GARDEN REBORN Spirit of Celia Thaxter’s creation alive on Appledore Island

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From outside the hand-tied wooden fence that surrounds her garden, I see Celia glaring at the slimy trails of slugs she can’t contain.

Not actually Celia Thaxter, of course, but her spirit which often feels alive on the southern coast of Maine. I see her just as she appears in century-old photographs, a white haired Victorian woman with excellent posture in a white ankle length, high-collared dress. The photos show her here on Appledore Island among the Isles of Shoals. Long before this morning when I boarded the ferry to Appledore, I commiserated with Celia, who all spring regularly rose before dawn to spade lime around her beds of annuals, determined to protect their new green growth from the wretched slugs that love to dine by moonlight.

Two winters ago, I read “An Island Garden,” in which Celia, an author and poet, described her final season as a gardener. The book was published months before her death in 1894. Celia chronicled her failures and successes for my fellow fledgling gardeners but it was her lyrical passages that enthralled me.

I never forget my planted seeds. Often I wake in the night and think how the rains and the dews have reached to the dry shell and softened it; how the spirit of life begins to stir within, and the individuality of the plant to assert itself; how it is thrusting two hands forth from the imprisoning husk, one, the root, to grasp the earth, to hold itself firm and absorb its food, the other stretching above to find the light, that it may drink in the breeze and sunshine and so climb to its full perfection of beauty. It is curious that the leaf should so love the light and the root so hate it.

The Isles of Shoals were Celia’s muse for poems, prose and artwork that earned her widespread acclaim. While I read the book beside my wood stove, I was by her side in the garden.

Time and distance give me a vantage point; I know what Celia could not foresee. Two decades after her death, a fire in 1914 ravaged her garden, home and the family’s adjoining hotel; the colorful profusion now reborn was once overwhelmed by sumac, wild cherry and witch grass even before World War II when the military erected barracks here, barring the public until victory was declared. Nor could she know, as I do, that a stream of volunteers would rely on “An Island Garden” as their blueprint for restoring her garden 50 years past its demise, tending it with a devotion that equals her own.

Celia Thaxter probably expected to be remembered for her writing, but her garden has become her unexpected legacy.

The garden is smaller than I expected, just 15 ft.-by-50 ft., but splashed with colors intensified by the island light. They are flowers that even in the 1890s she called “old-fashioned” – soft, pink sweet peas that climb a trellis, tendrils drifting in the breeze; orange-blooming calendulas with daisy-like petals tinged with rust; nasturtiums spilling along the ground, their blooms the shade of apricots. Daylight bounces off the low cloud cover, off the water of the Atlantic licking at the shore, even off the many shades of gray granite underfoot as I walked up from the cove where the John M. Kingsbury is tied up at the dock.

On my journey to the island with dozens of day trippers from across New England and as far as Colorado, some of whom have their own copies of “An Island Garden” stowed in their daypacks, I enter a world of gardeners, historians and travelers drawn here by her words. I, too, am drawn back in time.

In 1839, Thomas Laighton accepted a two-year stint as keeper of Shoals Light. He moved his wife, children and a cow from Portsmouth, N.H., to White Island, barely two acres of rock and sparse soil. His 4-year-old daughter Celia and her younger brothers, Cedric and Oscar, were home-schooled for the next six years. The children grew to love the treeless island’s solitude.

Laighton was more than a light keeper; he was an entrepreneur. Seeing opportunity in the altered demeanor of city dwellers as they discovered the Shoals’ haunting beauty, he reasoned that the nine islands – Hog, Smuttynose, Star, White, Seavey, Duck, Malaga, Cedar and Lunging – were easy to reach from Boston and a short, pleasant trip up the Piscataqua River to Portsmouth Harbor. Before long, he managed a small summer hotel on the island. Although most folks today think the entire chain is in New Hampshire, the border splits the islands; the Maine Shoals archipelago is the only part of the State of Maine south of 43 degrees north latitude, visible from Kittery. Several of the islands technically lie within Kittery’s borders.

Long before 1614, when Captain John Smith landed on Hog Island, the seaweed- and nutrient-rich waters surrounding the Isles of Shoals attracted commercial fishermen. It is said the name Shoals itself refers to the abundant schools of fish, not shallow water. Slowly word spread across the Atlantic. Laighton knew that during a span of 350 years, the islands hosted French and English explorers, trading posts and small settlements that served the dried-fish industry. He probably told his share of Shoals stories, of shipwrecks and Blackbeard’s buried treasure. And the tales continue to come. In Celia’s adulthood, a double ax murder of two women on Smuttynose made sensational headlines, fictionalized by Anita Shreve in her novel, “The Weight of Water.”

When Celia was 12, her father became business partners with 23-year-old Levi Thaxter, a recent Harvard graduate. The two men purchased several of the islands; on Hog they built a hotel for 300 guests. Laighton changed the name Hog to Appledore in a nod to marketing appeal.

Thaxter soon left most business decisions to his partner, instead taking on the role of the children’s tutor. Apparently a mutual love of learning kindled a flame; three years later, Celia, age 16, and Levi were married. Before long, they had three sons.

To her duties as wife and mother Celia added the role of hostess at Appledore House, which quickly was becoming a popular resort colony. From her garden refuge, she collected flowers to fill jars and colored bottles she placed throughout the hotel. And as she had since childhood, she filled the pages of her journals with poetry and essays that sprang from her garden’s soil.

Levi Thaxter was friends with many of the era’s intellectuals. During winters off-island, the couple often invited them to dinner. Celia’s sharp mind and lack of pretense seems to have captivated the crowd for she soon became the center of a literary salon. Come summer her closest friends – writer John Greenleaf Whittier, Sarah Orne Jewett, Annie and James Fields – came to Appledore House as did others – Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Horace Greeley and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

I wonder which them was the anonymous friend who sent Celia’s poem, “Land-Locked,” a yearning for the Shoals, to James Fields, editor of Atlantic Monthly. Its publication in 1861 launched her literary career. She dined with Charles Dickens. Her writing was favorably compared with Mark Twain. Her friendship with the American Impressionist painter Childe Hassam proved fortuitous for them both. Hassam’s watercolor illustrations are a famous complement to Houghton Mifflin’s first edition of “An Island Garden” (reissued in 2001). They are considered among the finest of his career.

Levi and Celia, however, were mismatched. He was sickly and never took to island life while she was homesick for the shoals each winter when they lived on the mainland. Within ten years they mostly lived apart and when Levi nearly died in a boating accident, he swore off travel by water completely.

If Celia were still alive in 2001, it’s likely she would have immersed herself in preparing for that year’s Portsmouth Athenaeum’s exhibit, “One Woman’s Work: The Visual Art of Celia Laighton Thaxter.” Perhaps under-appreciated as an artist, she surely would have relished the showing of china teacups, plates and vases on which she painted Icelandic poppies, violets and the craggy Maine shoreline, often including her hand-painted poems. Her framed watercolors of the Isles of Shoals reveal a delicate brush, a talent for fine detail.

She also had a head for business. Some have even speculated that she wrote her popular book, “Among the Isles of Shoals,” as a thinly disguised marketing tool for the hotel. Contributors to the Athenaeum’s exhibition catalog noted that at the hotel her painted china and watercolors sold like souvenirs. She endorsed her own likeness in advertising for products that ranged from cigar boxes to typewriters, using her celebrity to promote Appledore House.

But “An Island Garden” remains fresh and poetic. As a reader, I shared her dismay in the aftermath of a thunder storm that knocked a hummingbird unconscious. As March became May, I joined her watching for house martins, then sandpipers, and together we listened to the chorus of barn swallows. I considered whether I, too, should carry a magnifying glass in my pocket to study the delicacy of petals and stamens, the patterns of seeds.

Here on Appledore Island, from outside Celia’s garden, I almost expect to see her inside the gate beside her favorites, salmon poppies she called painted glass. But steps from where she is buried in the Laighton family plot, there are only the bright yellow marigolds, pink wild roses, multicolored hollyhocks. As in Hassam’s illustrations, feathery pale yellow coreopsis, blue cornflowers and bold sunflowers dance in the breeze, surrounded by a fence like the one she built to protect her garden from the ocean winds.

The fence perfectly frames her creation. This is my first real visit to the island but already I know something of the contentment she found here.

Shortly after World War I, scientists discovered the biological diversity of the Isles of Shoals. In 1928, the University of New Hampshire Marine Zoological Laboratory was established, thriving until military occupation of Appledore during World War II.

More than 125 species of pelagic (ocean-feeding) and inland birds migrate through the Isles of Shoals. Herring gulls are more abundant here than anywhere else in the United States and harbor seals raise their young around Duck Island. Lobstermen annually report sightings of several varieties of whales. Appledore Island now is a Registered Historic Site and a State of Maine Critical Nature Area, designated to protect both its heron rookery and the subtidal and rocky intertidal community. Black-crowned night herons, little blue herons, glossy ibis and snowy egrets nest within its 95 acres.

“Appledore was magnetic, a magic place, back in 1946 when just out of high school I first set foot on the island,” said Dr. John (Jack) Kingsbury, Cornell University Professor Emeritus of Botany. “I felt if I ever went back, I wouldn’t be able to leave, that it would attach itself to my soul.”

As a young Cornell professor, in 1966 he brought an undergraduate class to Star Island for a two-week program. Its success led faculty at Cornell and UNH to collaborate on establishing a permanent site. The Shoals Marine Laboratory, based on Appledore, opened in 1973, in part thanks to a grant from Rosamond Thaxter who wrote “Sandpiper,” an acclaimed biography of her grandmother. Today SML is nationally recognized and North America’s largest marine field station focusing on undergraduate study.

Once the academic program was established, he was determined to restore the garden doing much of the hard labor himself while his daughter, Joanna, researched heirloom seeds and many other volunteers pitched in to help.

When Kingsbury left the laboratory 13 years later, he worried who would take over as caretaker. Word of mouth brought an experienced garden preservationist. For the next 20 years, Virginia Chisholm dedicated herself to its historically accurate restoration.

Meanwhile the garden developed an almost mythical appeal. Something had to be done about visitors who were interfering with the lab’s academic activities. Weekly guided garden tours were the answer, with admission fees that to date have raised more than $100,000 for undergraduate scholarships to study marine science.

Five years ago when Giny Chisholm, then in her eighties, decided to retire, Pam and Mark Boutilier arrived for SML’s summer workshop, “A Garden is a Sea of Flowers.” There they met Chisholm and Kingsbury, who recognized kindred spirits in the couple whose North Hampton, NH, shop, Appledore Arbor, was inspired by Celia Thaxter. For Mark, who explored the Shoals as a young boy in a small boat, and Pam, who first read “An Island Garden” 20 years ago, entering Celia’s garden was like meeting an old friend. They became custodians of Celia Thaxter’s Garden.

Janet Mendelsohn can be reached at janetmendelsohn75@yahoo.com.