#000133
An Island Garden
Celia Thaxter
Celia Thaxter's *An Island Garden* is one of the loveliest books ever made about a patch of dirt. Thaxter — a celebrated nineteenth-century poet whose family ran a summer hotel on Appledore Island in the Isles of Shoals, off the Maine–New Hampshire coast — spent her last years tending a small, riotous cutting garden, and this 1894 book is her account of a single season in it, from seed to first frost. What makes it extraordinary is the collaboration: the American Impressionist Childe Hassam, a regular at Thaxter's famous artistic salon, filled it with luminous color plates of the very flowers she describes. The result is part gardening manual, part memoir, part art object. Published the year she died, it has never really gone out of print, and it still reads as a small hymn to attention and impermanence.
more…less ▴
The author
Celia Laighton Thaxter (1835–1894) grew up among the Isles of Shoals, where her father kept a lighthouse and later built a hotel that drew New England's literary and artistic elite. A popular poet in her own right, she is remembered today as much for the salon she hosted on Appledore Island — frequented by writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett and John Greenleaf Whittier and painters including Childe Hassam — as for her verse.
The book
An Island Garden is a season-long diary of her small seaside cutting garden, mixing practical advice on sowing and tending with reflection on beauty and loss. Houghton, Mifflin published it in 1894 with color plates and illuminations by Hassam and a binding designed by Sarah Wyman Whitman, making it a landmark of American book art as well as garden writing. It appeared the year Thaxter died.
How it has aged
More than a century on, it endures on two levels at once: as a still-usable meditation on gardening and as a coveted illustrated book, with Hassam's originals now held by major museums. Modern facsimile editions keep the text in circulation for readers who will never handle a first edition.
For more context
Readers can view Hassam's Island Garden paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and explore the restored Thaxter garden on Appledore Island today.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Celia Thaxter
- Publisher
- Houghton Mifflin
- Place of publication
- Boston
- Year
- 1894
- Edition
- 1988 reprint (intro Allen Lacy)
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Boxed / slipcase
- Shelf
- Nature
- Location
- Maine
Places
Verify 1894 original vs facsimile reissue (big value difference)