The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  “Mrs. Delany’s affections seemed to revive and to be concentrated upon this child,” the astute Lady Llanover, Georgina’s daughter, wrote. Her mother “was then about the age that her grandmother Anne Granville was when she and her sister Mary Granville (afterwards Mrs. Delany) were carried off by their aunt, Lady Stanley, at the period when Lord Lansdowne and his brother, Colonel Granville, were arrested and sent to the Tower.”29

  With her great-niece in tow, in the midst of her massive memorial project of the mosaicks, Mrs. D. entered into a mind-boggling level of activity. Here’s the agenda on two typical days with Georgina at home with her industrious great-aunt at St. James’s Place:

  After they gulp their breakfast, aunt and child look over a drawer of shells; aunt puts a shell to the child’s ear, who hears the whoosh inside and says “it always puts her in mind of dear mama.”30 At noon the daily guests start arriving, “Mr. Cole with his friend Mr. Symonds, and afterwards Mr. Martheille, Lady Andover, and Miss F., and Lady Stamford, who came from Whitehall to spirit me up to accept of Lord Exeter’s ticket for his concert, which I unwillingly assented to.” Then her nephew Court arrives with a companion. At last it’s time for mid-afternoon dinner. That evening, “Lady Bute, Mrs. Vesey and Miss Gregory, Lady Beaulieu, Lord Dartmouth, Lady Stamford, Duchess of Portland till eleven,” while Georgina, “ ‘the sweet bird ’ perch’d at my elbow till her usual hour of retirement, and not unnoticed !” Somehow in there a mosaick is getting looked at, thought about, or executed. Meals have been planned, visits to the privy made, and all details of life, from scratchy stays to farts and burps and a child’s spills and exclamations seen, heard, smelled, dealt with.

  In the same letter she describes another morning, when she had only four visitors, doesn’t record what happened in the afternoon – a collage, perhaps? – and in the evening goes to that concert she was reluctant to take the ticket for, conveyed in the Duchess’s coach with their friend Lady Stamford. When she got home, she reflected, “On the whole I was well, and entertained, slept better than for many nights before.”

  In two days she entertained twenty different individuals, supervised a child (who was not sent to her nursery but was kept by her aunt’s elbow), got gussied up and attended an evening concert, no doubt worked on a mosaick or maybe more, and climbed into bed peacefully exhausted. She barely had time to write to her niece Mary about her daughter’s progress in the spring of 1779, “so busy now with rare specimens from all my botanical friends, and idle visiters and my little charge must have a share of my time (tho’ not near so much as I wou’d most willingly bestow on her) that it generally drives my writing to candlelight, which does not suit my age-worn eyes.”31 Age-worn eyes. A signal. Well, she ignored that for the present. She swooped up the seven-year-old and took her to the nurseries to track down plants. “I took my little bird and Mrs. Pott to Upton in Essex, 10 mile off, to Dr. Fothergill’s Garden, crammed my tin box with exoticks, overpowered with such variety I knew not what to chuse! G. M. A. [that is, Georgina] delighted, fluttering about like a newborn butterfly, first trying her wings, and then examining and enjoying all the flowers.” That August, home at St. James’s Place, she rendered the freckles on the Lilium canadense from a specimen provided by nurseryman Mr. Lee.

  She was also busy obtaining paper. The papers Mrs. Delany worked with were imported from Holland or made in small local English mills.32 Linen rags, dumped in a vat with water, were washed and beaten to disintegration, mixed with hemp from old sailcloth or rope, packed down to a pulpy mass, and diluted again. Then a wire mold was dipped into the thinned linen-hemp slop and fished up. As the pulp dried on the mold, a single piece of paper was made. The variations in the sheets, plus the variations in the different mills (right down to how clean the vats were, the quality of the local water, and the fineness of the rags), made the differences in texture and thickness Mrs. Delany played on continually in the mosaicks. The papers were usually white, though they could be brown, blue, buff, gray, or olive. She seems to have employed anything at her disposal, from the laid paper she used for writing letters to the fine imported sheets of Dutch makers such as the Van Gerrevinck family at Phoenix Mill, Alkmaar, North Holland. (Earlier, she used papers made by James Whatman the Elder at Turkey Mill, Boxle, near Maidstone, Kent.)33 Forensic paper specialist Peter Bower has tracked down the watermarks and the various families, Dutch and British, who made the sheets Mrs. Delany used. The varieties are cornucopic. She used both Dutch and English papers for the backings, and she largely worked on the “felt side” of the paper.

  There are two sides to a handmade paper, the “wire side,” which bears the markings of the wire mesh of the mold (including the watermark) which was dipped into the linen pulp, and the “felt side,” or the smooth side of the paper, the top of the pulp in the wire mold. Mrs. Delany used the smooth sides, not allowing the markings to interfere with her surfaces. Yet she also used laid writing paper, which we still use today for stationery, and she let those lines become part of the texture of the collages.34

  She used papers imported from China, too, and possibly from India. Bower has detected brush marks on some of the papers, typical of Chinese papermaking. A friend of Mrs. Delany’s, Mrs. Boscawen, offered her paper from India, but we don’t know whether the paper was used.35 Mrs. D. approached the papers as she had long before approached the satins, silks, and linens for her clothing. She got them from abroad, she got them locally, she lusted after the exotic, yet she grabbed what was at hand when she needed it. Luscious, varied, and detailed as the patterns on cloth, she transformed the papers made from fragments of cloth into the textures of flowers that were very much like clothes. Bower, a lean, elfin man with the gusto of a detective, revealed in a lecture at the Yale Center for British Art on September 23, 2009, the underlying fact of Mrs. Delany’s papers, an emblem for her life: they were strong. Because they were handmade of strong fibers they were “infinitely better suited to such cutwork than the much weaker modern papers.”36 We cannot read the flimsiness of the papers we touch every day back into her collages, just as we cannot read our insubstantial, silky microfibers back into the elegant strength of the textiles of the eighteenth century. The fibers had a strength we do not usually imagine. And, of course, so did the woman who used them.

  Mrs. Delany took Georgina everywhere, including to Bulstrode and to court. After the encounters with King George and Queen Charlotte, Mrs. D. had been invited to visit them at Windsor. She described in fabulous detail the colors of the Queen’s private rooms, “all furnished with beautiful Indian paper,”37 as well as the gentle, informal, and warm conversation she had with the royal couple and the genuine enjoyment she took in meeting the whole passel of princes and princesses. The corm of a friendship had begun to increase between the elderly woman and the beleaguered royal couple. She was perfecting her role as a sympathetic aunt, energetic but wise, modest but witty, so utterly experienced in the world that one could relax with her, a mother figure aslant – not really a mother with a matriarchal judgment and claim, but an auntie with her own life who could also turn toward the couple with her whole attention and without a political interest, let alone an argued political bias. Combined with the devotion to botany all three shared, a thin but tensile tendril of attraction attached. By the time the King’s birthday came around in May 1780, Mrs. D. was outfitting Georgina in pink lutestring (glossy silk) and supervising the shaving of her hairline to get the effect of a high forehead. Mrs. D. asked Georgina’s mother’s permission to supply the child with a posture device that would keep her shoulders back, as suggested by the coat-maker.

  And all of this is in a letter describing her redecorating! “After this week I shall be monstrous busy, as I am under a necessity of whitewashing, new papering, and painting my drawing room; and I have delay’d in hopes of a more convenient time, but can do it no longer; and removing pictures, books, and China, &c., &c., will find me a good deal of busyness.”38 That was just after her own birthday: eighty year
s old. By July she was back at Bulstrode, aiming her scalpel for the insect bite in the leaf of her Rosa gallica, Damask Rose.

  There was nothing to do but take on an assistant, an apprentice, back in London the following November. “Miss Jennings, who I believe I have mentioned to you as a sensible, agreeable, and ingenious woman, a pupil of mine in the paper mosaic work (and the only one I have hopes of), came here last Thursday.”39 She barreled through the winter, Georgina returning to her mother and father, and by August 1781 was back at Bulstrode, cleverly, wittily, self-reflexively cutting the tendrils of the Everlasting Pea into scissor shapes. This was the year she dropped using the terms “herbal” and “hortus siccus” and began calling her work the Flora Delanica.40 She had her oeuvre, and she knew it. Her reputation had flowered. Hannah More, the bluestocking and friend, wrote about her in a poem called “Sensibility,” grouping her with luminaries like Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Jonathan Swift, and Dr. Johnson, as well as women we hear less about, like the writer Hester Chapone (wife of the son of Sally Chapone, Mrs. D.’s godchild):

  Delany shines, in worth serenely bright,

  Wisdom’s strong ray, and virtue’s milder light;

  And she who bless’d the friend, and grac’d the page

  Of Swift, still lends her lustre to our age:

  Long, long protract thy light, O star benign!

  Whose setting beams with added brightness shine! 41

  George Keate published a relentlessly metered nine-page poem called “A Petition from Mrs. Delany’s Citron-Tree, To Her Grace The Duchess Dowager of Portland” in 1781, in which the citron (probably Mrs. D.’s portrait of the Citrus medica) becomes audible, speaking out about the good fortune that befell it when Mrs. Delany portrayed it.

  O could my Sister Plants, and Flow’rs,

  That spring beneath your beauteous Bow’rs,

  Before the Good DELANY stand,

  And share the Magic of her Hand!42

  However it might not quite appeal today, published praise is published praise – and in couplets, too.

  An apprentice, laurels, royals – and dimming eyesight. What impaired her vision? It’s very hard to know; it may have been as simple as cataracts. It will take a medical historian with a detective’s bent to find out. The next year she was able to cut out fewer than thirty mosaicks. That was the number she had done in her single most productive month, five years before, at seventy-seven. Yet she contrived to scissor out the big flowers of the Portlandia grandiflora that August at Bulstrode. By September 1782, she confessed to Mary Port, “My eyes are much in the same state as they have been for some months past.”43 She hadn’t managed stairs well for quite some time – the King made special arrangements to see her on the ground floor at Windsor.44 Whatever it was, it would “serve me with some difficulty to attempt a flower now and then.”

  It was a doctor, the Greek Dioscorides (40–90 C.E), who described the Bladder Cherry growing in Rome.45 (Physalis means bladder.)46 Crowning her four-stages-of-life (plus one ghost) Winter Cherry is a dry leaf, not a real one but a cut leaf, sailing off like a cap waving farewell, or the recent Queen Mum giving one of her famous waves, as Ruth Hayden remembers.

  Physalis, detail (illustration credit 13.1)

  Do you have advice for living in one’s eighties? I asked Ruth once. “Not to look back too much,” she said resolutely. “Not to let life make you bitter.” Not to be a decrepit, bitter old thing but to dry beautifully, like the Winter Cherry. Better to write a poem, or tell a story. “Shall I tell you about the Queen Mum?” Ruth asked. Of course.

  “Well, Father preached at Sandringham, and the Queen Mother used to drop in. Once the Queen Mother called and gave half-an-hour notice for lunch. Once she came with Princess Margaret. She was fascinating. Very tiny. But the third time she came with five minutes’ notice! I was visiting, I was about thirty years old, and I was in bed with a temperature of 102. The rectory was a big Regency house, and my mother came running upstairs, and she opened the door to my room, looked around, then she tore downstairs looking for my father. The Queen Mother would be there in four minutes! Now, the bedrooms opened onto a gallery. And I could watch from the gallery, feverish as I was. I leapt out of bed and seized a very ancient eiderdown and wrapped it around myself, with my hair looking ghastly. There was a huge Edwardian mirror downstairs going all the way up to the ceiling. When the Queen Mother came and disappeared into the dining room, I practiced curtsying in front of it. I looked like the Caterpillar in the Tenniel drawing. After half an hour (it was a quick lunch), the Queen Mother came back out, looked up, and caught sight of me.

  “I curtsied like a caterpillar and the Queen Mother said, ‘You ought to be in bed! I do hope you’ll get better soon.’ She gave me a wave. Then she turned from the garden step and gave me a second wave.”47 There’s just a shadow of a waving hand in the topmost leaf of the Winter Cherry, where you can see the lines from the laid paper, the simple stationery paper that Mrs. Delany used to paint and cut out her leaf.

  Leaving.

  By 1783 Mrs. Delany had stopped the entire enterprise of the Flora Delanica. She simply couldn’t see well enough to complete her goal of one thousand.

  The set goal is almost never the body’s goal. As ceremonially as she had laid each of the 985 mosaicks, alphabetically, in one of the ten leather volumes and made a Table of Contents for each one, she put her Flora Delanica to rest, surrendering the spectacular level of energy she had sustained for a decade. She was eighty-two. Typically, she did not describe the letdown. By the time she’d reached the Portlandia, she’d known that she was near the end. But she also knew what she had accomplished, and in the front of the first volume she wrote a short poem to commemorate what amounted to her miracle. Then she entered a dedication, writing down why she’d done it, and for whom.

  PLANTS

  Copied after Nature in Paper Mosaick, begun in the year 1774.

  Hail to the happy hour! when fancy led

  My pensive mind this flow’ry path to tread;

  And gave me emulation to presume

  With timid art to trace fair Nature’s bloom:

  To view with awe the great Creative power

  That shines confess’d in the minutest flower;

  With wonder to pursue the glorious line,

  And gratefully adore the Hand Divine!

  The paper Mosaic work was begun in the 74th year of my age (which I at first only meant as an imitation of an hortus siccus) and as 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.

  Tho’ the effect of this work was more than I expected, I thought that a whim of my own fancy might fondly beguile my judgment to think better of it than it deserved; and I shou’d have dropp’d the attempt as vain, had not the Duchess Dowager of Portland look’d on it with favourable eyes. Her approbation was such a sanction to my undertaking, as made it appear of consequence and gave me courage to go on with confidence[.] To her I owe the spirit of pursuing it with diligence and pleasure. To her I owe more than I dare express, but my heart will ever feel with the utmost gratitude, and tenderest affection, the honour and delight I have enjoy’d in her most generous, steady, and delicate friendship, for above forty years.

  MARY DELANY.48

  Her poem is a realist’s manifesto, the stated desire to recreate the overwhelming awe that nature can produce. Her dedication and her reasons for making her singular art – and it is singular, since few other people have followed it – are the guiding principles of the artist as memorialist, the gift spurred on by praise.

  { TO MAKE THE CHERRY RED }

  Somewhere in the world around me, which included the life of a woman who woke to the smell of woodsmoke, who opened her door to a whiff of horse manure, and whose tea never came from a little bag you dipped into water boiled in a kettle with an electric cord, I
had misplaced my fear. Where did it go, the underleaf of panic that my husband would die and that his death would eject me into a grief-chasm? It hadn’t vanished in an obvious epiphany. It seemed a gradual thing, like one of Mrs. Delany’s colors merging into the next. No, it is one paper pieced next to another; if you really look, there is a line. There must have been a line, because the absence of panic has a distinct quality to it, like the bits that look seamlessly painted in the mosaicks. It feels like air. Something neutral and necessary and so ordinary you almost can’t think about it, except abstractly. A line was slipped past rather than boldly crossed, but I felt the difference the way a room feels different after the cat has slipped out. There must have been a moment when the animal left, but I never knew it till she was gone.

  The absence itself became a presence when I had dinner with an old friend who loves bullying ideas to their bottom-line conclusions. What, he growled, is the real reason that she was able to make those flowers? Some things take living long enough to do, I said. I was speaking from across the line, across the cut. It just took time, I went on to tell him, and it wasn’t purposive. It evolved, first from silhouettes, and then from handiwork and collecting shells and designing shell grottoes, and then designing her dresses, and then from drawing and painting and gardening, and from being supported in her enthusiasms by her sister and her husband, and lastly from not being able to paint, from a feeling of the world dimming, and from the energy of the natural world and the way she was supported by her friend.