I find lots of inspiration in the works of contemporary botanists, designers, gardeners and plant lovers, but I also comb through history for role models. A few weeks ago, Skylands, New Jersey’s official botanical garden, held its annual plant sale. This year’s sale included a used book table and I found my dose of inspiration there in the form of a small booklet entitled”Mrs. Delany’s Flower Collages.”
The volume was written to accompany a 1986 traveling exhibit on display at New York’s Morgan Library. Its text is by Ruth Hayden, author of Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers, a biography of the exhibit’s subject, Mary Granville Pendarves Delany.
Mary Delany—1700-1788—was an Englishwoman, celebrated in her time and since for creating extraordinary books of detailed flower collages, which she called Flora Delanica. Now housed in the Enlightenment Gallery of the British Museum, Flora Delanica consists of 10 books containing almost 1,000 different collages. By themselves, the collages are magnificent. They are even more remarkable given the fact that Mrs. Delany did not start on the work until she was seventy-one years old.
If Mrs. Delany had been born in our time, she might have gained renown as a professional botanist, writer and botanical illustrator. In her own era—the freewheeling eighteenth century–she pursued those occupations as an amateur, within the confines of upper class married life and widowhood.
The Granville family was very well connected, but not wealthy. As the result, their daughter, Mary, was married off at seventeen to a wealthy suitor named Alexander Pendarves. The attraction of Pendarves’ fortune was undoubtedly offset by the fact that he was sixty on his wedding day and afflicted with gout and alcoholism. The ailments eventually caught up with him, and the young Mrs. Pendarves became a widow at twenty-four. In London her intelligence and vivacity made her popular. She was intellectual, musical and artistic, traveling in a social circle that included composer George Frederick Handel. To hone her painting skills, she took lessons from prominent artists including William Hogarth.
At age 31, her friend, author Jonathan Swift, introduced her to Dr. Patrick Delany, an Irish clergyman, who became her second husband twelve years later. Happily married, she and Delany designed gardens for their Irish home, Delville. She pursued a host of artistic hobbies including painting, fine embroidery, silhouette-cutting and shell decoration. According to her biographer, Mrs. Delany “travelled with her botany books” when visiting friends and was always on the look-put for new and unusual plant specimens. A child of the Enlightenment, she was fully aware of the latest development in scientific botany—the then-new Linnaean binomial classification system.
Aged sixty-eight when her husband died, Mrs. Delany took to spending long periods at an estate called Bulstrode, home of her wealthy friend and fellow botanizer, the Duchess of Portland. During one of those stays Mrs. Delany created her first collage.
On the surface, it is easy to craft a collage by cutting out shapes from pieces of colored paper or other materials and forming pictures by gluing those paper fragments to a background piece of heavier material. Mary Delany took this idea to its apogee, treating her collages as full-fledged botanical illustrations. She started by dissecting the plant to be illustrated, observing all its parts. Taking up her scissors, she cut colored paper into the shapes of petals, leaves and stamens, combining and layering hundreds of tiny pieces to give the plant portraits realistic color, texture and movement. Each plant portrait was life-size, sometimes with a few colored details applied with tiny brushes. Like other botanical artists of the time, she often included depictions of roots, berries, bulbs and seed pods in addition to flowers.
Mrs. Delany’s reputation grew along with the number of her collages. The leading plant hunter/botanists of her day brought new and exotic specimens for her to work with, often at the urging of King George III and Queen Charlotte, who were fans of the collages. According to her biographer, Mary Delany’s hands were never idle and her collage collection grew until declining eyesight forced to give up art form at the age of eighty-two. Her great-great niece eventually willed the ten books of “paper mosaicks” to the British Museum.
The Delany rose collage that adorns the cover of my little booklet is very reminiscent of one of the celebrated flower paintings by nineteenth century artist Pierre-Joseph Redoute and equally beautiful. I stare at it and feel that if I blinked my eyes, I would see a petal drop.
What can Mary Delany’s life and flower collages teach the everyday dirt gardener? Perhaps the most important thing is the value of looking closely at plants and other living things in order to understand them better and appreciate beauty that is not always apparent at first glance. Mrs. Delany’s life inspires because she turned an unpromising start into an enlightened middle period and a glorious final chapter. The potential for similar second and third acts is always present in gardens where bad weather, pests and other factors beyond our control can ruin the best-laid plans. On any given day, many of us are on the brink of having to make a new start in some part of the garden—or our lives.
So….The next time Mr. Antlers has gotten to the lilies, turn your despair into something better. Think of Mary Delany and pick up your garden tools.