Celia Thaxter's garden, Appledore Island
Herald Sunday, August 13, 2006
Sensory delight in Celia's garden
Caretakers tend to 19th century poet's colorful vision at sea
By Amy Kane
My first taste of Celia’s garden is literally a taste: the petal of a nasturtium. It’s crisp, sweet and peppery. “Like a radish,” Pam Boutilier says.
We have crossed 10 miles of river and ocean, climbed rocky ground past speckled gull chicks and their squawking parents, and opened the gate of a garden painted in a dazzling palette of colors.
The cornflowers are bluer than the sky. Yellow calliopsis reach for the sun. Red and pink poppies flutter in the sea breeze.
It’s a garden that seems lifted from the pages of a lovely old book. In fact, it is.
Poet Celia Thaxter wrote “An Island Garden” in 1894, the last year of her life, for friends who wanted to know the secrets to growing the famous little flower garden that stood at the entrance to her cottage on Appledore Island.
Only friends and special guests were invited to view her garden.
With floppy hat, sunblock, pen, notepad, camera and a bag of pretzels to stave off seaside munchies, I have come for the day as a guest of the current caretakers of Celia’s resurrected garden, Mark and Pamela Boutilier, along with a garden crew of three.
I may even try a few snips with the garden shears.
The sun glints off the water, the students and professors go about business at the Shoals Marine Laboratory buildings nearby, gulls wheel and call overhead, and the heady scent of flowers mingles with salt air.
It’s a garden at sea.
A little history
Celia grew up a lighthouse keeper’s daughter on nearby White Island.
The rocky island outpost sharpened her senses. Later she wrote, “Every blade of grass that sprang out of the ground, every humblest weed was precious in my sight.”
At age five she planted her first flowers. The fire-colored marigolds in her scrap of garden were the joy of her heart and delight of her eyes, she wrote.
Later she became hostess at the grand resort hotel her father Thomas Laighton built across on Appledore, the largest of the Isles of Shoals, with his business partner Levi Thaxter, who eventually became Celia’s husband.
Celia filled glass vases in the hotel with freshly cut flowers. Her garden design was informal.
“She planted it willy-nilly,” Mark Boutilier said. “She liked colors.”
As a poet she liked the names of her flowers too: cosmos and candytuft, delphinium and dianthus, Giant Imperial Larkspur, fairy rose, marguerite and mignonette, forget-me-nots, Queen Anne’s thimbles, sweet rocket and more.
Flowering vines grew up to shade the cottage piazza, where American Impressionist Childe Hassam liked to sit and paint. The same hops she used to make beer grow along the garden fence today.
The fame she earned at a young age, with memoirs like “Among the Isles of Shoals” in 1873, and poems published in The Atlantic magazine, helped draw writers and dignitaries like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe and President Franklin Pierce to the island.
In 1914, Celia’s cottage burned to the ground along with the Appledore House Hotel. Only the stone foundation remains today.
But in 1977, Dr. John Kingsbury, the founder and first director of the Shoals Marine Laboratory, cleared away the sumac and poison ivy and, using Celia’s detailed book as a guide, began replanting her garden.
A small dedicated band of volunteers carry on the legacy.
Celia’s gardeners
Tuesdays in summer, before the public guided tour on Wednesdays, the Boutiliers close their flower and home décor shop in North Hampton, Appledore Arbor (named for the island and the arbor in the garden), and hitch a ride on the 36-foot Shoals Marine Laboratory boat from a Portsmouth dock to tend Celia’s garden.
“I love being in this 15-by-50 foot rectangle,” Pam Boutilier said.
She makes her way with a calm concentration from plant to plant, cutting off withered flowers and seed heads to instigate new blossoms, pulling weeds, and turning the soil.
She was joined on this day by Carol Hutton, an eighth-grade science teacher and farmer from Lee, and longtime garden volunteer Virginia Chisholm, of Rye Beach.
Ginny has been coming to Celia’s garden since 1980. She helped Dr. Kingsbury find and plant many of the historic flowers – annuals brought now as seedlings from greenhouses at UNH each May.
In early years she asked every visitor to bring a bag of garden soil.
“On planting day we would ring the bell and students would come down to help,” she said. “We’re a close family out here.”
She has battled muskrats same as Celia battled slugs and seed-snatching sparrows.
Ginny tapped Pam and Mark to replace her as official caretakers of the garden four years ago, but she still enjoys a day of work on the island. She brings an old lawn chair for restful breaks.
“I can’t give it up,” she said. “I’ve always loved flowers, but to be able to come out here was very special. The people are wonderful. There’s always something interesting going on.”
At the Shoals Marine Lab dining hall at lunch, where the skeleton of a whale hangs from the ceiling, Ginny meets an old friend, former director John B. Heiser. He is back from a trip to New Zealand, and is teaching a course in marine vertebrates.
At the other end of the table, Mark and Pam hobnob with current director William Bemis. The garden is officially part of the Shoals Marine Laboratory.
After lunch, we explore a couple of buildings, and peer in tanks with live sea creatures like starfish and hermit crabs.
We meet a young research scientist from the Mexican desert studying the seal population of Duck Island.
People come to Appledore for many reasons, Mark said: to count bees, look at birds, study marine mammals, make art.
“But each individual who comes out, they’re equally passionate,” he said. “The island draws them. It’s not like any other beautiful place.”
Mark and Pam recruit their Tuesday garden crew with care.
“We try to choose people who know something about gardening or who take good directions,” said Pam. “And people who don’t get seasick.”
Between three and six helpers come out each week; some are one-timers, others return many times.
Pam shows us historic photos of the hotel and cottage. Later, just before the 4 p.m. boat, we will walk island paths to Siren’s Cove, the Devil’s Dance Floor, and the small graveyard of the Laighton family.
This is Carol’s first trip to the island but probably not her last. She is an experienced gardener who finds the work relaxing and fulfilling.
“It feels good, doing something for people who will see the beauty of this place tomorrow,” she said.
Proceeds from the Wednesday tours – which are $75 each and depart at 9:30 a.m. from the Eastman Docks in Seabrook, returning at 4:30 p.m. – benefit Shoals Marine Laboratory student scholarships.
After lunch, Keith Mills, of Hampton, and Mark, resumed weed whacking among the foundation ruins.
Keith, a regional account manager for a large company, said he loves to escape to the island a few times each summer.
“I have to travel a lot, put on a flak jacket, deal with problems, get yelled at,” he said. “Here I can make a difference right away.”
They found a few hunks of rusted and unidentifiable metal hidden in weeds, artifacts from the long-gone cottage.
Mark has a passion for Shoals history, and regales us with tales of Captain John Smith, the Laightons and Blackbeard’s 12th wife.
In the 1960’s when he was 12 he made a secret trip in a small boat across open water from New Castle.
“It was a calm day, I had 10 full gallons, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a compass,” he said.
He found the ruins, and the lab buildings from earlier in the century with broken windows and seagulls flying in and out of the roof. It was a ghost town.
“The impact it made on me at that age, the look of the island – I immediately claimed it as my own,” he said.
In 1988, Pam’s mother gave her the newly republished “An Island Garden.” She has read the book 20 times.
“It’s so full of details, descriptions of flowers I find so sweet and romantic,” she said. “The love of nature that Celia had – I find peace in the same things.”
I can’t achieve Pam’s gardening zen, but I try helping by snipping dead flowers off the rose-of-heaven. Hundreds, it seems.
That night I will lie in bed and, instead of the sensation of a rocking boat, I will be staring into a myriad of tiny blossoms, dizzy with the memory of bright colors.
It’s the light, Mark explained that day. It reflects off the ocean.
. . .
Information about Celia’s garden, including Wednesday tours, which run through August 30, can be found on the Boutilier’s Web site at www.appledorearbor.com and at the Shoals Marine Laboratory site www.sml.cornell.edu.
There are three Wednesday trips left this summer – Aug. 16, 23, and 30 – and all three have openings. Tours cost $75 per person and depart at 9:30 a.m. from the Eastman Docks in Seabrook. Sign up through the Shoals Marine Laboratory Web site or call (607) 255-3717. Reservations for next summer open in April 2007.
Pam and Mark Boutilier
Photo album: Appledore Island
More... in the Maine Morning Sentinel Online today: Celia's passion shared by many
Wow. Through your words and photos, I think I just fell in love with a new place. A garden by the ocean...sweet smelling seclusion.
Posted by: Marie | 14 August 2006 at 09:29 PM
It is a special beautiful place. And it attracts the sort of people it's nice to be around. When you come visit me some day (in summer), we'll take the tour or go motor around the island in our little boat.
Posted by: Amy | 15 August 2006 at 12:45 PM
That sounds so beautiful. Your coastal area is so different from mine. I hope I get the chance to see it some day.
Posted by: terrilynn | 16 August 2006 at 07:05 AM
I hope you do too. I love this rock jumbled coast of ours, but sometimes I miss the warm southern waters.
I like what you have on your blog now: "The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea." (Isak Dinesen)
Posted by: Amy | 17 August 2006 at 07:22 AM
Beautiful story! It captures the story of Celia Thaxter, and the hard working, wonderful people that are keeping it alive today! Great photos. Thank you!
Posted by: Lisa | 22 August 2006 at 10:32 PM