Most visitors to Prince Edward Island arrive in the summer, a season marked primarily by long hours of sunlight, mild temperatures, and gentle breezes. The island is far enough north to have nearly sixteen hours of daylight by mid-June (three-quarters of an hour longer than New York, and more than an hour longer than San Francisco or Tokyo), while daytime temperatures in July and August average in the mid-70s F. The beaches invite swimmers, the Confederation Trail bikers, and the markets and festivals brim with good cheer.
Yet summer represents only a small part of Anne’s and Maud’s worlds, engaged as each is in noticing subtle changes in the natural world year-round. Anne gives us frequent glimpses of the different seasons in Anne of Green Gables, waxing poetic no matter the weather, while Maud Montgomery, in her journals, provides frequent evidence of the sustenance she derives from the changing landscape as well as the effect on her soul when the weather is so stormy and cold that she is unable to get outside and be replenished in the places she loves. But such blue periods, as Montgomery calls them, are relatively few. The prevailing theme throughout both the novel and Montgomery’s Cavendish journals is that the outside world is a glorious place, with every season bringing forth new hues, new sights, and new reminders of the beauty of Prince Edward Island.
The wind across a field of ripening wheat (seen here on Prince Edward Island) can make it look like moving water, an extension of the sea just beyond.
Spring had come once more to Green Gables—the beautiful, capricious, reluctant Canadian spring, lingering along through April and May in a succession of sweet, fresh, chilly days, with pink sunsets and miracles of resurrection and growth.
—ANNE OF GREEN GABLES
Spring—the season of tiny pale mayflowers, or, as Montgomery describes them, “the initials of spring’s first lettering . . . that have in them the very soul of all the springs that ever were”; their much-anticipated arrival sets in motion Anne’s mayflower picnic in Avonlea and Maud’s in Cavendish. Spring is also the time of violets, particularly those grown as thickly as in Violet Vale, “all the grass enskied with them,” along with great drifts of narcissus that Rachel Lynde lets Anne gather by the armful after apologizing (at Matthew’s urging) for behaving so terribly when the two first met.
Spring is when twinflowers first appear in the woods—“those shyest and sweetest of woodland blooms”—and the “pale, aerial starflowers, like the spirits of last year’s blossoms.” And in her journal, spring is the season that Montgomery will choose, in answering the question as to which is her favorite, with an exclamation point for added emphasis. “Spring—spring—spring! The last two weeks of May in Ontario, the first two of June in P.E. Island. Who could love any season better than spring?” “Spring in the Woods” appears as the first of four essays about the seasons that she’ll write in 1911 for The Canadian Magazine, and reveals the way she approaches the forested landscape.
After Anne apologized, Mrs. Lynde encouraged her to “pick a bouquet of them white June lilies, over in the corner if you like.” Narcissus (Montgomery was careful to use the formal “narcissi” for the plural) shows up often in the novels, a perennial favorite of Anne Shirley.
Believe me, it is of no use to seek the woods from any motive except sheer love of them; they will find us out at once and hide all their sweet, world-old secrets from us. But if they know we come to them because we love them they will be very kind to us . . . for the woods when they give at all give unstintedly.
Spring, too, is when Anne and Matthew take their last walk together, though neither could know they wouldn’t have another chance, as he was to die the next day.
She never forgot that day; it was so bright and golden and fair, so free from shadow and so lavish of blossom. Anne spent some of its rich hours in the orchard; she went to the Dryad’s Bubble and Willowmere and Violet Vale . . . and finally in the evening she went with Matthew for the cows, through Lovers’ Lane to the back pasture. The woods were all gloried through with sunset and the warm splendour of it streamed through the hill gaps in the west.
The two talk about his weariness, and Anne’s guilt that she wasn’t the boy that he and Marilla had wanted, someone who could have relieved him of some of the hard work of the farm. But he wouldn’t have taken a dozen boys, he tells her, over the chance to have had her. And it wasn’t a boy, was it, he says, who had just won the coveted Avery scholarship. “It was a girl,” he says, “my girl—my girl that I’m proud of.”
The spring woods are all spiritual. They charm us through the senses of eye and ear—delicate tintings and aerial sounds, like a maiden’s dreams set to music. But the summer woods make a more sensuous appeal.
—“THE WOODS IN SUMMER,” THE CANADIAN MAGAZINE, SEPT. 1911
Summer on Prince Edward Island begins in mid-June, when the daytime temperatures average 67°F and the land has turned lush and green again. For the Avonlea children, liberated from school, summer meant leisurely hours spent boating and picnicking, trouting and berrying (“Who that has eaten strawberries, grass-new from the sunny corners of summer woods, can ever forget them?”). When the doctor advises Marilla to keep “that red-headed girl of yours in the open air all summer and don’t let her read books until she gets more spring in her step,” striking fear in her about the threat of consumption, Anne has “the golden summer of her life . . . She walked, rowed, berried and dreamed to her heart’s content.”
On an evening in August, when fireflies blinked through the fields and the cooling air brought out the woods’ smells, Anne came “dancing up the lane, like a wind-blown sprite.” Though her excitement stems from the invitation she has just received to tea at the Allans’, she seems also to be riding the very joy of a summer night. She radiates a similar spirit after the tea party, when “she came home through the twilight, under a great, high-sprung sky gloried over with trails of saffron and rosy cloud, in a beatified state of mind.” While she describes the evening to Marilla, the author reminds us of the setting.
Haying began today, which means that the best half of the summer is over. And now the field before my window is a sweep of silvery swaths gleaming in the hot afternoon sun and the wind that is rustling in the poplars is bringing up whiffs of the fragrance of ripening grasses.
—THE SELECTED JOURNALS OF L. M. MONTGOMERY, VOL. 1
A cool wind was blowing down over the long harvest fields from the rims of firry western hills and whistling through the poplars. One clear star hung above the orchard and the fireflies were flitting over in Lovers’ Lane, in and out among the ferns and rustling boughs. Anne watched them as she talked and somehow felt that wind and stars and fireflies were all tangled up together into something unutterably sweet and enchanting.
An early summer view from the Lucy Maud Montgomery Land Trust Trail, to the west of Cavendish Beach.
It’s an entanglement that would seem less so without Anne in its midst, her vitality as much a part of the landscape as that of every other living being that inhabits it.
As a girl, Maud Montgomery shared many of the same summer activities as Anne, while also spending considerable time at the nearby shore. During vacations, as she writes in The Alpine Path, the children would often be pressed into service to deliver lunch to the men fishing for mackerel, and would then stay for the rest of the day at the beach. “I soon came to know every cove, headland, and rock on that shore. We would watch the boats through the sky-glass, paddle in the water, gather shells and pebbles and mussels, and sit on the rocks and eat dulse [a type of edible seaweed], literally, by the yard.”
She writes, too, of finding large white shells, “as big as our fists, that had been washed ashore from some distant strand or deep sea haunt.” With the words from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “The Chambered Nautilus” in mind, she imagines herself “sitting dreamily on a big boulder with my bare, wet feet tucked up under my print skirt, holding a huge ‘snail’ shell in my sunburned paw and appealing to my soul ‘to build thee more stately mansions.’” It’s easy to imagine Anne, barefooted and sun-kissed (or maybe more freckled), taking a similar flight of fancy with a treasure tossed up by the sea.
Maud Montgomery’s photograph shows the Campbell family, including Aunt Annie and Uncle John, along the north shore of Prince Edward Island, c. 1890s. This famous landmark was known as Teapot Rock in Montgomery’s time, but the back “handle” has since eroded away, so locals have renamed it Teacup Rock.
October was a beautiful month at Green Gables, when the birches in the hollow turned as golden as sunshine and the maples behind the orchard were royal crimson and the wild cherry-trees along the lane put on the loveliest shades of dark red and bronzy green, while the fields sunned themselves in aftermaths. . . . “Oh, Marilla,” [Anne] exclaimed one Saturday morning, coming dancing in with her arms full of gorgeous boughs, “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
—ANNE OF GREEN GABLES
Autumn comes fairly quickly to the island, marked most visibly by the end of the tourist season and the changing colors of the trees, a brilliant display that typically lasts throughout the month of October. By early September, the lupines have all gone by, though goldenrods and asters still bloom along the roadsides. The last hay has been baled, the apple trees are heavy with fruit, and the ocean begins to appear more moody and dark. Night begins arriving noticeably earlier than in July, especially in the woods, and as Anne brings the cows home down Lover’s Lane one September evening, she sees “All the gaps and clearings . . . brimmed up with ruby sunset light. Here and there the lane was splashed with it, but for the most part it was already quite shadowy beneath the maples, and the spaces under the firs were filled with a clear violet dusk like airy wine.”
She’s deep into the world of a Sir Walter Scott poem when she comes upon Diana, who’s full of news to share, and Anne greets her with a description that seems to have absorbed autumn’s very hues. “Isn’t this evening just like a purple dream, Diana? It makes me so glad to be alive. In the mornings I always think the mornings are best; but when evening comes I think it’s lovelier still.”
Cattails, also known as bulrushes (Typha species), in late autumn light; the seed heads begin to disintegrate in the fall, their cottony fluff blown about by the wind.
Autumns were a bit tougher for the young Maud, after she leaves the Cavendish school and begins to make her way in the world, the season stunning in its splendor but bittersweet in what it came to represent. With autumn came the start of new teaching positions, and long, often lonely hours by herself that coincided with a slow fading of the light and fewer hours to wander outside. While still in Lower Bedeque and just shy of her twenty-fourth birthday, she writes: “Harvest is ended and summer is gone.”
Some of the many different colors of autumn on Prince Edward Island—the reds and golds of maple and birch on one side and the dark green of spruce and fir on the other.
It is October and autumn. We are having delightful fall days, misty and purple, with a pungent, mellow air and magnificent sunsets, followed by the rarest of golden twilights and moonlit nights floating in silver. Maple and birch are crimson and gold and the fields sun themselves in aftermaths. But it is autumn and[,] beautiful as everything is[,] it is the beauty of decay—the sorrowful beauty of the end.
Despite the initial upbeat tenor of the entry, with its celebration of the season’s colors, the writing begins to turn, even as autumn does, for her next lines describe her emotional state as neither happy nor at peace. Unlike Anne, who might be sitting near Marilla in a warm firelit room—“curled up Turk-fashion on the hearth-rug, gazing into that joyous glow where the sunshine of a hundred summers was being distilled from the maple cord-wood”—Maud was beginning to experience “the infinite sadness of living,” and autumn was the time when its ache became most acute.
It had been a very mild December and people had looked forward to a green Christmas; but just enough snow fell softly in the night to transfigure Avonlea. Anne peeped out from her frosted gable window with delighted eyes. The firs in the Haunted Wood were all feathery and wonderful; the birches and wild cherry-trees were outlined in pearl; the ploughed fields were stretches of snowy dimples; and there was a crisp tang in the air that was glorious.
—ANNE OF GREEN GABLES
Winter is the season when, as Maud Montgomery writes, “people like to cuddle down and count their mercies.” From November to April, the island receives an average of ten feet of snow, while temperatures typically range from 10 to 26°F. Bitter winds can make it feel much colder, while calm, crystalline days can transform the outer world, often sending both Maud and Anne into blissful or exuberant moments, seemingly impervious to the harsh weather. On one such winter day, after rescuing Minnie May from her terrible bout with croup, Anne wanders home
in the wonderful, white-frosted winter morning, heavy-eyed from loss of sleep, but still talking unweariedly to Matthew as they crossed the long white field and walked under the glittering fairy arch of the Lover’s Lane maples. “Oh, Matthew, isn’t it a wonderful morning? The world looks like something God had just imagined for His own pleasure, doesn’t it? . . . I’m so glad I live in a world where there are white frosts, aren’t you?”
The night of the first concert that Anne attends (and where she feigns disinterest in Gilbert’s recitation) is made even more memorable by the sleigh ride she and Diana take to get there.
Anne revelled in the drive to the hall, slipping along over the satin-smooth roads with the snow crisping under the runners. There was a magnificent sunset, and the snowy hills and deep blue water of the St. Lawrence Gulf seemed to rim in the splendour like a huge bowl of pearl and sapphire brimmed with wine and fire.
To the irrepressible Anne, winter is simply another season to experience fully and joyously.
Winter could be a merry time for Maud Montgomery as well, as when she recounts near-mishaps with the sleigh—getting stuck, tipping over, or, as during one storm when she was living in Belmont, becoming so lost that no one in her party knew where they were and her three male companions took to arguing about what to do next.
Finally, as the squall continued as thick as ever, we decided to take the wind in our faces and start. If the wind had not changed—a rather momentous “if”—this would take us across to Cape Malpeque. If it had—well, we might drive straight into the channel. In no very long time, however we reached land . . . There was no use in looking for a road—we just had to make one. We turned slap up the bank, tore a gap in a fence and drove across two fields . . . I expected every moment to hear the runners go smash.
Heavy frost on the sand dunes near the Panmure Island Lighthouse, on the eastern shore of Prince Edward Island.
The horses were terrified, the traces broke, and though “half frozen and wholly frightened,” she also “shook with laughter” at the absurdity of the arguing boys. At last they reached the light for which they’d been aiming—a house “not half a mile from where we started.”
This sense of humor was often the only way to cope with the season’s brutal weather. “We have had a terrible two days’ storm,” she writes in 1905, the year she begins working in earnest on Anne of Green Gables. “I would say the worst storm we ever had if I didn’t know that every bad storm seems the worst by reason of the contrast its present badness offers to the badness of past ones grown dim.” The sequence of storms that winter and the amount of snow each delivered eventually created drifts as tall as the house, covering the doors and windows and leaving the rooms downstairs, “as dark as twilight. The drifts are certainly very beautiful; but one does not care greatly for architectural beauty in a prison.” A week later she describes her pleasure at not having to “sally out and shovel snow . . . for the excellent reason that I could not get out. This morning the door and every window on the east side of the house was completely snowed over.”
Some days, however, neither humor nor her writing could help her shake the weight or the length of the long nights (sixteen hours of darkness on the shortest day of the year); the effect on her was that of being imprisoned, with no escape from the depression that too often settled in during this time of year. “Winter is here to stay,” she writes on the solstice in 1900.
I hate it because I can’t prowl around by myself outside in the evenings. When the dim wintry twilight comes down there is nothing to do but drop my work with a little sigh of weariness and creep away into a dark corner to nurse a bit of a heartache. If it were summer I could get away outside under the trees and the stars and my soul would be so filled with their beauty that pain would have no place.
Many of Maud’s journal entries in winter read like the account of someone struggling with seasonal affective disorder. If she could just get outside; if she could just get enough sun! After a particularly fierce March storm left her with a case of “the blues,” she writes, “I’ll be all right when the sunshine comes back and I’m able to work.” She finds some pleasure in forcing bulbs inside—daffodils, hyacinth, narcissus—their blossoms providing a bit of color in the dead of winter. “I have some . . . poking their dear heads up in window boxes and I have great hopes of them by and by.” A few years later she writes of the effect of her daffodils, their beauty making her “feel ashamed of my blues and my despondency.”
Maud Montgomery’s photograph of Lover’s Lane on a day when she was able to get outside with her camera, despite the weather, c. 1890s. “I am no longer a prisoner,” Montgomery wrote in her journal on March 11, 1904. “I can get out to the dear comradeship of woods and fields again. I went across the snowy fields to Lover’s Lane. I love that place idolatrously—I am happier there than anywhere else.”
A winter scene of the Cavendish home where Maud Montgomery lived with her grandparents. Photograph by L. M. Montgomery, c. 1890s.
And even when the sun isn’t shining, she can usually find in her work the necessary uplift that helps her transform the difficult into the beautiful. On one bitter night, when she’s riding back from Charlottetown by sleigh after finishing her entrance exams, she writes that she “began to suffer keenly” from the chill. But after a stop to warm up, they set out again.
And I could once more enjoy the cold pure beauty of the landscape . . . The snow crackled and snapped under the runners. The sky faded out but the strip of yellow along the west got brighter and fierier, as if all the stray gleams of light were concentrating in one spot, and the long running curves of the distant hills stood out against it in dark distinctness and bare birches hung their slender boughs against the cold with the very perfection of grace.
Looking down from the highest cliff on the island at the Cape Tryon Lighthouse, just east of Park Corner.
It’s just such exquisite moments that she carries over to Anne of Green Gables, giving Anne the same fierce energy of the season. When Anne bolts out the door to reunite with Diana after Minnie May’s recovery—“gone without a cap or wrap . . . tearing through the orchard with her hair streaming”—Marilla tries calling out to her, “Anne Shirley—are you crazy? Come back this instant and put something on you.” But of course it’s too late, as Marilla quickly realizes, “I might as well call to the wind.”
I had . . . then, as now, two great refuges and consolations—the world of nature and the world of books. They kept life in my soul; they made me love my home because of my dreams and rambles and the deep joy and delight they gave me—because of the halo they threw over what was otherwise bare and savorless.
—THE SELECTED JOURNALS OF L. M. MONTGOMERY, VOL. 1
