Maud Montgomery’s writings reveal an abiding fondness for three different types of garden: the “old-timey” garden, which she introduced as the Barry garden in Anne of Green Gables and which is still known as a grandmother’s or old-fashioned garden; the wild garden, which might be a neglected corner or an abandoned plot where hardy perennials delight a wanderer with their unexpected blossoms; and the woodland garden under a canopy of boughs, full of the ephemerals that gave her such delight each spring.
Bouncing Bet (Saponaria officinalis), an old-fashioned plant that Montgomery also called bouncing Bess.
Fair, rich confusion is all the aim of an old-fashioned flower garden, and the greater the confusion, the richer . . . No stiffness, no ceremony—flowers, and not a garden—this is the beauty of the old style.
—ANNA BARTLETT WARNER, AUTHOR OF GARDENING BY MYSELF
When Anne Shirley, still new to the Avonlea community, learns that another girl, Diana Barry, lives nearby, she can hardly contain her excitement. “Oh, Marilla,” she says, “I’m frightened . . . What if she shouldn’t like me! It would be the most tragical disappointment of my life.” Marilla seeks to console her, in her gruff Marilla way, though she can do little to allay the specter of the judgmental Mrs. Barry, who might not take kindly to the queer little orphan.
Yet at the much-anticipated moment when the two girls are finally to meet—and before Montgomery even reveals what they have to say to each other—the author first gives a lengthy description of the garden. It’s a fascinating, tantalizing diversion, briefly distracting the reader from the prospects that may or may not await Anne in this “very pretty little girl” with “the merry expression.”
For the author, and thus for readers, it clearly matters that, after initial introductions, the two meet outdoors, surrounded by plants—a “bowery wilderness” of them. As they gaze “bashfully at one another over a clump of gorgeous tiger lilies,” the reader is likewise invited to bask in the rich array of colors and sounds, the garden’s bounty seeming to foreshadow the course of their friendship. We sense how it transports Anne—it takes a moment before she can compose herself enough to whisper her big question to Diana—but at last she’s asking Diana if she will like her well enough to be her bosom friend. The laughing Diana agrees, and repeats the oath to be faithful, a promise that holds true throughout the novel.
Orange daylily (Hemerocallis fulva) at the Anne of Green Gables Historic Site. Anne and Diana meet for the first time amid brightly colored lilies in the Barry garden.
Montgomery’s tactic, which could have frustrated an impatient reader, pays off. She has reminded us of the importance to Anne of a natural setting, the kind that embodies so much of her emotional and spiritual life and where so many of her significant realizations take place. She has offered a context that allows each girl to be her natural self—innocent, affectionate, joyous—when free of the inside, adult world. And she has given us a way to read the scene that follows—the blossoming of a friendship into something as full of potential as that found in the splendor of the garden.
The Barry garden was a bowery wilderness of flowers which would have delighted Anne’s heart at any time less fraught with destiny. It was encircled by huge old willows and tall firs, beneath which flourished flowers that loved the shade. Prim, right-angled paths, neatly bordered with clam-shells, intersected it like moist red ribbons and in the beds between old-fashioned flowers ran riot. There were rosy bleeding-hearts and great splendid crimson peonies; white, fragrant narcissi and thorny, sweet Scotch roses; pink and blue and white columbines and lilac-tinted Bouncing Bets; clumps of southernwood and ribbon grass and mint; purple Adam-and-Eve, daffodils, and masses of sweet clover white with its delicate, fragrant, feathery sprays; scarlet lightning that shot its fiery lances over prim white musk-flowers; a garden it was where sunshine lingered and bees hummed, and winds, beguiled into loitering, purred and rustled.
—ANNE OF GREEN GABLES
There is nothing in the world so sweet as a real “old-timey” garden . . . [I]t must be secluded and shut away from the world—a “garden enclosed”—preferably by willows—or apple trees—or firs. It must have some trim walks bordered by clamshells, or edged with “ribbon grass,” and there must be in it the flowers that belong to old-fashioned gardens and are seldom found in the catalogues of to-day—perennials planted there by grandmotherly hands when the century was young. There should be poppies, like fine ladies in full-skirted silken gowns, “cabbage” roses, heavy and pink and luscious, tiger-lilies like gorgeously bedight sentinels, “Sweet-William” in striped attire, bleeding-heart, that favorite of my childhood, southernwood, feathery and pungent, butter-and-eggs—that is now known as “narcissus”—“bride’s bouquet,” as white as a bride’s bouquet should be, holly hocks like flaunting overbold maidens, purple spikes of “Adam and Eve,” pink and white “musk,” “Sweet Balm” and “Sweet May,” “Bouncing Bess” in her ruffled, lilac-tinted skirts, pure white “June Lilies,” crimson peonies—“pinies”—velvety-eyed “Irish Primroses,” which were neither primroses nor Irish, scarlet lightning and Prince’s feather—all growing in orderly confusion. Dear old gardens! The very breath of them is a benediction!
—THE SELECTED JOURNALS OF L. M. MONTGOMERY, VOL. 1
Shirley poppies (Papaver rhoeas) by a wagon wheel, Avonlea Village, Cavendish, Prince Edward Island.
That the Barry garden is so similar to Maud Montgomery’s ideal flower garden—the passages from the novel echo the descriptions in Montgomery’s journal—is another reminder of the sensibilities that Maud and Anne share, as well as what each believed that gardens should reveal of their owners. Gardens, they felt, should display a distinct aesthetic, an extension of one’s idea of beauty, a place of sensory pleasures. By “garden,” Montgomery typically means a flower garden. As the title character of The Story Girl (1911) makes clear, “Oh, I never like the vegetable garden . . . Except when I am hungry. Then I do like to go and look at the nice little rows of onions and beets. But I love a flower garden. I think I could be always good if I lived in a garden all the time.”
Staking out such a preference for the old-timey garden put Maud Montgomery at odds with those who welcomed the annual push toward the new and exotic. Then, as now, seed catalogs arrived in winter, when the craving for flowers and colors was its most acute, the pages full of endless possibilities for transforming a front or back yard. Ranging in size from a modest few dozen pages to an exuberant two hundred, the late-nineteenth-century catalogs were arranged much as they are today. The newest varieties appeared in the opening pages, followed by vegetables, flowers, lawn seeds, and farmers’ needs (such as grains and seed corn), all in alphabetical order; the larger companies might also include climbing vines, bulbs, or berries. While the smaller suppliers typically had but a few illustrations, limiting themselves to lists of plants and their prices, the bigger companies used color lithographs for the front and back covers, detailed black-and-white drawings of select varieties scattered throughout, along with an occasional full-page painting; by the early twentieth century, photographs began to supplement the lengthy descriptions.
Anne Shirley calls the fruit of Rosa rugosa “roseberries,” and she and Diana make necklaces of them.
Front cover of Farquhar’s 1902 catalog, with an image of hollyhocks that look almost like peonies in their number of petals.
From the very first page, the enticements beckoned. From unexpected colors to an over-the-top doubling in size or number of petals (peonies, asters, daffodils), the latest fashions made big splashes, and the catalogs displayed them to their best advantage.
Montgomery didn’t appear to be seduced—flowers in her old-timey garden were “seldom found in the catalogues” of the day—which aligned her with the type of literature she had immersed herself in for years as well as with the burgeoning Arts and Crafts movement. She knew by heart whole poems by Whittier, Longfellow, Tennyson, Burns—nature-based writers whose values and vocabularies became or meshed with her own. They eschewed the built life and trappings of the Industrial Age, seeking instead the visceral and the ineffable that could be found only in the natural world. Likewise, adherents of the relatively new Arts and Crafts movement sought a return to work that was handmade, the one-of-a-kind tool or piece of furniture, the elegantly crafted thing that bore its own unique story. When Montgomery claimed that the ideal garden, like the poet, must “be born not made . . . The least flavor of newness or modernity spoils it,” she was allying herself with a position that critics and art lovers around the world were beginning to advance.
We learn, after his sudden death in Anne of Green Gables, that Matthew Cuthbert shared a similar fondness for old-timey flowers. At the funeral, there were flowers all around his coffin—“sweet old-fashioned flowers which his mother had planted in the homestead garden in her bridal days and for which Matthew had always had a secret wordless love.” Later, when Anne chooses a bush to plant on his grave, it, too, is of the old-fashioned kind—a white Scotch rose descended from one that his mother had carried over from Scotland.
One of the first women to start her own seed company, Miss C. H. Lippincott highlights the influence of foreign markets—and the Japanese aesthetic, in particular—in this back cover image for her 1897 catalog, “Imperial Japanese Morning Glory: The Handsomest Climber in Cultivation.”
Similar descriptions of flowering plants appear in the short story “A Garden of Old Delights” (1910), which Montgomery later integrated into the beginning section of The Story Girl; ironically it’s the garden of an actual grandmother that forms the story’s setting, her loving nurture of each of the flower beds essential to their emotional impact. (Montgomery’s own grandmother, who forbore anything that might be seen as frivolous or impractical, never appears in her granddaughter’s writings as either laboring in or caring about a flower garden.)
In appearance, a grandmother’s garden resisted excess, startling color, and blooms so heavy their stalks needed support. Miss Lavendar, for example, won’t have dahlias in her garden in Anne of Avonlea; “she did not like them and they would not have suited the fine retirement of her old-fashioned garden.” To be true to its aesthetic, such a garden also resisted the formality of a typical Victorian layout, opting instead for a more natural look—“orderly confusion,” Montgomery called it—which appealed to those like Maud and Anne, with their shared value of intimacy with the natural world and a means of entering it without artifice.
Given Montgomery’s literary tastes and her fondness for native plants and trees, which she often personified as friends (as Anne says to Diana in Anne of Avonlea: “That white birch you caught me kissing is a sister of mine. The only difference is, she’s a tree and I’m a girl, but that’s no real difference”), it followed that she would advocate a style of gardening that emphasized natural settings and traditional species, including those native to the area as well as those that the first settlers to the region brought over. In her writings, she doesn’t dwell on such garden features as height or texture or accent colors, but fragrance is paramount, as is the perceived sense of wildness and organic naturalness—shrubs integrated with flowers, fruit trees on the periphery, paths that follow the contours of the land instead of adhering to artificial, linear schemes. To an untrained eye such gardens could appear reckless and messy; yet to the trained observer, the scene reassured, and the visitor knew that, in the designer of the garden, she had met a like-minded soul.
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).
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.
My garden—oh, the delight it has been to me this summer! I am positively reveling in flowers. Roses—such roses! My big bush of blush doubles, which never did anything before, flung all its hoarded sweetness of three years into bloom—dozens of the most lovely blossoms. There is a big vaseful on my tables before me now. And behind me are other vases full of the sweetest of sweet peas and yellow poppies, and nasturtiums like breaths of flame . . . Oh, what a wise old myth it was that placed the creation of life in a garden.
Hollyhocks against a porch railing, with Delphinium hybrids in the back and poppy pods and daylilies in the foreground.
Orange and yellow nasturtiums in the foreground; purple Liatris spicata, also known as blazing star or gayfeather in the middle; and several varieties of daylilies in the background. Cavendish, Prince Edward Island.
Peony, a favorite perennial; Montgomery referred to peonies as “pinies” in her description of the ideal garden.
Maud Montgomery’s garden in Leaskdale, Ontario, with its flower-covered arch. Photograph by L. M. Montgomery, c. 1917.
Additional garden descriptions don’t appear in her journals until after her marriage to Ewan Macdonald, in 1911, when they moved to Leaskdale, Ontario, and she could finally design the kind of garden she had long wanted. “We have been gardening furiously since housecleaning was finished,” she writes, “and I am besottedly happy in it . . . I had to go without one for so many years and now I’m quite drunk with the joy of having one again.” At another point, she refers to the destruction of her garden by a sudden cloud-burst, when “a perfect river rushed down the hill and swept our garden out of existence in a twinkling—the garden I had worked so hard to get in, doing all the digging and preparing myself.” More typical in her journal entries from the Ontario years is the occasional mention of the canning she has done, the preserves she has just put up—pears, plums, cherries, raspberries—listed as briefly as when she summarizes other household chores.
The reasons may be many for this lack of attention to gardens in her journals: a natural resistance to mentioning chores or physical labor (Anne Shirley doesn’t dwell on such things either), a disappointment when her gardens couldn’t meet her high expectations, or such a commitment to the most important work of her life—her writing—that gardens, much as they soothed, had to fall away. Where Montgomery seemed happiest was in creating gardens on the page, conjuring them visually by listing the species of flowers, much as she did in Anne of Green Gables with the Barry garden. In Anne of the Island, she adds a variety of annuals to a garden “sweet with dear, old fashioned, unworldly flowers and shrubs—sweet may, southernwood, lemon verbena, alyssum, petunias, marigolds and chrysanthemums.” And in “A Garden of Old Delights,” she names the flowers in the main garden—peonies, hollyhocks, lilies, clove-pinks, narcissus, and roses (old and sturdy enough, she writes, that they were never bothered by mildew or insect pests), and then turns her attention to the “very old-fashioned bed full of bleeding hearts, Sweet William, bride’s bouquet, butter-and-eggs, Adam-and-Eve, columbines, pink and white daisies, and Bouncing Bets.” As with so many local names for plants, the identity of Montgomery’s purple-spiked Adam-and-Eve remains a mystery.
A view of the back garden from the kitchen window, Leaskdale, Ontario. Photograph by L. M. Montgomery, c. 1917.
Maud Montgomery’s son Chester, as a toddler in their garden in Leaskdale, Ontario. Photograph by L. M. Montgomery, c. 1914.
Alma Macneill and her mother at the site of the garden in Cavendish that likely inspired the Barry garden in Anne of Green Gables. Montgomery referred to it as “old Mrs. George Macneill’s garden.” Photograph by L. M. Montgomery, c. 1897.
Montgomery’s archives yield but one photograph of a Prince Edward Island garden that she might consider ideal—“old Mrs. George Macneill’s garden,” the likely inspiration for the Barry garden, with vines climbing the walls and flowers spilling into the central pathway.
In late summer, pink spires of fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium), which can grow as tall as eight feet, appear along fields and recently disturbed edges.
Past the spruces the lane dipped down into a sunny little open where a log bridge spanned a brook; and then came the glory of a sunlit beechwood where the air was like transparent golden wine, and the leaves fresh and green, and the wood floor a mosaic of tremulous sunshine. Then more wild cherries, and a little valley of lissome firs, and then a hill so steep that the girls lost their breath climbing it; but when they reached the top and came out into the open the prettiest surprise of all awaited them.
—ANNE OF AVONLEA
Helter-skelter is not an easy appearance to cultivate; it takes considerable care to make a garden look as though it sprang up naturally, reckless and exuberant in its very wildness. Perhaps that’s why Montgomery found neglected or forest gardens so attractive, shaped as they were by the forces of nature. In “A Garden of Old Delights,” the unnamed narrator loves the wild garden the best, “a sunny triangle shut in by the meadow fences and as full of wild flowers as it could hold: blue and white violets, dandelions, Junebells, wild-roses, daisies, buttercups, asters, and goldenrod, all lavish in their season.” In Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910), an abandoned orchard provides the idyllic setting for the relationship between the mute Kilmeny and the new teacher, Eric, that will result in her regaining her power of speech and his learning to love the Prince Edward Island setting that had originally seemed so pastoral that he wasn’t sure he could tolerate a month on its shores. The setting made all the difference.
Most of the orchard was grown over lushly with grass; but at the end where Eric stood there was a square, treeless place which had evidently once served as a homestead garden. Old paths were still visible, bordered by stones and large pebbles. There were two clumps of lilac trees; one blossoming in royal purple, the other in white. Between them was a bed ablow with the starry spikes of June lilies. Their penetrating, haunting fragrance distilled on the dewy air in every soft puff of wind. Along the fence rosebushes grew, but it was as yet too early in the season for roses.
Beyond was the orchard proper, three long rows of trees with green avenues between, each tree standing in a wonderful blow of pink and white.
The charm of the place took sudden possession of Eric as nothing had ever done before.
Phlox (Phlox paniculata) was a favorite of many early gardeners; its presence in an overgrown area often indicates an abandoned homestead.
In Anne of Avonlea, Hester Gray’s abandoned garden—and the romantic and tragic story that accompanies it—deeply affects Anne and her friends when they discover it while setting off on a spring picnic. From its location between beeches and firs, to its moss-covered stone walls and border of blossoming cherry trees, everything about the small plot entrances them. Most compelling of all are the naturalized flowers—the spring bulbs that continued to multiply, year after year. “There were traces of old paths still and a double line of rosebushes through the middle; but all the rest of the space was a sheet of yellow and white narcissi, in their airiest, most lavish, wind-swayed bloom above the lush green grasses.”
The girls—Anne, Jane, and Priscilla—listen raptly as Diana tells the story of Hester’s husband’s devotion; as Hester became increasingly ill, he carried her daily to the garden, until the day she was dying, when “he picked all the roses that were out and heaped them over her; and she just smiled up at him . . . and closed her eyes . . . and that . . . was the end.”
To die so loved and in a garden! The effect may have been especially acute on Anne, who, when the girls eventually settle down for their picnic, suddenly startles them by pointing at the brook and exclaiming, “Look, do you see that poem?”
“Where?” Jane and Diana stared, as if expecting to see Runic rhymes on the birch trees.
“There . . . down in the brook . . . that old green, mossy log with the water flowing over it in those smooth ripples that look as if they’d been combed, and that single shaft of sunshine falling right athwart it, far down into the pool. Oh, it’s the most beautiful poem I ever saw.”
Jane finally decides it’s more of a picture than a poem. But not so to Anne, to whom “The lines and verses are only the outward garments of the poem . . . The real poem is the soul within them . . . and that beautiful bit is the soul of an unwritten poem.”
Though a classic case of beauty residing in the beholder’s eyes, it’s also a continuation of the trope of wild elegance that the sheer abundance of narcissi set in motion. To one so inclined, a grand drift of white blooms floating above a carpet of lush grass invites finding similar scenes in the surrounding world, the ordinary made extraordinary through a shift in the light, a different means of approach, a willingness simply to be present and pay attention.
It was a little narrow, twisting path, winding down over a long hill straight through Mr. Bell’s woods, where the light came down sifted through so many emerald screens that it was as flawless as the heart of a diamond. It was fringed in all its length with slim young birches, white-stemmed and lissom boughed; ferns and starflowers and wild lilies-of-the-valley and scarlet tufts of pigeon berries grew thickly along it; and always there was a delightful spiciness in the air and music of bird calls and the murmur and laugh of wood winds in the trees overhead.
—ANNE OF GREEN GABLES
No other forest smells as spicy as the boreal forest; no flowers are as hardy and as delicate as those that open under a stand of spruce and fir in spring; and no other woods embody the same kind of spiritual home than the one that Maud and Anne found under the conifers’ cathedral-like spires. This northern forest, consisting of various species of spruce, fir, birch, and larch, dominates the Prince Edward Island landscape and inspired some of Maud Montgomery’s most rapturous passages.
To Anne Shirley, one species of these trees—the firs—are stately, they’re friendly, and “there is no sweeter music on earth than that which the wind makes in the fir-trees at evening.” When a fir tree is cut into, Anne is convinced that the “delicious aroma” must indicate their very souls. And on the bitterest of nights, when the moonlight reflected off the snow is glaringly bright, and there is “no soft blending, or kind obscurity, or elusive mistiness in that searching glitter,” Anne realizes that “the only things that held their own individuality were the firs—for the fir is the tree of mystery and shadow, and yields never to the encroachments of crude radiance.”
These favorite trees of both Anne and Maud are part of a boreal forest that stretches across most of Canada and appears at high elevations in the continental United States and across the northernmost reaches of Europe and Asia. In these dark-hued woods, mosses and ferns abound and streams keep the shaded areas verdant and moist. Dense evergreen boughs make everything below them feel lush and well protected. When Montgomery designed a questionnaire for herself, modeled on one she had just read, her answer to the question “favorite object in Nature?” was the straightforward “A Prince Edward Island wood of fir and maple, where the ground is carpeted thick with ferns.” (She then shifts her reply to something even more specific: “my favorite object in Nature is Lover’s Lane.”)
The first blossoms to appear in the understory in spring—twinflower, starflower, Canada dogwood (also known as bunchberry or crackerberry), and Canada mayflower (wild lily of the valley)—look almost too delicate when snow might still fall and temperatures drop well below freezing. Their slender pale blooms belie their hardiness, however, and account for their presence throughout Anne of Green Gables, creating another kind of flowerbed that Anne and Maud relish.
The ferns and flowers that Anne and Diana find in their favorite places—Willowmere, the Dryad’s Bubble, Violet Vale, and the Haunted Wood—matter as much to the story as do those planted by the hands of a gardener or wood fairy, whether setting them out in spring or banking them under a cover of mulch for winter. As Anne tells Marilla after an outing to the Haunted Wood, “All the little wood things—the ferns and the satin leaves and the crackerberries—have gone to sleep, just as if somebody had tucked them away until spring under a blanket of leaves. I think it was a little gray fairy with a rainbow scarf that came tiptoeing along the last moonlight night and did it.”
The fruit of Canada dogwood; Anne also calls them pigeon berries, a term perhaps derived from what John Stewart in his Account Of Prince Edward Island (1806) noted was their ability to “fatten fowl fast.”
Canada mayflower or wild lily of the valley (Maianthemum canadense), also referred to as rice lilies in Anne of Green Gables.
Here, under a tree canopy, is the original garden, the place where Anne imagines being wed, much to the chagrin of Marilla and Rachel Lynde, who believe it would be terribly queer and maybe even illegal to be married outside. For Anne, however, the ideal setting would be “a June dawn, with a glorious sunrise, and roses blooming in the gardens; and I would slip down and meet Gilbert and we would go together to the heart of the beech woods—and there, under the green arches that would be like a splendid cathedral, we would be married.”
After her marriage to Ewan (a traditional wedding, in the parlor at Park Corner), Maud Montgomery moved far from the woodland gardens of her childhood, taking pleasure instead in the gardens in Leaskdale, where they lived from 1911 to 1926, and later in Norval, Ontario, where they stayed for the next nine years. Many Anne fans wondered whether, after Ewan retired from the ministry in 1935, Maud might move back to Prince Edward Island; she had, after all, admitted after one visit, “Oh, I felt that I belonged there—that I had done some violence to my soul when I left it.” Prince Edward Island was the landscape she most loved, the setting she used for all but one of her novels, the blueprint in her mind for an idyllic life.
She settled instead on simply carrying it with her—an island made timeless by its location; its reliance on fishing and farming, which kept its visual landscape relatively unchanged; and its very hold on her imagination, which was peopled with a large community of fictional characters by then. In romanticizing and fabricating aspects of the land, she made it possible for generations of readers to do the same. Her return visits reinforced her vision of the place, but she didn’t seem to need to live there again to keep all the old memories alive.
In her homes in Leaskdale and Norval, Ontario, she had family and friends, and literary connections and status, all of which provided myriad reasons to stay. A series of domestic troubles meant she couldn’t resettle the household far from a network of help and support, and the ongoing and expensive legal battle with her original publisher meant she had to maintain her same writing pace, even as a busy wife and mother of two sons, in order to help meet the family’s financial obligations. Perhaps, too, once she had worked the soil around each new home, finding a way to love each location, she established the necessary relationship with place that only a gardener can truly know.
“I love my garden,” Anne Shirley Blythe says in Anne’s House of Dreams, “and I love working in it. To potter with green, growing things, watching each day to see the dear, new sprouts come up, is like taking a hand in creation, I think. Just now my garden is like faith—the substance of things hoped for.” As in so many instances, her words sound like the heartfelt belief of her kindred spirit, Maud Montgomery.
Spring is the best time to walk in the woods; at least, we think so in spring; but when summer comes it seems better still; and autumn woods are things quite incomparable in their splendor; and sometimes the winter woods, with their white reserve and fearlessly displayed nakedness, seem the rarest and finest of all. For it is with the forest as with a sweetheart of flesh and blood, in every changing mood and vesture she is still more adorable in her beloved’s eyes.
—“SPRING IN THE WOODS,” THE CANADIAN MAGAZINE, MAY 1911
