The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  Chapter Five.

  NODDING THISTLE

  Carduus nutans, Musk or Nodding Thistle, Bulstrode, November 26, 1776 (illustration credit 4.4)

  The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, also known by the Latin “Carolus” and later as Carl von Linné, was Mrs. Delany’s near-contemporary, born seven years after her in 1707 and dying ten years before her in 1778. Before he got the risqué idea of classifying plants according to their sexual organs, various systems for naming had been tried, but none of them was as marvelously effective as concentrating on a flower’s reproductive organs rather than its smell, color, blooming time, or petal patterns. Linnaeus shocked plant lovers by revealing the loose, polygamous habits of flowers, then reassured them by reducing multiple flower names to a simple system of two words: the first one for the type of plant, or genus; the second for the specific plant itself, or species. In much the same way that lexicographer Samuel Johnson described words, Linnaeus would write a description of one plant, then keep refining it by comparing it to a similar plant, and another, and another, with each comparison painstakingly subtracting characteristics that were not shared. In this way he would accumulate a general portrait, the genus. Carduus (Latin for thistle) is the generic name for the Nodding Thistle and nutans is the species (nutans means nodding, also suggesting “to waver or give way”).1

  The Nodding Thistle is not structured like the adorable single-petaled Omphalodes. It falls into a group of much more pedestrian flowers: a cousin of the dandelion or the burdock. “No one is so ignorant of plants as not to know the Dandelion,” J. L. Comstock, M.D., wrote in the second edition of The Young Botanist: Being a Treatise on the Science, Prepared for the Use of Persons Just Commencing the Study of Plants, an edifying textbook published in America forty years after Mrs. Delany flourished her tweezers, scissors, bodkin, and scalpel, zigging and zagging around her Carduus nutans. It’s a marvel of a handbook for old-style Linnaean classification, and Dr. Comstock treats all his readers like Boy Scouts qualifying for a botany badge.

  “Syngenesia,” he states with the simple, comforting syntax of a junior high science teacher, “is from the Greek, syn, together, and genesis, origin, and signifies that the anthers grow together in a single set, or tube.”2 Polyandria means many stamens. “Aequalis,” the good doctor states, “signifies equal, in reference to the presence of both stamens and pistils in the plants of this order.” This means that each floret has both stamens and pistils. (If you have trouble remembering which are the male and which the female reproductive parts of a plant, one mnemonic is to recall that stamen has the word “men” in it.) This group of plants features many small florets that cluster “upon a common receptacle, forming heads,” just like dandelions.

  The nodding head of Carduus nutans is formed by the scaly calyx, which is “armed with prickles” at the base of its cluster of florets.3 Dr. Comstock gives his description a military air. The idea of being armed suits the defensive posture of the young Mary Pendarves, and it suits as well the date on which Mrs. Delany cut her portrait of the flower. In the collage of the Musk or Nodding Thistle that she created at Bulstrode in November 1776, the spiky purple thistle head bows compliantly above a whirlwind of prickers. Although the head nods in shy assent, its determined spikes poke from turbulently bristling leaves that a wise person would never handle without gloves. Alexander Pendarves, like a burr, always irritated his young wife – she, the thorny object of his love.

  A year after her exile to Roscrow, Mary’s uncle Lord Lansdowne wrote to commemorate her first anniversary – which his niece spent alone. He and Pendarves, he told her, “are now together” on political business in the House of Lords “to drink your health with an Huzza, and to Roskrow Top-a-Toe.”4 He sent her a number of letters that year, some apologizing for his silence, and each of these guilty communiqués gave off a whiff of rationalization for having horse-traded her to his buddy.

  “I soon found there were degrees of misery,” Mary wrote, because Pendarves fell into fits of jealousy whenever a young man came near her. “I would rather have had a lion walk into the house, than any one whose person could alarm”5 her husband. The pitch of emotion between the suspicious man and the defensive wife drove them both to weep. Pendarves burst into tears as he warned Mary against his nephew-in-law (the one who had refused to take Pendarves’s name in exchange for his estate) while she dissolved into tears in response, declaring, “I am miserable, indeed, if you can be jealous of this ugly man; for what am I for the future to expect?”6 We’ll never know if Pendarves was impotent, but it is certain from Mrs. D.’s reports that he envied the younger men who crossed his path, men more assured of, to put it botanically, their stamen power. Wherever she turned, she was caught in Pendarves’s sulky demands for loyalty. This never let up, and it put her into the low-grade panic of a person who is ever watchful that these imagined rivals might provoke him. Did she desire any of these contenders? Only one, it seems, and on that she did not act. She merely called the man “dangerous” and went on her way.7 Whatever she was seeking for herself, it was not the diversion of illicit romance.

  In the first two years at Roscrow, dressed in the riding habit her uncle sent to her (she was married off with plenty of clothes and pocket money), Mary Pendarves escaped her marriage by horseback, riding on the beach, windblown as those thistle leaves seem to be in her mosaick sixty-eight years later. On the beaches near the castle she searched for shells. If there is any inkling that she turned to making art for solace at this time, it’s her shell collecting, but she mentions nothing about the shells except that she looked for them. In her fifties she would design a shell-encrusted grotto at Bulstrode, but at eighteen what she craved was physical escape. “My greatest pleasure was riding.”8 She galloped down the beaches in the sea air, the cantering four-legged beauty between her legs a vigorous inversion of the ineffective beast of a man at home.

  Like the nettles in the thistle, the marriage was complicated. Pendarves had taken her off to his dank castle, but he loved her. She would not return the love, and remained an unwilling prisoner. During his frequent attacks of gout, he stayed in, and Mary stayed with him. “I always worked [sewed] and read in his chamber.… When he had the gout, he could never bear (even in the midst of winter) the least fire in his room, and I have read three hours together to him, trembling with cold all the time.”9 A toughness in her made her behave correctly and even to a degree obligingly toward him as she read to him in his fireless room where no shawl could keep her warm enough. Two years went by in the castle, with Pendarves, under her attentions, remaining sober.

  Mary did not seem to have her own closet, or studio, at Roscrow, yet she did sometimes retreat into herself, to look out her window. She sewed, she rode, she looked for shells, she supervised the redecorating of the huge house that had not been lived in for thirty years, and, with increasing reluctance, because of Pendarves’s envy, she socialized. She did not get pregnant.

  During the third year of her marriage, when she was twenty, Mary’s mother, father, and sister came to stay with her while Pendarves’s business took him to London – and kept him there. During the year that he was away, he wrote as often as he could. He had “so true an affection” for her that, in retrospect, she saw herself as an ingrate, though she qualified her assessment of her guilt, wondering if that affection “can be strictly called so.” She stated that she never showed Pendarves false fondness, “which my honest heart would not let me do,” but then admitted, “I must do him the justice to say he was very obliging in his behaviour to me.”10 Mrs. Delany’s portrait of the Nodding Thistle creates a tall, straight spine, with a masculine upward thrust; but it also swirls around, like skirts whipping. The main character, if that’s what we can call the flower, is the obedient, correct, but spiky thistle-head, apparently unwilling, though it seems to be nodding “yes.” Her perfect propriety, never wanting to give Pendarves anything to blame, as well as his attempts to be kind, exacerbated by the acceleration of his alcoholism (a
nd, soon, the deceleration of his finances), proved a constant irritant to both of them: pricked, bit, stung, irritated, rubbed raw.

  The year he was gone was a passionate relief. But after the sabbatical, which she spent entertaining her family and neighbors, she followed Pendarves to London. Her husband was thrilled to greet her when she came to “a very unpleasant part of the town (Rose Street, Hog Lane, Soho).”11 In the house in the downscale neighborhood waited another irritating surprise: Pendarves’s ill-humored sister. She would be living with them, despite his promise to Mary that he would not invite her. Her sister-in-law (who had been duped into an ill-fated marriage when she was sixty-one – apparently this late-life marrying ran in the family) spied on her and, according to her great-great-niece Lady Llanover, reported her every move to Pendarves, who was rarely home except when he was sick with gout (though that was sometimes six weeks at a time).

  Then he began losing money. “I thought myself at least secure of an easy fortune,” Mary mused, but nothing was going to balance the marital scale. Pendarves’s “excuse” was “bad tenants and a cheating steward.” The more he lost, the more he drank. The more he drank, the later he stayed out. Soon he “never came home sober.” He was “frequently … led between two servants to bed at six and seven o’clock in the morning.”12 She had become the wife of a drunk.

  Mary Pendarves, who had previously loved London life, now begged her husband to return to Roscrow, where at least he had been sober and solvent. He promised her they would leave London, and he broke his promise every month. It was she who left, not for Roscrow but for Buckland, to be together with her family, where she re-encountered her sister’s “lively genius.”13 In her “three months of felicity” there at the end of 1723, she fell into the household routine, and perhaps some handiwork got done. Her life at the dank Roscrow castle made “the dear Farm” look particularly sunny and utterly innocent. In her memoir there is no pricking thought of her father and mother allowing her uncle to sell her into her marriage. Why should there be? This sort of arrangement was not unusual; two decades later, in 1745, William Hogarth (1697–1764) would parody such marriage deals as he finished his series of paintings Marriage à la Mode.

  Mrs. Delany later knew Hogarth and discussed painting with him; he gave her craft tips, and she admired him. In the first work of the Marriage à la Mode series, he paints in dashing detail the figures of an impoverished earl making a contract with a rich alderman to marry off the earl’s penniless viscount son to the daughter of the wealthy, untitled merchant. By the second painting the newly married couple have embarked on their separate (though similar) courses: both are hungover, he just home from carousing on the town, she from partying with friends at home. This was the world Hogarth flayed open as he satirized it.

  But Mary Granville Pendarves had a more tender, more painfully conscious understanding of the damage that had been done to her. She clung to her belief that her parents were not culpable; her marriage was the doing of her uncle, whom she forgave. In these lyrical three months, she felt “caressed and indulged by the most amiable parents in the world.”14 Then her father fell ill in a “distemper,” as her uncle John Stanley described it in a letter. Because of the “violence of the attack,”15 he stated, at least one of her brothers, and perhaps both (the eldest, Bernard, and the worrisome, younger, scampish Bevil) were summoned so that the family could be together as the Colonel died, forever changing their family constellation. Their reunion “was closed by a most severe affliction,” she wrote, “the death of my dear father! That misfortune dispersed us all.”16

  All she says about his death is in that exclamation mark. Mary’s father and his sister, her Aunt Stanley, had designed the pattern of her life for her, giving her time to practice all the arts for which she showed so much talent: music, dancing, embroidery, and paper works. Her father had given her a pattern by which to live, and when he’d sent her to his sister, she’d embellished this template, and afterwards, when he’d dispatched her to his brother, and after that, when his brother had traded her to her husband, the pattern had been reinforced – and tattered.

  When her father died, her mother and sister moved nearby to Gloucester. Her younger brother Bevil, after trying his hand at theatre, then attempted to make his fortune in Jamaica, where he would die in his thirties.

  Her older brother Bernard returned to London with Mary and Pendarves, who blessedly quarreled with his spying sister. Pendarves’s sister moved out, a thorn removed. But Mary was “so melancholy on the loss of my father”17 that Pendarves (who, she says, “really loved me, was much concerned”) tried to assuage her by leaving the house in Hog Lane and taking lodgings for them at Windsor, where the court had established itself.

  A careful look at the Nodding Thistle shows not only prickers on the stems but also terrible points on the leaves, each potentially leaving a little gash in the skin of someone who dares to disturb it. (Nobody ventures out gathering thistles to make a bouquet, no matter how charming a purple that bit of a nodding flower may be.) Carduus nutans is a wildflower, not a typical garden flower, and some regard it as an invasive weed, but Mrs. D. made no such judgment. Just the opposite: she was very interested in native plants. Each specimen that came under her observation was merely itself, something to be examined minutely, engaged with, focused on, and cut out according to a suggestive emotional state.

  Carduus nutans, detail (illustration credit 5.1)

  Thistles adapt to almost any conditions. And, of course, so had she. Carl Linnaeus wondered about how plants adapt, especially in the context of his own psychological life. In 1749, on a research trip after a traumatic year which included the death of his father, the genius botanist journeyed out from his Swedish university town of Uppsala, stopping in Lund, where he had begun his education as a young man. There he went searching for wildflowers and found that even the flora on the town walls had changed. When Linnaeus recorded what was now growing there, he discovered Carduus nutans, which he had not seen there before, everywhere.18 Those adaptable prickers seemed to be a good defense for change – or a way for a person to weather it.

  The young wife of an old man was fair game in the eighteenth century, an easy focus for other men who were looking for a dalliance, and the thought of this inflamed Pendarves. One day, after they had settled at Windsor, Mary went out for a walk. In the Great Park at Windsor she met the musical-clockmaker Pinchbeck, whom she knew and admired as a craftsman and who wanted an introduction to a new patron, Lady Walsingham. Mary was delighted to provide it for him, and she met Lady Walsingham for tea. Lady Walsingham suggested that she walk with Mary in a little enclosed park in the cool of the evening, and Mary agreed. But when she went to the park, Lady Walsingham was nowhere to be seen, and a servant locked her in the park with a man she identifies with the pseudonym of “Germanico,” who apparently expected to seduce her right then and there. (Lady Llanover identifies him as “M. Fabrici, the Hanoverian Minister.”)19

  Pendarves could see the park from his window (he seems to have had a knack for the perfectly positioned window to watch her every move), and, had he been looking, as Mary feared, he would have seen Germanico “upon his knees, holding my petticoat!”20 However, since the court of George I was occupying Windsor at this time, Mary told this Germanico that if he did not go to find treacherous Lady Walsingham, she would run up to the window of Windsor Castle where she knew “the King sat after dinner” and scream the story to the monarch. Germanico had “expected a dove,” Mary boasted, “instead of a tiger.” Defeated, Germanico called for the gate to be unlocked, the tigress went home, and Pendarves never saw them together.

  This wasn’t an isolated experience. Her frivolous and manipulative Aunt Lansdowne locked her in a room with the Earl of Clare, a French roué, where, like a real-life but more successful Clarissa, Mary resisted. After a number of hours her aunt and the Earl let her go, but not before he stole her ring, which she had taken off when she washed her hands after supper. She was afraid that thi
s ring would show up and compromise her, but the Earl went to France, and Mary the Tigress triumphed again. Later in her life Mrs. D. would correspond with Samuel Richardson, the author of the epistolary novel Clarissa, drawn to the shadow of herself in the underpinnings of Richardson’s novel, much as she saw the seed of her situation in Hogarth’s satirical paintings.

  Imagine a world where someone can lock you in a room and expect you to lift your voluminous skirts for a so-called lover you’ve never met before, and then to sit down and have supper with the stays of your bodice in place. There was something in Mrs. D. that would not give herself up so easily. She was as prickly with the potential lovers and the risqué aunt as she was with her husband. And as fiercely correct. She lived in an age in which women hid their lights, but to hide a light means you know you have one, and it means you understand that you have to protect it from threat and nurture it for growth. The legend that the Scots survived barefoot Scandinavian invaders because one of the marauders stepped on a thistle and howled, alerting the Scots to defend themselves, is part of the aura of the thistle. At this point in her life Mary protected herself ferociously.

  Even a thistle, even a tigress, needs a friend. Her sister was far away with their mother in Gloucestershire. Her London life was fraught with the social treachery that prevents genuine friendship. Bereft of the mirroring that a friend can provide, she had to turn to her internal life. But her very dreams depict the necessity for friendship. It was rare that she recorded one, but in May of 1724 she described to her sister Anne a dream in which she spent the night confiding in her. “And though my eyes are shut, I see my dearest sister in my dreams. I talked with you all last night and was mortified when the vision fled.”21 Then suddenly she included some surprise information: “The cut paper I will get framed and mended, and send them.”22 This stray reference to cut paper gives a pinprick glimpse into a creative life that still must have been going on beneath the drama of her marriage and the loss of her father.