An Island Garden

by Celia Thaxter

Other authorsChilde Hassam (Illustrator)
Hardcover, 1988

Call number

635 THA

Collection

Publication

Houghton Mifflin (1988), 126 pages

Description

"Celia Laighton Thaxter (1835-1894) was born in Portsmouth, NH. When she was four, her father became the lighthouse keeper on White Island in the Isles of Shoals. After resigning his post eight years later, he built a resort hotel on Appledore Island in Maine. The first of its kind on the New England coast, the hotel became a gathering place for writers and artists during the latter half of the 19th century. In her last year of life, Celia published this work, in which she lovingly describes her Appledore garden and its flowers. The flowers she grew in her cutting garden filled her own rooms and those of the hotel, and this work became famous for its descriptions of the old-fashioned flowers she grew there. Her island garden, a plot that measured 15 feet square, has been re-created and is open to visitors."… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member labwriter
My edition is a boxed facsimile of the original, with cover by noted Houghton Mifflin book designer and artist Sarah Wyman Whitman and color illustrations by Childe Hassam. The original was published in 1894. Thaxter lived on Appledore Island, the largest of the Isles of Shoals in Maine.

Thaxter
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entertained friends at her home on the island, including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Jewett, and American Impressionist Childe Hassam, etc.

"21st [May] Weeding all day in the hot sun; hard work, but pleasant. . . . It takes me longer to weed than most people, because I will do it so thoroughly. It is such a pleasure and satisfaction to clear the beautiful brown earth, smooth and soft, from these rough growths, leaving the beautiful green Poppies and Larkspurs and Pinks and Asters, and the rest, in undisturbed possession!"
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Pages

126

ISBN

0395485916 / 9780395485910
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