The Landscapes of Anne of Green Gables by Catherine Reid

Author:Catherine Reid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: 2018-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

Carnations (Dianthus caryophyllus) on the cover of E. J. Bowen’s Catalogue of 1902, in a color and size that wouldn’t have appeared in a grandmother’s garden; most dianthus are pale to dark pink (hence another common name—pinks).

Trumpet honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens)

When writing about her personal life, however, Montgomery rarely describes the labor required to maintain the ideal garden. In the essay she wrote about her career, The Alpine Path, she treats the gardens she worked hard to create with Well and Dave (the two boys boarded with her grandparents for three years when she was a girl) in a very lighthearted way. “Our carrots and parsnips, our lettuces and beets, our phlox and sweet-peas—either failed to come up at all, or dragged a pallid, spindling existence to an ignoble end, in spite of all our patient digging, manuring, weeding, and watering, or, perhaps, because of it, for I fear we were more zealous than wise.” The one bright spot? “[A] few hardy sunflowers which, sown in an uncared-for spot, throve better than all our petted darlings, and lighted up a corner of the spruce grove with their cheery golden lamps.”

Similarly, her journals include but a few references to the act of gardening itself, the most notable appearing in 1905, when she was beginning work on Anne of Green Gables. With the warming weather of spring, she was able to move back upstairs to her preferred room, which she had to vacate each fall as her grandmother refused to heat it during the winter. The effect on her emotional wellbeing was profound and immediate, a seasonal difference “between happiness and unhappiness.” Milder days also meant the chance to attend to a second love: “I almost live up there [in the room]—what time I don’t live in my garden.” She wrote and she gardened, the two creative acts reinforcing each other as she labored on the threshold of fame.

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