I hovered over the earrings and scarves, the note cards and ties, all things I would have longed to buy years before in New York when I stalked the gift shop of the Morgan Library, though none of it really attracted me now. I wandered through displays, periodically leaning back toward the door to see him still on the phone. I passed the umbrellas, the datebooks. Then the books began. I skipped the books on ancient sculptures, ignored the medieval titles, and somehow persisted to the last table at the end of the shop. There it was! Sixteen years after the show at the Morgan Library, there lay the book that had accompanied it: Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers, by Ruth Hayden. This time I could afford it. I snatched it up just as Mike came looking for me.
In the cab he grabbed it out of my hand and turned, as he does, instantly to the fine print on the back of the title page. Since its publication in 1980, he observed, it had never been out of print. But what, he asked, did I buy it for? I had never breathed the name of Delany to him. I hadn’t known I needed to.
On the plane home the flowers astonished, amazed, and astounded me again. Seeing them was just like picking up a novel you read long ago, hoping that you’ll still be able to relate to it, and finding, now that you’re older, that it’s even better than when you first read it. I thought of a seventy-two-year-old woman having only the light from a nearby window or, worse, candlelight to work by as she invented a brand new art form. I’d passed over Ruth Hayden’s book when I hadn’t really needed it. Now it had popped up just when my unconscious required it, except my conscious mind hardly knew why it seemed so necessary. I was always carrying on a sub-rosa search for answers to questions I hadn’t even formulated yet. I was fifty-six years old. My father had been dead for nineteen years. My mother had been dead for eleven years. My sister had been dead for seven years. I read the book.
Cramped into my economy-class seat, I found a role model, one born at the start of a century I had previously ignored. (“The eighteenth century!” I remember exclaiming to my sophomore adviser. “Do I have to read Rasselas?”) But now, from Ruth Hayden’s book about a woman whose life spanned the century, I learned that most of Mrs. D.’s collages were in the museum I had just left. Well, I wouldn’t have thought of her as “Mrs. D.” then. I’d visit those works on my next trip to London. In the meantime I could read the book and find out some things. And so I did.
As I was reading, I had that familiar but blurry role-model-searching wandering feeling. As I soaked in the Papaver somniferum (it was on the cover), a mosaic of images bobbed up and down in my mental stream, carried by a current of years poring through my grandmother’s seed catalogs. I was entirely confused looking at the collages. Cut paper? I refused to believe that the poppy wasn’t painted. Were the paint-splash-like gestures in the middle actually pieces of paper? I could not process the fact that they were cut with a blade, not outlined with a brush. I leaned closer. Actually, I was encountering the flowers again in just the way Mrs. Delany meant people to meet them: by leaning over them, holding them in their hands, like a book.
Chapter Nine.
MAGNOLIA
Magnolia grandiflora, the Grand Magnolia, Bill Hill, August 26, 1776 (illustration credit 8.3)
Thin as a billowing white cotton nightgown, Mrs. Delany’s Grand Magnolia lies back in the balmy darkness of the summer night of its background. Perhaps her most blowsy bloom, plumped with the musk of maturity, it evokes the eighteenth-century gardener’s word for a fully opened Magnolia grandiflora, “blown.” Although it seems that “magnolia” would share a root with “magnificent,” in fact the genus name comes from the French botanist Pierre Magnol (1638–1715).1 Mrs. Delany composed the work with the tissue-like paper she brought with her to Bill Hill, the estate of her friend the Dowager Countess Gower.2 The realistic effect of rust on the colossal petals gives the mosaick what landscape historian Mark Laird calls its “soapy” imperfection. We can’t know the degree of intention that achieves this slightly rain-damaged effect, whether paste leached through the thin paper after she finished the work or whether she took advantage of some discoloration as she was making the collage, but the creamy rustiness conjures up a bosomy sense of maturity. If this magnolia were marriage, it would be Marriage grandiflora.
Coincidentally, two magnificent images of magnolias were published in the year the Delanys married, one by Mark Catesby (1679–1749) and the other by Georg Dionysius Ehret, Linnaeus’s illustrator.3 (Ehret was also the painting teacher of the daughters of the Duchess of Portland.) The images these men created (Catesby’s engraved after a drawing by Ehret) display a bit of the lust of eighteenth-century botany grandees who, once they heard about these flowers, were dying to import and grow them. Magnolias heroically survived transplantation, despite the fact that the English climate can’t replicate the balmy humidity of the American South.
Mark Catesby had been fascinated by plants since he was a child in Suffolk, East Anglia, playing in the garden created by his uncle Nicholas Jekyll on the grounds of his house, Castle Hedingham. When Catesby’s sister married a colonial physician who lived in Williamsburg, Virginia, Catesby escorted her to her new home. While he was there he had a look around – and was astounded by the sumptuous flora.4 He stayed for five years. With William Byrd II he explored the Virginia tidewater, collecting live specimens, then traveling to Jamaica to do the same. By the time he returned to England in 1719 he had an extensive collection and a deep familiarity with the habitat which he displayed in his lush drawings and watercolors. When British horticulturalists saw the specimens and artwork, Catesby was drawn into the world of botanical expeditions, and in 1722, armed with a twenty-pound-per-annum grant from the Royal Governor of South Carolina, and with other backing, he embarked on a natural history voyage both to the Carolinas and to the Bahamas to draw, study, and collect specimens of flora and fauna, especially birds and snakes.5
Thus Catesby began the project of his life, preparing for the etchings of his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, published in its first volume in 1731 using folio-sized color plates, often with animals in the background with plants. The project was financed by a fellow member of the Royal Society, the Quaker Peter Collinson, friend of horticulturist John Bartram, and subscriptions were sold, including one to the Duchess of Portland. The second volume of Catesby’s remarkable books of etchings was published in 1743, completing his life’s work in the year of Mary and Patrick Delany’s nuptials. This volume included his print labeled “The Laurel Tree of Carolina (Magnolia altissima).”6 In it he positions the bloom on black. Since the Duchess owned these volumes, Mrs. D. almost certainly pored through them; because Catesby’s work came into the collection of King George III and Queen Charlotte, there’s every chance that Mrs. Delany may have seen his Magnolia a number of times.
Georg Ehret’s Magnolia, also on black, influenced both Catesby and, very likely, Mrs. Delany.7 Ehret used black on paintings such as his “Echinopsus [sic ] major” and his “Astrantia and Resida.” Since her friend the Duchess owned the “Echinopsus,” Mrs. Delany was probably quite familiar with these as well.8
Her love affair with flowers on black began long before she ever would have had contact with Ehret’s or Catesby’s work, back with the black gown embroidered with flowers she designed and wore in 1739. Yet her likely contact with these botanical artists affirmed and strengthened her idea. But the way she fashioned her magnolia flaunted an attitude difference. Catesby’s and Ehret’s magnolias sit at the tops of their works looking down. Mrs. D’s magnolia lolls at the bottom of the page. It almost looks up from the bed linen–like disarray of its petals. The two men style the magnolia at the top of the missionary position, but hers waits below for a partner to lower onto it.
Her Magnolia grandiflora plays with creamy whiteness, but as soon as Mary entered Patrick’s house at Delville, she went for red. Seeing Delville again, twelve years after she’d first visited and competed with Kitty Kelly for the affections of both Jonathan Swift and Ann Donnellan, she
made her claim in scarlet. Her bedchamber she “hung with crimson damask,” and she applied the same to the bed chairs and bed curtains. Then she splashed this rich ruby into the Delville drawing room, “the curtains and chairs crimson mohair.”9 The minute she described their bedroom, she slipped into the pronoun “we” – of being married in the flesh as well as joined in companionship. At the thick, phallic root of the stamen in the very center of her Magnolia grandiflora mosaick is a powerful splash of red.
The Delany relatives Lady Llanover and Ruth Hayden both feel that the couple had a sensible marriage, a mid-life union of mutual interest. But there was also a fleshy compact with one another that included perhaps not very sexy but entirely intimate acts, such as upchucking on the Irish Sea. The depth of their familiarity likely included an element of deep touch. Mary lived by her hands. Those hands that the Dean now encouraged to draw and paint were the sensuous extension of their new life and how they apprehended the world. The letters that Lady Llanover collected never give a whiff of their married sexuality. But to me it seems impossible that the woman who ate with the gusto, who wrote with the vigor, who danced with the élan, who walked with the heartiness, who consoled a friend with the vitality, who drew with the energy, who gardened with the spirit, who chattered with the vim that Mary displayed moment to moment in all her eighty-eight years did not have a little sexy affection in her forties for the man who called her his bliss. She worried over him, she doted on him, and they slept in the same bed.
Though she describes Delville as pleasingly small, the entrance hall she measured was twenty-six feet by twenty-two feet, with twelve-and-a-half-foot ceilings “finished in compartments, with a Doric entablature in stucco round the room.”10 Compared to Longleat or Bulstrode, it wasn’t a palace, but the circular road around the house had room “for a coach-and-six [horses] to drive round commodiously.” She had a room of her own there, with a view, too. “On the right hand [of a little hall] is a small parlour, where we breakfast and sup, out of it our present bedchamber and a large light closet within it; it is but a small apartment, but very pretty, and lies pleasantly to the gardens.”
The Delville grounds, so charming and eccentric, displayed Patrick Delany’s attraction to the Picturesque gardens of Alexander Pope. Delany’s plantings responded to the natural contours of his land. The grounds sported a bowling green, a high bank, a circular terrace, flower walks, and fruit trees. Delville came with a “kitchen garden” and “two fruit-gardens.”11 The land sloped down to “fields, or rather paddocks, where our deer and our cows are kept.… These fields are planted in a wild way.” The new mistress of Delville immediately made plans for an orangery and a grotto, and was so captivated that she said she could hardly describe the “several prettinesses”: the “little wild walks” and “private seats,” including a “beggar’s hut,” a particular seat in a rock where tame robins came to her husband’s hand. The gardens were one of the reasons for the great success of this marriage, the passionate, lifelong gardener Patrick allowing the imaginative designer Mary to merge with his enthusiasm. Their joy in their gardens reminds us that the root of enthusiasm is “theus” – the divine.
There is no question that twenty-five years of gardening at Delville led to the flower mosaicks. But the reason to emphasize it is that Mary Delany did not garden alone, but with her husband. It was his first, after all. She exerted her hand and her imagination, but it was a mutual endeavor. They spent many hours together in it, and Patrick Delany taught Mary his trick of feeding robins from his hand. Here was the place where Patrick tamed the wild, a different prospect from preserving the wild, our task today. This was a man so mild, so patient, so willing to quiet himself that birds came to his hand. In contrast to the sharp formality of the training that Mary received as a child, an education that tamed the wild in her, his recognition of the way avian nature can meet human nature when he coaxed a bird to feed from his palm became sharply emboldening – and reassuring. Such a quick, small gesture is like a column. It can support a temple of art, especially one made in grief, when this kind of gesture is absent.
Throughout the decades of her marriage, Mary never stopped reveling in their mini-pleasure-ground at Delville. On the summer solstice of 1750, seven years into their married life, she wrote to her sister, “My garden is at present in the high glow of beauty, my cherries ripening, roses, jessamine, and pinks in full bloom, and the hay partly spread and partly in cocks, complete the rural scene.”12 The couple didn’t just walk in the garden or supervise the planting of the garden or cut and arrange the blooms, they ate there, too.
We have discovered a new breakfasting place under the shade of nut-trees, impenetrable to the sun’s rays, in the midst of a grove of elms, where we shall breakfast this morning; I have ordered cherries, strawberries, and nosegays to be laid on our breakfast-table, and have appointed a harper to be here to play to us during our repast, who is to be hid among the trees. Mrs. Hamilton is to breakfast with us, and is to be cunningly led to this place and surprised.
It was a complicated pleasure, since gardens require staying home, and the Delanys had to leave at the peak of the summer – when the Dean’s commitments as a cleric had to be met – packing a carriage with all their belongings and several of their servants and bumping along the roads between Dublin and Downpatrick (the county town of County Down), unloading, making another house habitable. After reaching these lodgings (over time they used several, including Mount Holly and Mount Panther), they had to go to work, he visiting his congregation and she entertaining them. By early July of that same year she wrote to Anne, “I never enjoyed Delville so much as I have done this year, there having hardly been a day that I could not live in the garden from morning till night.… Now I have told you how much enjoyment I have had of Delville, I must tell you we are on the brink of leaving it.”13
The Dean had promised Mary that they would visit England every third year, and since this journey took place in the summer as well, they were forced to enjoy the garden through a sliphole of time. Three years into her marriage, as they were about to make this first return trip to England, her grounds seemed sweet as music. By now she referred to the Dean by her shorthand, as D.D.:
Our garden is now a wilderness of sweets. The violets, sweet briar, and primroses perfume the air, and the thrushes are full of melody and make our concert complete.… Two robins and one chaffinch fed off of D.D.’s hand as we walked together this morning. I have been planting sweets in my “Pearly Bower” – honeysuckles, sweet briar, roses and jessamine to climb up the trees that compose it, and for the carpet, violets, primroses and cowlips.14
But just as she immerses herself in this outdoor room complete with a floral carpet, she knows she won’t actually “smell their fragrances, nor see their bloom, but I shall see the dear person to whom the bower is dedicated, I hope, and I think I shall not repine at the exchange.” She had dedicated this bower to Anne.
The following year, in May 1747, they settled into Delville again.
We had the pleasure of finding house and gardens in perfect beauty; and Mr. Greene has added three beautiful young deer to my stock with a milk white face; my swan is well; Tiger knew me, and I have a very fine thriving colt and calf.… I have breakfasted and drank tea in an afternoon in my garden twice; Pearly Bower in high beauty, and I have not failed paying my daily homage to it. The robins have not yet welcomed us, but one chaffinch has, and hops after us wherever we go.15
The garden was catnip to them; it was so irresistible they almost rolled around in it. They loved it; they drank it in. But they stayed only briefly, for they headed up to Downpatrick again. The next year it was the same. She missed the heart of the summer at Delville because of commitments in Downpatrick and finally returned in August 1748. “My orange-trees come on finely; there is but one that has failed, and four of them bore prodigiously. All my plants and flowers have done very well, that is, all that came up before I went into the country, except the tuberoses, and they promise but
indifferently.”16 Buried in her record of the “wilderness of flowers” she found on her return is a seed of her later mosaicks. Here is the way of looking that would portray each flower as an individual, stepping out of its black background, outlined and unique.
My flower-garden, which is now just under my eye, is a wilderness of flowers, the beds are overpowered with them, and though the enamelled look they have is rich and pretty, I believe it will be advisable to have the different sorts of flowers appear rather more distinct.
“Rather more distinct.” When a painter outlines a figure in black, the figure, separated from its environment, becomes more distinct. Her phrase “enamelled look” and the urge to separate the “different sorts of flowers” point to an urge to make the garden appear more like fabric. It is as if her court dress unfolded itself from whatever trunk it was packed in, got up, and wafted across the landscape.
The Delanys’ every-third-year trip from Delville to England, then back to Dublin and up north to Downpatrick, continued its triangular course. In June of 1754, seasick yet again, Mary and Patrick returned from another visit to Anne at her house, Wellesbourne, to her friend the Duchess of Portland at Bulstrode, and to myriad friends in London. They arrived after thirteen hours on the ship from England, which she thought was “a surprisingly quick passage, but a very rough. All on board excessively sick.… D.D. pure well, and now my giddy head will allow me to say no more.…”17
She toured her garden, quickly employed people to take care of it, then packed and hurried again to the north.
Our gardens are in high order and beauty: I have just agreed with a skilful gardener to take the care of all my fruits and flowers, without having anything to do with any other part of the garden, so I hope Flora and Pomona will both flourish. I have got a cook, housemaid, coachman and postilion to drive with four horses, and we talk of setting out next Tuesday se’night, but I believe our coach will hardly be ready to go so soon, but D.D. is impatient, though in the midst of his haymaking, to be on the spot where he thinks his duty most calls him.18
The Paper Garden Page 17