{"id":94128,"date":"2016-02-04T14:30:45","date_gmt":"2016-02-04T19:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=94128"},"modified":"2016-02-04T14:00:18","modified_gmt":"2016-02-04T19:00:18","slug":"the-room-of-flowers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/02\/04\/the-room-of-flowers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Room of Flowers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Childe Hassam, The Room of Flowers<\/i>, 1894.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

I am fully and intensely aware that plants are conscious of love and respond to it as they do to nothing else. \u2014Celia Thaxter\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Last year, I picked up a book called\u00a0An Island Garden<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>by Celia Thaxter. I\u2019m not interested in gardening\u2014I can\u2019t keep a plant alive\u2014but I\u2019d loved her\u00a0Among the Isles of the Shoals<\/a><\/em>, a sort of informal travelogue. An Island Garden<\/em>\u00a0conjures the same passion for a remote and challenging and fiercely beloved place. It evokes a sense of belonging, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thaxter was a successful and prolific poet in the second half of the nineteenth century, and much of her (admittedly old-fashioned) work dealt with the remote Isles of the Shoals, which span the Atlantic waters of Maine and New Hampshire. Thaxter\u2019s father had been a hotelier and lighthouse keeper, and she had grown up on White, Smuttynose, and Appledore Islands. Later, after an unhappy stint on the mainland, she returned to Appledore and lived out her life there, running her father\u2019s inn and garden on a generous scale. This hotel became the site of a sort of summer New England artists\u2019 colony: guests included Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Jewett, and Whittier. The painter Childe Hassam recalled that the salon was composed of a\u00a0\u201cjolly, refined, interesting and artistic set of people \u2026 like one large family.\u201d Hassam wrote that he spent some of his \u201cpleasantest summers\u201d there, \u201cwhere I met the best people in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hassam made a series of vivid paintings of Thaxter\u2019s garden\u2014thriving despite or because of the rocky soil. My favorite is The Room of Flowers<\/em>, from 1894, the year Thaxter had died suddenly: the painting was a tribute. Apparently Thaxter\u2019s parlor served as an informal gallery for buyers, too; Hassam\u2019s painting shows the work of Thaxter\u2019s many artist friends and prot\u00e9g\u00e9s.<\/p>\n

I remember seeing The Room of Flowers<\/em> at a Childe Hassam show many years ago and buying a postcard of it to invoke its sense of peace and light and creativity and outdoors brought inside. I loved the comfortable untidiness, the piles of books and the scattered cushions. One thing that struck me at once was the sheer number of small vases clustered on tables and books\u2014flowers carefully chosen and arranged, that would need to be discarded and replaced with near-obsessive care, I thought then. It didn\u2019t occur to me that it was a sort of floral tribute to the friend whose absence probably filled the cluttered, warm room.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cLike the musician, the painter, the poet, and the rest,\u201d Thaxter wrote, \u201cthe true lover of flowers is born, not made. And he is born to happiness in this vale of tears, to a certain amount of the purest joy that earth can giver her children, joy that is tranquil, innocent, uplifting, unfailing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Celia Thaxter in Her Garden<\/i>, 1892.<\/p><\/div>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am fully and intensely aware that plants are conscious of love and respond to it as they do to nothing else. \u2014Celia Thaxter\u00a0 Last year, I picked up a book called\u00a0An Island Garden\u00a0by Celia Thaxter. I\u2019m not interested in gardening\u2014I can\u2019t keep a plant alive\u2014but I\u2019d loved her\u00a0Among the Isles of the Shoals, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[16689,21046,21047,21050,21045,21048,7470,4131,20717,21049,5014,12985,13808,14684],"class_list":["post-94128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-american-literature","tag-among-the-isles-of-the-shoals","tag-an-island-garden","tag-appledore-island","tag-celia-thaxter","tag-childe-hassam","tag-gardening","tag-hotels","tag-islands","tag-lighthouses","tag-new-england","tag-nineteenth-century","tag-painters","tag-plants"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOn the Isles of the Shoals with Celia Thaxter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on the 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