The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  It took four more years for the case to be settled, years in which Mrs. Delany suffered from headaches, for which the remedy was being bled (a “cure” that prevented her from joining the Dean in Downpatrick), and a creeping depression. At Christmastime in 1752 she attended rehearsals of Handel’s Messiah in Dublin, but she was initially reluctant to go, apprehensive of being overwhelmed. “I was a little afraid of it, as I think the music very affecting, and I found it so — but am glad I went, as I felt great comfort from it.”45 Handel had gone blind. His loss of sight reminded her of Milton’s line “Total eclipse! no sun, no moon!” in Handel’s Samson Oratorio. “Poor Handel! how feelingly must he recollect the ‘total eclipse .’ ”46 By 1753 she despaired of relief “for I feel my spirits harassed, and at times more heavy and gloomy than ever I knew them.”47

  Her painting counterpointed her gloom. In the same letter she says, “I have painted close this week. Our Saviour’s figure is quite finished, and the sky about him, and Elias’s head.” Painting was a poultice, a remedy, a light. Mrs. Delany painted, and repainted. The energy poured into it was her treadmill, her rowing machine, her Prozac.

  She submerged the lawsuit into her life. She embarked on vast reading projects: poring through the letters of Madame de Maintenon, in English translation, comparing them to the output of the prolific seventeenth-century correspondent Madame de Sevigné, whose letters she read “in the French language.”48 She finished the third volume of Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, declaring, “What a soul that Richardson has!”49 A month later, she remained preoccupied with Grandison: “Had a woman written the story, she would have thought the daughters of as much consequence as the sons, and when I see Mr. Richardson, I shall call him to an account for that faux pas.”50 She supervised the cooking, served up splendid meals, worried over her neighbors, and learned a “recipe for the headache” from the Duchess, which she passed on to Anne: “eat every morning as soon as you wake a bit of stale bread about the size of a walnut.”51

  The lawsuit ground on, forcing them to cancel visits to England and to make unexpected visits to England as well. In 1754, the Dean had what appears to be a minor stroke. One January night he “complained of a weakness and watering in his left eye.… When I met him at breakfast, his left eyelid was much fallen, and his mouth drawn a little awry … his voice not quite so clear, which he took notice of it himself; and on looking in the glass saw what indeed had terrified me.… He was cupped on Sunday night.… It is undoubtedly an attack of the palsy, but everybody assures me it was as slight as such an attack can be.”52

  In 1756 both Mary’s and Patrick’s health was so low that they ventured to take the waters at Bath. She wrote from the spa in chilly November that “the Dean is rather better this evening,” but she continued weakly that “I fear I must stay now much longer, as I can only drink the waters very cautiously.… I have promised not to write much.”53 Although she eventually felt repaired, the Dean’s health would need continual scrutiny and care. By December of that year, back in London, she had little energy left for others. Her depletion led to exasperation with her old friend Ann Donnellan’s demands. Donnellan had been involved in family disputes about her own inheritance, fighting with her sister and bringing her troubles to Mary. “When a long train of friendly offices and attention to the utmost of one’s power has been offered, and the sacrifice not accepted, it is then time to grow selfish and do only what is quite convenient and agreeable to one’s self.”54 By 1758 she had sacrificed friendship and her health, and the Dean had almost sacrificed his life for their position in society.

  Fearful of the outcome of the lawsuit,55 the Dean went so far as to buy his wife a house of her own for her security. This moment has the feel of the strange surface of Mrs. D.’s Magnolia grandiflora, the paste leached through into the petals, as the lawsuit leached through into everything. The lawsuit and its midnight background. And yet, of course, there is the pink growing tip of the next bud. In Mrs. D.’s mosaicks there is always the next bud.

  Finally a settlement was reached. Writing from the house the Dean had bought for her, Mary announced the details:

  We have certainly all the reason in the world to be satisfied with the decree as it now stands, for it seems most equitable, and D.D. is now as if no marriage-settlement had been made; as our opponents could make out no claim, (as interested in the deed that was burned).56

  The Tennisons relinquished a “£4000 mortgage which D.D. has possession of” and split with Delany “half Stephen’s Green lease, which is fifty pounds a year,” as well as an additional “£1700.” The settlement, which favored Delany, “occasioned much talk, as you may believe.” What was lost was largely restored – except for the Dean’s health, and, to a certain degree, Mary’s placidity. “I was not born to be a philosopher,” she declared. “Nature has not thrown in enough of indifference in my composition, nor has art attained it; in short, I like, and love, and dislike with all my might, and the pain it sometimes costs me is recompensed by the pleasure.”57 Unabashed as her Grandiflora, she exerted her passions. She loved and hated with all her might and found the end of the lawsuit and the labor of having persevered deliciously satisfying.

  Mrs. Delany composed her Magnolia grandiflora at Bill Hill, the graceful blue-brick early-Georgian house of her friend the Dowager Countess Gower, nee Mary Tufton.58 (It is still a private residence and now a stud farm.) The magnolia tree had probably cost her friend a small fortune. In her ink-heavy handwriting that – compared to Mrs. D.’s swirly script – was clotted and thick as twigs, the Countess recorded the progress of her exotic, ecstatic magnolia and her battles with her “mule” of a gardener as to what was best for its colossal flowers. In the 1750s, seedlings for the Magnolia grandiflora were sold for the steep price of two pounds, two shillings.59 Compare this to a maple seed, another tree that had to be harvested from North America, nestled into a wooden box, buffeted in that box in a merchant ship across the Atlantic Ocean, and preserved by British nurserymen for sale to botanical collectors like the Countess. That maple seed would have cost a mere shilling, whereas two pounds, two shillings might have been a whole year’s salary for a laundry maid. By the end of the century, magnolia trees were selling for a more reasonable fifteen shillings; the Countess likely paid something in between.

  Mrs. Delany cut some of the biggest petal pieces of her oeuvre for the Magnolia grandiflora. After, or as, she scissored around the luscious thin white petals, she dipped a brush into gray watercolor to paint in shadows and details. When you pore through the collage, you notice the gray – like detecting gray strands in a head of blondish brown hair. By the early 1760s Mrs. Delany’s hair was probably quite gray. Her marriage, now of two decades, had been deeply contented – though half of it had been haunted by the courts.

  The Countess, about the same age as Mrs. Delany, considered her magnolia tree a personal associate, the connection between the body of a tree and the human body intimate and material. Not only was her tree human, it was female – mostly. Though she referred to it as “Mother Magnolia,” occasionally she called it “he.”60 There’s a vigor about this flower with its “lemon and wax” scent that almost makes it both sexes at once.61 The Countess was truly disappointed that the shiny-leaved beauty with her colossal saucer-like flowers didn’t have ears to hear. Three years before the making of the Magnolia grandiflora mosaick, she wrote to Mary from Bill Hill that she couldn’t “help feeling sorry the magnolia must remain insensible of all the fine things you say of it; ’tis but a vegetable, yet one may say of it what one can’t say of many things, [that] in its way ’tis all perfection.”62 As they watched themselves age, as their skin surprised them with its crepiness – and just think of the floppy body of the eighteenth-century matron sculpted by stays – to be drawn to the image of robustness inserted a perfection into their lives that they would never see in their own physical selves again.

  { GARDENS, PAPER AND REAL }

  At home in Toronto I pored t
hrough Ruth Hayden’s book, leaping from the words to the collages, trying to let my own eye be my guide, yet also having to rely on Hayden to verify what I was seeing. It was the collages that drew me. The gowns and aristocratic goings-on seemed like wallpaper compared to the flowers. The fact that the artist accomplished them in great age intrigued me, but when I realized that she’d had a thriving mid-life marriage, I began responding to her life as well. She had no children. I had no children. She had a deep connection to a second husband. I had such a bond. In her marriage she had begun all sorts of artistic projects that her husband encouraged. In my marriage I had not only continued writing poetry but had started writing prose – a memoir and essays – as well as writing and performing a one-woman show. She had a plethora of arty girlfriends. So do I. When it finally sank in that mourning was the prompt for the great flowers, I felt a hook slip into my own unconscious. Her husband had died. I was afraid mine would.

  I had let go of my life alone. I had tumbled down ravines of love and involvement, now so separated from my determined, ambitious, solitary young woman’s marching forward that I could never go back to it. Not only was I separated from my youth and the self I recognized, but this separation was vivified daily by the fact that I lived in two countries. Mrs. Delany lived in two countries, exhausting herself traveling back and forth between them and dragging her husband back and forth with her. I knew exactly why she felt she had to do it. Exile, even voluntary, is horrible. At first, the fact that she was born into an entirely different class and in an entirely different century meant little to me. She was an artist. I was an artist, in the sense that a poet is an imaginary painter.

  As a poet I was always connecting back through centuries to words. Because poetry exists against time, I can read with indiscriminate gusto poets of all countries and centuries. Love and death, the great subjects of the lyric poem, manifest in all places and times. Love, James Joyce says in Ulysses, is the “word known to all men.” And women, I might add. James Joyce, that swaggering modernist, was dragging my husband to Dublin again, and I was going with him to celebrate Bloomsday, June 16 – the day when tourists walk in Leopold Bloom’s footsteps.

  Why not walk in Mrs. Delany’s footsteps, too? Mike and I tromped the southern edge of St. Stephen’s Green searching for Bishop Clayton’s mansion, where the thirty-year-old widow Mrs. Pendarves stayed on her first visit to Ireland. I was shocked to find it, substantial, with its pillars of stone so anchored that the Irish government felt it still solid enough to govern from. But what shocked me more than finding it was its demonstration of the substantial difference in our wealth. It was the first three-dimensional evidence that she had existed, and the reality of her aristocratic life was so palpable that it stopped me dead in my tracks. How could I have been comparing my life to hers? Mrs. Delany consorted with royalty, with kings and queens, and the mansion she visited was so different from the ephemeral house my grandfather had built all by himself – and quickly, with no foundation, just a dirt crawl space underneath – that to link myself with her felt ludicrous.

  Yet the house of my grandfather, who was descended from Northern Irish people like those farmers to whom the Dean of Down and his wife, Mrs. Delany, ministered, charmed the landscape. It was set in an orchard. It was neat and trim as a cottage. Attached to the side of the house and out to the road was a general store and gas station, adorned by gas pumps with round glass heads like the figures of ghosts children are taught to draw at Hallowe’en. Geraniums at the frosty windowsills bloomed in January. And the view of the rolling landscape of the fruit and wine country west of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York was worthy of the photo shoot that Gourmet magazine had featured on the happiness of the upstate weekend. I was shocked when I saw the layout. The photographer must have positioned the camera in places I’d stood to take my own snapshots.

  One night in Dublin we met up with Gerry O’Flaherty, a tall, tweed-jacketed Joycean with an encyclopedic knowledge of the city. “Don’t take another picture of people!” He held up his hand, stopping me from taking a redundant shot of a group of Joyceans. “Photograph the dishes on this table! It’s pictures of people’s everyday lives we need!” O’Flaherty remembered the buildings from Joyce’s day, which still had stood in his boyhood but which were being destroyed by renewal projects or ravaged by renovation.

  “Molly is looking for Delville,” my husband told him.

  “You missed it,” he said with a grim glee. “Torn down.” But O’Flaherty urged me to take the city bus out to Glasnevin, the suburb where Delville had been located, anyway.

  The spot must have some sort of garden karma: the Dublin Botanic Gardens abut the old Delville grounds. It was an unusually hot, dry day when I wandered out there, walking past Jerusalem artichokes that were taller than I was, trying to get – what? A feel for a marriage, for a companionship that flourished in layers, like the fruit and vegetable mosaicks Mrs. D. also included in the Flora Delanica. She concocted collages of a number of edible plants, famously an eggplant that actually demonstrates its name, featuring the white, egg-shaped start of the vegetable before it elongates at one end and becomes bulbous at the other, and before it darkens into purple. O’Flaherty was right. A dull photograph of Delville in the 1940s exists, as well as Mrs. Delany’s sketches of the gardens. Photos of the plasterwork in the ceilings survive. But the lived life of dirty dishes on the table we have to imagine.63

  Under fabulously different circumstances from a minor aristocrat’s second marriage and happiness dipping into her garden at Delville, my own second marriage and happiness dipping into a garden at a little house in London, Ontario, called Villanelle slips and slides as a ghost silhouette. Even as a middle-class woman in the early twenty-first century, I recognized in Mrs. D.’s letters a similar and peculiar mix of push-pull between two countries and job and family obligations. When we lived in London, Ontario, I had a nagging garden (and a reproachful yellow wheelbarrow). The machinations I had to perform to keep a garden going where my husband worked, five hundred miles away from New York City, where I often worked, even included a version of Mrs. D.’s “skilful gardener,” my friend’s son Bill, as well as Dave’s Lawn and Garden Service. The push and pull of house-and-garden guilt involved the same arrivals and departures as the Delanys’ over the ten years I felt compelled to maintain a garden, before I gave it up for an eighty-square-foot-balcony green aerie in Toronto. Somehow I had imagined that if my life were retro-ed back into eighteenth-century Ireland, I would rematerialize in a pastoral paradise where time would stretch out in a perennial childhood summer. But Mrs. D.’s life pointed in the same hurried, over-full direction as my own.

  In some ways the Delanys had it all too easy with their garden. “Just the kind of gardening I love to do,” quipped my friend Ann McColl Lindsay in the shade of her Victorian house in London, Ontario, beyond which is a fantasy of arched roses in a garden built with back-breaking labor. “Sit in a chair with a martini while you tell the help which plant to move and call that gardening!” In some ways it’s more possible to traverse the hundreds of years with botany than to traverse the chasm of class. My friend and I both feel that our families would have been “the help.” But we identify with Mrs. D.’s green-obsessed imagination, and Ann Lindsay has anchored herself in a huge, beautiful historic house far from the cramped post-war quarters in Glasgow she came from.

  But artifacts let us leap centuries. Artwork to artwork, hand to hand, time falls away in the presence of the marvelous.

  Behind LaGrange Garage and General Store, my grandmother Ruth McMann Wright planted a faeryland of perennials after my grandfather, Gilbert, made the plan. To the north side of the store lay an acre that had been an old orchard, and Gillie had cut down many of the old apple trees, leaving the most gnarled and picturesque ones. Then he dug several not particularly shapely rectangular perennial beds, the way they do in upstate New York. But the environment of the orchard made the oblong beds just fine (and easy to mow around). My grandmother
planted and supervised this country garden, full of all the standards from crocuses to chrysanthemums. Most summer nights my grandparents, whose lively lifelong marriage was a model to me, toured their acre and a half. In the preadolescent summers when I visited them for extended periods of time, I did the tour, too. My grandmother said the name of each flower and I repeated it, till I had them all memorized. I spent my time memorizing Bible verses by day (she sent me to Vacation Bible School) and flower names by evening. Now, in a book, I had met another Ruth who was listing the pages of genus and species names of flowers that her ancestor, married to quite a Bible-quoter himself, had written on her works of art.

  It was my mother (who wouldn’t have darkened the door of a church if you’d paid her) who taught me to grow things. In the style of her father, she dug out a rectangular bed at the back of our suburban house, said it was mine, and handed me several packets of seeds. I was ten when I grew a huge load of Celosia argentea (Plumed Cockscomb) and harvested a mess of them, dragging them to school for an art class still-life set-up, shedding leaves and bending flowerheads on the way. In the school cafeteria our teacher taught us to crayon on paper with bright colors, then to cover all the color up with another layer of black crayon. Then we could grip the edge of a pair of blunt-nosed scissors and scrape a drawing through the waxy black to show the color underneath. “You care about things you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make,” Louis Menand has written about craft.64 The caring crosses chasms of adulthood, class, and time.

  Chapter Ten.

  EVERLASTING PEA

  Lathyrus latifolius, Broad-leav’d Everlasting Pea, Bulstrode, August 22, 1781 (illustration credit 9.2)

  Lathyrus latifolius, Broad-leav’d Everlasting Pea, is a collage with a secret. Made at Bulstrode in the last year of Mrs. Delany’s great work, it discloses a clue to her process. Almost at the center of the collage she pasted a vine tendril in the exact shape of a pair of scissors, positioned upside down to us, but in the place they might take if they were held in the artist’s hand. To the left, above her caption, is a more fragile tendril from what appears to be a dead part of the vine, also in the shape of a pair of scissors. Inside a portrait of a common plant (one that grows wild by the roadside in Canada), Mrs. Delany took the idea of an everlasting thread-like vine, both alive and dead, and made known her method of making her mosaicks.