An Island Garden

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Celia Thaxter's An Island Garden is a lyrical garden journal set among the Isles of Shoals, where loneliness, memory, and devotion to flowers shape every page. Born from repeated requests to explain how her beloved island garden was made, the book begins with a meditation on dust, soil, and seeds, marveling at the hidden miracle that turns ordinary earth into blossoms, fruit, and trees. For Thaxter, gardening is never merely practical: it is an act of love, patience, sacrifice, and reverence, a relationship in which plants seem to answer the care bestowed on them. At once poetic and practical, the book records the daily warfare of flower culture—worms, mildew, aphids, slugs, cutworms, storms, and hungry birds—alongside the gardener's remedies of nets, cages, lime, powders, rich compost, and careful transplanting. Thaxter delights in toads as allies, song-sparrows as mischievous foes, and seedlings as promises carried through winter windows to spring light. Through seasonal scenes of snowdrops, violets, roses, sweet peas, asters, and water plants, the island garden becomes a vivid celebration of labor, beauty, generosity, and the enduring companionship of birds and flowers.