiwork, crisply bordered or patched with cut geometrical shapes and defined by stitching, was what I watched my maternal grandmother do – in the quilts for our beds, the quilt for my doll, the embroidered and crocheted runners on the buffet, the corners of the tablecloths, and the handkerchiefs that primly blinked from her pocketbook. I’d had plenty of the unboundaried world as a child. In the tumult of the working-class household where I grew up and the crowded post-war elementary school I attended, where the floor space was so limited that each child’s mat overlapped another, I longed for distinct outlines to things.

  At an age when other women had left New York City to marry or remarry and move to affordable places to have their families, I had stayed. I was divorced and lived in a studio apartment on the Upper East Side, a tiny spot in a neighborhood so wealthy my blue-collar Buffalo family or their farmer cousins west of the Finger Lakes would never have imagined it. My family were my earliest role models, but since my first attachment to a teacher as a child, I have never stopped my search for others. Past adolescence, the usual time for bright examples, as Mrs. Delany’s brother-in-law would say, my quest went quietly on, well into middle age �
� and beyond. It hasn’t been a focused canvassing but almost its opposite, something full of happenstance. Years ago, I lit upon teachers and slightly older girlfriends, then professors, older colleagues, and therapists, and I was always scanning likely characters in stories and novels. At times the role models proliferated; at others the world emptied of them. Yet my blurry radar scanned on, as if I were always looking for something at the back drawers of experience.

  At the age I am now, these guides no longer come from the ranks of the living – yet I find a good dead role model to be ideal. Life has its rushing formlessness, but an existence from centuries ago has a shape. Mrs. Delany’s life is so shapely that it feels like a complete work of art, cut and pasted – a still life rich with the captured curves of petals, bristling with the leaf, and still, in a sense, breathing. Her post-life suggestions are succinct and piquant. They almost have a scent, like the imagined perfume that might arise from her blooms.

  The Morgan Library exhibit was accompanied by Ruth Hayden’s book, and I was determined to have it. But even as I tromped to the quiet gift shop staffed by silk-bloused, wool-skirted volunteers who may have appreciated the handiwork detail of the mosaicks more than the ebullience, I knew that an imported hardcover would be expensive and that I had to make my rent. My salary as a middle-school English teacher at Friends Seminary School was so low that I couldn’t eat, take the subway, and pay for the Upper East Side studio, so I sublet my apartment illegally for the last weekend of each month, moved out to Queens to stay with my boyfriend at the time, and returned to pay my rent on the first of the next month with the sublet money. I paged through the British Museum publication, with its horrific conversion price from pounds to dollars, and gave up the chance to buy it. Credit card debt would not have stopped Mrs. Delany, who never had enough money but who spent all her life as befit an aristocrat. In retrospect, I know it wasn’t my credit card that stopped me. It was where I was in life. Like reading a novel you know is too old for you but being fascinated anyway, I read the opening of Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers – and put it down.