The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  This statement may not have been made exactly about what she was fashioning on paper, but it was made in a kind of awareness of her age and venerability. An old lady was intact, with her brains, with her sense, with her imagination. She was beginning to be abrupt with people in order to do her work, asking their forgiveness for “my being in haste to finish a flower for my hortus siccus.”4 This abruptness – not demonstrated before as she gracefully, if sometimes resentfully, accommodated the hundreds of visitors in her life – shows the incivility of the artist at work (what others call selfishness). She was compelled – especially since she worked from live specimens, and living plants change every day, some of them minute to minute.

  As she inspected her specimens – plants in bloom first from the Duchess’s greenhouses and gardens but soon from a variety of sources, from nurseries to neighbors – she was struck again with a spiritual connection between the artist as creator and the Creator of nature:

  I hope it is not only the beauty and variety [of the natural world] that delights me; as it is impossible to consider their wonderfull construction of form and colour, from the largest to the most minute, without admiration and adoration of the great Author of nature.5

  In the previous years, she looked to nature for distraction, but now the natural world talked back. “We are now consoling ourselves, with books, work, butterflies, fungus’s, and lichens: they entertain us and tell us pretty moral tales.”6 The mosaicks were telling their tales, too, like diary entries. In 1775 she amped up the number, completing, according to scholar Lisa Ford, around fifty-five.7 In June of that year, a young Chinese man traveling in England was introduced at Bulstrode. “Last Friday we had an extraordinary visitor here; Mr. Whang at Tong; thus he writes his name: – You know the Chinese write perpendicularly.”8 Mrs. D. promptly learned from him to write Chinese characters, then cut a mosaick of a plant called Old Tyger’s Ear, labeling it in ideograms. Emily Dickinson’s musing about the “career of flowers” that “differs from ours only in inaudibleness” vivifies – and reverses – as Mrs. D. makes each flower talk. “I feel more reverence as I grow for these mute creatures whose suspense or transport may surpass my own,” Dickinson wrote to her Norcross cousins almost a hundred years later,9 and the whole idea of the “language of flowers,” corny in hands other than Dickinson’s – and Mrs. Delany’s – begins to form syllables of meaning in blossom after bloom, of hortomorphized memory combined with the sheer joy of observing the world as it is.

  By the spring of 1776, when a revolution was about to take place on the other side of the world, Mrs. Delany was at the inner circle of Bulstrode’s court, snug as a Winter Cherry in its orange jacket. Not oblivious to the American problem but without interest in politics, she warmly reflected: “Happiness may seemingly retire sometimes under the disguise of losses, trials, or worldly disappointments, which in the train of life may happen, and indeed in some degree must, but you are sure of finding her again with added luster.”10 It was the hortus siccus that was adding luster. “The spring flowers now supply me with work, for I have already done since the beginning of March twenty plants,” she wrote at the end of April.11 Among them was the Hound’s Tongue, with its blue flowers that were both cleaving and leaving. By the end of 1776 she had added 135 pages,12 including the billowing white nightgown of the Magnolia grandiflora, which she cut out in August at Bill Hill, the Opium Poppy in its green cape and red gown, fashioned in October back at Bulstrode, and the Nodding Thistle with its prickly bow of the head in November, snipped out at Bulstrode, too.

  Though Mrs. D. was so observant of all the details of life, right down to ladies’ teasing their hair so high that they couldn’t fit into their carriages – “I hear of nothing but balls and high heads – so enormous that nobody can sit upright in their coaches”13 – her letters are dry of her trials and errors, except for one succulent reference to technique from June 1776: “I have been busy at my usual presumption of copying beautifull nature; I have bungled out a horse chesnut blossom that wou’d make a fine figure in a lady’s cap, or as a sign!”14 “Bungled,” easy to read as ordinary false modesty, also implies mistakes, and that Horse Chestnut mosaick is so complicated and so big that it must have invited plenty of errors. This little nugget of explanation also shows that she intended her collages to be portraiture. It’s an easy leap from a woman’s hat to a figure itself. In another letter from the same day she speaks of her flowers as ladies, and explains the reason that she is writing on this day rather than the day after. “I began my letter to-day, as I have made an appointment for to-morrow with a very fair lady called ‘Lychnidea.’ If I neglect her, she will shut herself up, and I shall see her no more.”15 Her assignation was with a variety of Phlox in perfect bloom, ready for her portrait to be taken. Later in the same letter, Mrs. Delany debriefed: “Monday. The fair lady was true to her appointment, and we parted friends.” There it is, three lines out of more than a hundred thousand lines that she wrote: a flower is a lady, a lady in a portrait, just like the religious portraits she had copied, or those Sir Joshua Reynolds was painting of young ladies of marriageable age. Through the portraits, Mrs. D. regained her flexibility – and her hope. The rigidity we fear in age relaxed into balance. “I never quit resting on hope, which often opens a pleasant view. Rigid Wisdom says, ‘Don’t hope, and then you will not be disappointed;’ but your philosophers are rare talkers, and sad comforters,” she wrote in this June of 1776 as some Loyalists in North America were selling off houses and packing carriages to drive to Canada or sail to the Caribbean.

  On a Monday night in late August 1776, between six and seven o’clock, Mrs. Delany was hiding out at Bulstrode in “the dressing room belonging to the blue damask apartment,” having begged the Duchess to let her go to London for the day.16 Margaret had refused: “she was inexorable.”17 Instead, the Duchess ordered her servants to see that “the drawing-room [was] divested of every comfortable circumstance.” At exactly the time Mrs. D. had secreted herself away came “a chaise with a pair of horses and grooms attending,” and in the carriage were “their Serene Majesties” King George III and Queen Charlotte, attended by the Duchess’s daughter. They were coming on this long summer night for respite from their political troubles, to visit the animals and plants and vases and shells at Bulstrode as well as the two ladies, hardly concerned with political matters, who puttered around the estate. The Duchess went out to greet them on the steps, but Mary Delany, who hadn’t consorted with royalty for decades, hoped to “be overlooked,” or at least to see “their royalties thro’ the window, or thro’ the keyhole!” She was old, she was out of practice, she was, she joked, fit only to be shelved among the antiques.

  But the Duchess’s daughter, Lady Weymouth, knew where to hunt for her mother’s friend. (Lady Weymouth had married the son of Mrs. Delany’s cousin Thomas, whose marriage to Lord Carteret’s daughter Mrs. D. had helped to engineer years earlier. Now she was mistress of Longleat, the house where Mary had been given up in marriage to Alexander Pendarves, and also where she hollow-cut the silhouettes of the Weymouth children.) Lady Weymouth peered into the blue damask room. There she saw a gray-haired antique in a black dress, not one embroidered with bright flowers like the one she had once ordered made, but an old woman’s somber gown. She told that old woman that she “was sent by the Queen to desire” that Mrs. D. “would bring the hortus-siccus.” And she obeyed. This was the first time that the horticulture-loving King and Queen had seen the mosaicks, and they marveled at them just as we do. “I was charm’d and I was pleased,” Mrs. Delany wrote, “and I even wish’d they had staid half an hour longer.” Four years earlier, when the Duchess showed such instant appreciation of her work, she had leapt to do more. Now, when the Queen and King so deeply approved, she leapt again. After this evening, she doubled production of the mosaicks.

  Approval played a major role in the production of her art. The idea of the solitary artist is undercut at every turn by Mrs. D. The lonely artist who struggles on unap
preciated is opposite to what she did and felt and how her class, sex, and era conceived of makers and limners. Her increased pace of work demonstrates the role that approval plays in productivity.

  In 1776 William Gilpin visited Bulstrode to see the antiquities and discovered instead Mrs. Delany, “who enjoys her faculties in such vigour,” and the hortus siccus. “The work of hers, which I allude to, is an herbal, in which she has executed a great number of plants.… And what is the most extraordinary, her only materials are bits of paper of different colours.… [T]he work, I have no doubt, into whatever hands it may hereafter fall, will long be considered as a great curiosity,” he wrote in his Observations Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1776, on Several Parts of Great Britain.18

  As news got around about her paper flowers, Mrs. Delany continued to travel to create them. She climbed into carriages with her tools and accoutrements and bounced her eighth-decade kidneys and bladder along toward the houses of her friends. She traveled to Luton Hoo to Lord and Lady Bute, she traveled to visit her nieces and nephews, and later on she visited her friend the Countess at Bill Hill. At each place she selected plants in bloom, set up, and began to cut, carve, scissor, and position, reposition, think again, pose, re-pose her assemblage of botanical portraits. Did she take all her papers with her? Probably not all. Were there wallpapers and resources at each of the houses she visited? Highly likely. Pigment, kept dry, is eminently packable. And she must have packed her scissors, scalpel, bodkin, and tweezers – one would want to have one’s own tools. These must have been tucked in along with her clothes and, in a separate case, the few belongings of her personal maid. But it was at Bulstrode, the Hive, where she was able to go into hortus siccus overdrive. Bulstrode, that destination where all visited.

  By five years into the process, she had a pattern for accomplishing the mosaicks. She was very likely doing them in stages, coloring paper, stockpiling her resources (she had a distinct color palette for her multitudes of greens, and those colors don’t change a great deal across the many collages), and completing them in stages so that her one-a-day month very likely had been prepared for in advance. Part of her thrust forward was driven by the arrival of the plants that the Queen was sending under the auspices of Sir Joseph Banks at Kew. And the blooming plants were dispatched to wherever Mrs. Delany was. In the spring of 1777, the Bloodroot arrived in London at the house she had bought in St. James’s Place. By the following summer Lord and Lady Bute had opened Luton Hoo’s horticultural riches to her. “I am now very busy with my hortus siccus, to which I added, at Luton, twelve rare plants.”19 By July of 1777 she was cutting the hundreds of hula skirts that made the fabulous purple Passiflora at Luton.

  “This morning I finished my 400th plant!” she crowed in September 1777.20 Almost half the opus was completed. Exotic plants from around the globe arrived in profusion back at Bulstrode. “I am so plentifully supplied with the hothouse here, and from the Queen’s garden at Kew, that natural plants have been a good deal laid aside this year, for foreigners, but not less in favour. O! how I long to show you the progress I have made!”21 She was approaching her big month, October 1777, when she would finish one a day. Because there’s every reason to believe that she had assembled a number of collages but not finished them, completing one a day is both spectacular and possible.

  The botanical world had turned its attention to her and she was absorbing its information. “Dr. Solander, &c. came as expected, and I am now going to get a botanical lecture and to copy a beautifull flower called the Stuartia.”22 Because the work was intimately tied to the plant explorers, botanists, and nurserymen, and to aristocrats and royalty, too, in a way Mrs. Delany was holding court: the court of the art of her flowers. The King and the Queen were coming to her – well, at least to breakfast at Bulstrode on August 12, 1778, on the Prince Regent’s birthday.23 Breakfast was served at mid-morning, and the Duchess, who was throwing this little birthday party for the Prince, had been scurrying around Bulstrode in preparation for days. All the collections were stocked back in their grand cabinets, chairs were put away, plants returned to the greenhouses.

  Mrs. Delany, who did not seem to feel her age when it came to climbing into a carriage to go to Luton Hoo or Bill Hill on the hunt for a plant, very much felt her age at the coming spectacle of this breakfast. She took to her previously unsuccessful tactic and retreated to her ground-floor apartments. There she peered out of her windows and down the long approaching road from Windsor at the entourage of gold-dipped equipages. Two princes on horseback with their riding master, two footmen, two grooms, the King and Queen in a phaeton, two more servants, a post-chaise with four horses and another prince and a princess and the Duchess’s daughter Lady Weymouth jostling inside, then two more servants on horseback, then a coach with six horses ferrying more princes and princesses and governesses, more footmen, more servants, more attendants, two more coaches with six horses with more princes and their preceptors and more servants and footmen and more dignitaries, as well as a phaeton with the Duke of Montague and other aristocrats – even Mrs. Delany didn’t record all the ranks, totaling “33 servants, and 56 personages” for a total of 89 guests at breakfast.

  Mrs. Delany still crept behind the curtains of her long windows. She wasn’t dressed for company, but Queen Charlotte sent Lady Weymouth to find her, and, the fact that she wasn’t in a party dress notwithstanding, Mrs. D. was escorted to the Queen and the princesses. The King meanwhile was inspecting the Duchess’s china collection with his two eldest sons; then everyone except Mrs. D. joined them. She was catching her breath sitting quietly in the drawing room, but when they returned, the Queen sat down with her again, and they talked – what? Court gossip? The fractious American colonies? No, they talked craft, “the chenille work.”24

  Then the birthday fare entered on platters and salvers, in tureens, bowls, and cups: tea and hot chocolate, “bread-and-butter, roles, cakes, and – on another table all sorts of fruit and ice.” The King drank chocolate, the princes and princesses ate everything. The Duchess brought the Queen her tea but she insisted on carrying back her cup herself. Then His Majesty, who had retreated for relief from his public life into his family and his childhood hobby of tracking his chlorophylled subjects to the exclusion of his human ones, called for the great floral scrapbook.

  “The King asked me if I had added to my book of flowers, and desired he might see it. It was placed on a table before the Queen, who was attended by the Princess Royal and the rest of the ladies, the King standing and looking over them.” Like any artist who has to stand by while people peruse the work, Mrs. Delany said, “I kept my distance, till the Queen called to me to answer some question about a flower.” As she came toward the table, seventy-eight years old and perhaps unsteady on her pins, George III did something endearing and unusual. He brought Mrs. Delany a chair. Then he “set it at the table, opposite to the Queen, and graciously took me by the hand and seated me in it.” Mrs. D. was totally flustered. Not the thing that royalty was expected to do. But Queen Charlotte said, “Sit down, sit down … it is not every body has a chair brought them by a King.”

  And so she sat. It seems a little bit as though the party were for her.

  By this time she was amassing all types of papers to color. Watercolors were handmade in Mrs. Delany’s day, not commercially available until the very late eighteenth century, after her collages were complete.25 Either she made her own paints or commissioned them. Pigments were ground by hand with a muller (a flat-bottomed pestle) and a stone or a heavy slab of glass. Whether she ground her own or ordered it ground – and since it was hard to grind, it makes sense that someone else applied the muscle power – she probably experimented with her formula for watercolors, figuring out the best proportion of gum arabic to water to pigment to honey to ox gall. Gum arabic binds the color to the paper, but it also helps disperse the pigment into a colloid, suspending the particles of color in the water. Honey acts a smoother. Ox gall alters the surface o
f both the paper and the paint, so the watercolor doesn’t soak into the paper immediately. She also used gouache or body color, a watercolor to which white is added for greater opacity. She was washing colors for translucency in some instances and deepening colors for the opposite effect as well. Intuition was at work in the combinations, and inspiration. She was varying her papers, too. Most of the papers were white, but in some of the mosaicks she worked with “a green paper with mica flakes.”26

  When she made her black backgrounds, she probably wet the papers to stretch them, using a rag or wide brush to wash water onto the surface of the paper to “relax” it, preparing it to accept the most quantity of paint. Kohleen Reeder, a book and paper conservator to whom I am indebted for this reconstruction of Mrs. Delany’s process, speculates that she sometimes also took a brush and painted over the flowers after they were assembled.

  In the next three years, from 1778 to 1781, she did between eighty and one hundred per year – about one every fourth day.27 Her juggernaut went on, even when she received such disturbing news from her niece Mary Port in 1778 that she became ill with a fever. Mary Port’s husband, John, had suffered extreme financial difficulties, and Mrs. D., in between making a collage every four days, decided to do something about it. “I thank God I am much better,” she wrote to her nephew John Dewes’s wife, “tho’ sensible of being weaker than before my illness, which indeed, I believe, was much owing to my great agitation of mind on your dear sister-in-law Port’s account, who bears her great reverse of fortune with uncommon fortitude; but I hope they will sett their affairs in such a train as may enable them to enjoy what is left. It is truly an heart-breaking sight to see her suffer so much anxiety.”28 At seventy-eight, she undertook an act of motherhood.

  There may be those of us who have decided that the reason Mrs. Delany could accomplish such a great deal at an advanced age is that she had nothing else on her mind except her mosaicks. Let us disabuse ourselves of this. Mrs. D. up and decided, without missing a beat, to take on the care and education of her great-niece Georgina Mary Port. Her niece Mary journeyed to London to deliver her little daughter, and Mrs. Delany swooped up seven-year-old Georgina into her household, taking the opportunity to re-enact her own education at the hands of Aunt Stanley, softening it, rectifying it, restoring it through her ensuing seven decades of experience. And a little girl bloomed.