The Paper Garden by Peacock Molly

Author:Peacock, Molly
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2010-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

Magnolia grandiflora, the Grand Magnolia, Bill Hill, August 26, 1776

Chapter Nine.

MAGNOLIA

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.

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