But on Sunday, April 6, 1788, after Mrs. Delany had gone on an excursion with the royal family to Kew to see what she could, but more to touch and smell the plants in the greenhouses, she caught an upper respiratory infection. A doctor was summoned and she was bled. Two days later, she was blistered. Then bark was administered, the abominable mixture that had been spooned into her sister Anne’s dry throat before she died. “I have always had a presentiment that if bark were given, it would be my death,” Mrs. D. whispered to Mrs. Astley, who wrote the description of her final days.11 Astley offered to hide the mixture and pretend that she had taken it. “Oh, no!” Mrs. D. said. “I never was reckoned obstinate and I will not die so.” She took the bark, the vile chemical cocktail, and rallied for another three days.
On Tuesday, April 15, at 11:00 p.m., she died.
The flow that is our lives until the very last minute then became a form. The sudden appearance of a life’s shape at the moment of its end always provokes our shock, even if the death was expected. Yet, old as she was, few around her anticipated it. They thought she would recover. “Oh, madam, she is no more!” So seventeen-year-old Georgina, cast into a chasm of bereavement for the woman who had taken on her motherhood at the age of seventy-eight, wrote to Mrs. Frances Hamilton after leaving her Aunt Delany’s bedside, her aunt’s eyes closed, her nightcap settled on the head that, without the life force it had moments before, looked so much smaller.12 The line had been crossed. Cut.
Mrs. Delany had written a will, of course, in which she insisted, somewhat as she had insisted that the Dean not publish his romantic portrait, on being buried “no matter where” and at as little expense as could be said to be proper.13 But she was buried in a vault at St. James’s Church, where her epitaph, written by the Bishop of Worcester, appears on a wall:
She was a lady of singular ingenuity and politeness, and of unaffected piety. These qualities endeared her through life to many noble and excellent persons, and made the close of it illustrious by procuring for her many signal marks of grace and favour from their Majesties.
This generic epitaph does not mention the flowers, but at least it leads with her “singular ingenuity.” The Bishop didn’t have the words of Dean Delany to rely on. His dove-eyed love had forbidden it, but Anne, ever that saver of all, had rescued those words, which the Dean had enclosed to her in a Christmas message. The pages lay at John and Mary Port’s house in Ilam.
John Opie’s portrait of Mrs. Delany in old age and the enamel portrait done by Christian Friedrich Zincke when she was about forty (in the first chapter of this book) invite a person to trace the lines of the wise, old face against the fullness of the middle-aged one, a bit like mirroring the cut petals of one of the flower mosaicks back to its bloom. You see the face in its prime in the aged person, and, more fascinatingly, you see the older woman in the full flush of the younger woman. Each draws up the same life force in both sets of those eyes that exhibited, as far as her husband could discern, an almost unnamable variety of hues. There in the eyes of those portraits is her pluck, young and old. There is her fast commitment to the diamonds caught in the glazed nettings of life that appeared before her, in the profile of a silhouette, in the shine of floss over sewn into roses – or in the lucky glimpse of a petal of a geranium the same shade as a piece of paper below it. Not just lucky. Her whole life flowed to the place where she plucked that moment.
{ THRESHOLD }
Living a full life requires invention, but that needs a previous pattern, if only to react against or, happily, to refigure in the making of something new. A multitude of vectors brings us to the moment where we are, and where we love, or cough, or say the wrong thing, or fail, or feel our fate in what we fear, or to a moment where clarity descends, and we understand the world simply from having observed it. Uncontrollable events hurtle toward us until the very moment of our deaths, yet in each instance figuring out how to go on, even on to the next world, repeats the confusion of youth. Of course we need our role models long past adolescence.
To search a drawer or a pocketbook or a botanical bibliography, even to search a littered table or beneath the leaf of a geranium, means feeling for one’s conscience and one’s heart, looking for something that will complete – with a key, a tissue, a truth, a love, a victory, a seed – an instant of one’s being, or perhaps one’s whole life. In a sliver of knowledge, time is obliterated and reinstated. A single instance, the fall of a petal, or the swirl of the paper that imitates and becomes it, flourishes an answering likeness.
I am now and then haunted by some semi-mystic very
profound life of a woman, which shall be all told on one
occasion; and time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall
somehow blossom out of the past. One incident – say the fall
of a flower – might contain it.
Virginia Woolf, in her diary,
Tuesday, November 23, 192614
NOTES
Note on the Endnotes:
AC = The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany: With Interesting Reminiscences of King George the Third and Queen Charlotte, ed. Lady Llanover, 6 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1861 [first series], 1862 [second series]). Each series contains 3 volumes, numbered from 1 to 3, but I have followed Lady Llanover’s practice in her index to the series in numbering them as a continuous series from 1 to 6.
The letters in these volumes are identified by writer, recipient, and date. I have referred to Mrs. Delany throughout these notes as MD. Mary Granville became Mary Pendarves after her first marriage, in 1717, and Mary Delany after her second marriage, in 1743. Her sister Anne Granville became Anne Dewes after her marriage in 1740; I have referred to her throughout these notes as AD. Anne’s daughter (Mary’s niece), Mary Dewes, became Mary Port after her marriage in 1770; I have referred to her throughout these notes as MP. The dates have been standardized to the Gregorian calendar, with the new year beginning on January 1, although Mrs. Delany used both the Julian calendar, with the new year beginning on March 25, and the Gregorian.
The autobiography of her early life that Mrs. Delany, the widow Mary Pendarves at the time, wrote in letters to the Duchess of Portland in 1740 is identified as “Autobiography,” and the remarks that Lady Llanover included in passages between the letters and in footnotes is identified as “Lady Llanover’s commentary.”
I have retained Mrs. Delany’s spelling, grammar, punctuation, and italics in the quotations, including all her variations. All italics in the quotations are in the originals, and all ellipses in them are mine.
CHAPTER ONE: SEEDCASE
1 AC 4:469; MD to MP, October 4, 1772. biography
2 Kohleen Reeder, “The ‘Paper Mosaick’ Practice of Mrs. Delany and her Circle,” in Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, eds., Mrs. Delany and Her Circle (New Haven and London: Yale Center for British Art/Sir John Soane’s Museum/Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 224-35.
3 The British Museum Web site is: http://www.britishmuseum.org.
4 Interview with Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, April 12, 2010.
5 Inscribed on the first page of the first volume of her Flora Delanica, and quoted in AC 5:443; Lady Llanover’s commentary.
6 Robert Hogan and Donald C. Mell, eds., The Poems of Patrick Delany (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), p. 23. The next quotation in this paragraph is also on this page.
7 Lisa L. Moore, “Queer Gardens: Mary Delany’s Flowers and Friendships,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39, no. 1 (Fall 2005), pp. 49-70.
8 Jonathan Swift, “An Epistle upon an Epistle from a Certain Doctor to a Certain Great Lord: Being a Christmas-Box For D. D———Y,” in Hogan and Mell, Poems of Patrick Delany, p. 130, ll. 61-63.
9 AC 2:432; MD to AD, March 29, 1746.
10 “Thou Modest Rose, of Blushing Bloom,” in Hogan and Mell, Poems of Patrick Delany, p. 185.
11 AC 2:291; MD to AD, April 3, 1744.
12 AC 1:156; MD to AD, January 19, 1728.
/> 13 “Orlando: British Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present – George Paston: More Biography and History”: http://orlando.cambridge.org/public/svPeople?person_id=pastge.
14 The original letters have been dispersed, and some of them have been lost. The biggest cache of them is located at the public library in Newport, Wales, where the letters still in Augusta Hall, Lady Llanover’s possession were donated.
15 Interview with Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, April 12, 2010.
16 Ruth Hayden, Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers (1980; 2nd ed., 1992; rpt. London: British Museum Press, 2000), p. 130.
17 For a review of this show, see Vivien Raynor, “Art: Flower Collages from the 18th Century,” New York Times (September 5, 1986): http://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/05/arts/art-flower-collages-from-the-18th-century.html.
CHAPTER TWO: SEEDLING
1 AC 1:1; Autobiography. The other quotation in this paragraph is on page 1:2.
2 AC 1:2, 1:3; Autobiography.
3 AC 1:3; Autobiography.
4 AC 1:3; Autobiography.
5 “Classic Encyclopedia – Based on the 11th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (pub. 1911)”: http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Etienne_De_Silhouette.
6 AC 1:230; MD to AD, December 20, 1729. The next quotation is also on this page.
7 Interview with Helen Sharp, British Museum, June 23, 2008.
CHAPTER THREE: HOUND’S TONGUE
1 Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, and English Physician (1652): “Hounds Tongue”: http://www.naturalhealthcrafters.com/culpepper/houndstongue.html.
2 Hayden, Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers, p. 21.
3 Clarissa Campbell Orr, “Mrs. Delany and the Court,” in Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, Mrs. Delany and Her Circle, p. 46.
4 Hayden, Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers, p. 15.
5 AC 1:8; Autobiography.
6 AC 1:8; Autobiography.
7 AC 1:6; Autobiography.
8 AC 1:8; Autobiography.
9 AC 1:10; Autobiography.
10 AC 1:9; Autobiography.
11 AC 1:10; Autobiography. The next four quotations are also on this page.
12 Bruce Chadwick, The General and Mrs. Washington: The Untold Story of a Marriage and a Revolution (Napier, IL: Sourcebooks, 2007), pp. 199-200.
13 John Butt, ed., The Poems of Alexander Pope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 243, ll.1-4, 7-10. The poem’s title here is “Epistle to Miss Blount, on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation.”
14 AC 1:17-18; Autobiography.
15 AC 1:14; Autobiography.
16 AC 1:15; Autobiography.
17 AC 1:13; Autobiography.
18 AC 1:15-16; Autobiography. The other quotations in this paragraph are also on these pages.
19 AC 1:18; Autobiography.
20 AC 1:30-31; Autobiography.
21 AC 6:17; MD to MP, May 3, 1781; also Mark Laird, “Mrs. Delany’s Circles of Cutting and Embroidering in Home and Garden,” and Lisa Ford, “A Progress in Plants: Mrs. Delany’s Botanical Sources,” both in Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, Mrs. Delany and Her Circle, pp. 25, 212.
CHAPTER FOUR: DAMASK ROSE
1 David Burnett, Longleat: The Story of an English Country House (1978; rev. Stanbridge, Dorset: Dovecote Press, 1988), p. 97.
2 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets (1779-81; Garden City, NY: Dolphin/Doubleday, n.d. [ca. 1960]), p. 62.
3 AC 1:22-23; Autobiography.
4 AC 1:23; Autobiography.
5 AC 1:34; Autobiography.
6 AC 1:24; Autobiography.
7 AC 1:24; Autobiography.
8 AC 1:26; Autobiography.
9 AC 1:26-27; Autobiography.
10 AC 1:27; Autobiography. The next two quotations are also on this page.
11 AC 1:27-28; Autobiography.
12 AC 1:28; Autobiography.
13 AC 1:28; Autobiography.
14 Frank E. Grizzard, Jr., George Washington: A Biographical Companion (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002), p. 59.
15 AC 1:28; Autobiography. The next four quotations are also on this page.
16 AC 1:28-29; Autobiography.
17 AC 1:29; Autobiography.
18 AC 1:29; Autobiography.
19 AC 1:32; Autobiography.
20 AC 1:29-30; Autobiography.
21 AC 1:30; Autobiography.
22 AC 1:31; Autobiography.
23 AC 1:36; Autobiography.
24 AC 1:29; Autobiography.
25 “Journey North: A Global Study of Wildlife Migration and Seasonal Change”: www.learner.org/jnorth/images/graphics/t/flower_parts.gif.
26 Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 505; Emily Dickinson to Louise and Frances Norcross, ca. April 1873.
CHAPTER FIVE: NODDING THISTLE
1 François Gros d’Aillon, “Flora, etc.: Carduus nutans Linnaeus”: http://ariel.minilab.bdeb.qc.ca/~fg/MyFlora/Asteraceae/Carduus/Nutans/
nutans.e.shtml.
2 J. L. Comstock, The Young Botanist: Being a Treatise on the Science, Prepared for the Use of Persons Just Commencing the Study of Plants (2nd ed., New York: Robinson, Pratt, and Co., 1836), p. 162. The other two quotations in this paragraph are from pp. 165 and 162 of this book.
3 Comstock, Young Botanist, p. 163.
4 AC 1:49; Autobiography.
5 AC 1:50-51; Autobiography.
6 AC 1:39; Autobiography.
7 AC 1:106; Autobiography.
8 AC 1:55; Autobiography.
9 AC 1:55, 1:63; Autobiography.
10 AC 1:55; Autobiography.
11 AC 1:61; Autobiography.
12 AC 1:63, 1:62, 1:63; Autobiography.
13 AC 1:85; Autobiography. The two other quotations in this paragraph are also on this page.
14 AC 1:85; Autobiography.
15 AC 1:87; Sir John Stanley to MD, December 10, 1723.
16 AC 1:85; Autobiography.
17 AC 1:89; Autobiography. The following quotation is also on this page.
18 Wilfrid Blunt, Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist (1971; rpt. Princeton, New Jersey, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 198-203.
19 AC 1:83; Lady Llanover’s commentary.
20 AC 1:91; Autobiography. The other quotations in this paragraph are also on this page.
21 AC 1:98; MD to AD, May 30, 1724.
22 AC 1:99; MD to AD, May 30, 1724.
23 AC 1:107; Autobiography. The next four quotations are also from this page.
24 Robert Phelps, Editor’s Foreword to Colette, Earthly Paradise: An Autobiography, ed. Phelps (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966), p. ix.
CHAPTER SIX: OPIUM POPPY
1 AC 1:105; Autobiography.
2 AC 1:106; Autobiography.
3 AC 1:109; Autobiography.
4 Interview with Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, April 12, 2010.
5 AC 1:110; Autobiography.
6 AC 1:130; Autobiography.
7 AC 1:96; MD to AD, March 28, 1724.
8 AC 1:123-24; MD to AD, November 8, 1726.
9 AC 1:144-45; MD to AD, November 11, 1727.
10 AC 1:111; Autobiography.
11 AC 1:105-6; Autobiography.
12 AC 1:131; Autobiography. The next four quotations are also on this page.
13 AC 1:133; Autobiography. The next five quotations are also on this page.
14 AC 1:148; MD to AD, November 11, 1727.
15 AC 1:113; Lord Lansdowne to MD, January 19, 1725.
16 AC 1:129; MD to AD, January 26, 1727. The next quotation is also on this page.
17 Alain Kerhervé, Mary Delany (1700-1788): Une épistolière anglaise du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), p. 294.
18 “The Marteau Early-18th-Century Currency Converter”: http://www.pierre-marteau.com, and “Measuring Worth” Web site: http://www.measuringworth.com.
19 John Mainwaring, Memoir
s of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1760), p. 110. Mainwaring quotes Handel as saying, “Oh! Madam, je sais bien que Vous êtes une véritable Diablesse: mais je Vous ferai savoir, moi, que je suis Beelzebub le Chéf des Diables.”
20 AC 1:111; Autobiography. The next quotation is also on this page.
21 AC 1:158; MD to AD, January 19, 1728.
22 AC 1:163; MD to AD, March 14, 1728.
23 “What think you of a Newgate pastoral, among the whores and thieves there?”: Jonathan Swift to Alexander Pope, August 30, 1716, cited in Richard Traubner, Operetta: A Theatrical History (2nd ed, London: Routledge, 2003), p. 11, and in Calhoun Winton, “The Beggar’s Opera: A Case Study,” in The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Vol. 2: 1660 to 1895, ed. Joseph Donohue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 128.
24 Katherine Cahill, Mrs. Delany’s Menus, Medicines and Manners (Dublin: New Island, 2005), pp. 262-66; also Madeleine Ginsburg, “Women’s Dress Before1900,” in Natalie Rothstein, ed., Four Hundred Years of Fashion: Victoria and Albert Museum (London: V&A Publications, 1984), esp. pp. 13-31, and Norah Waugh, Corsets and Crinolines (1954; rpt. New York: Routledge/Theatre Arts Books, 2004), esp. chapter 2.
25 Interview with Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, April 12, 2010.
26 Interview with Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, April 12, 2010.
27 AC 2:580; MD to AD, undated (probably August 1750).
28 Cahill, Mrs. Delany’s Menus, Medicines and Manners, p. 265.
29 In the seventeenth century a whalebone busk was “thrust down the middle of the stomacher to keep it streight and in compass, that the Breast nor Belly shall not swell too much out. These Busks are usually made in length according to the necessity of the Persons wearing it: if to keep in the fullness of the Breasts, then it extends to the Navel; if to keep the Belly down, then it reacheth to the Honour.” Randle Holme, The Academy of Armory (1688), cited in Cahill, Mrs. Delany’s Menus, Medicines and Manners, p. 264.
The Paper Garden Page 30