The Paper Garden

"A great book should leave you with many experiences, 
and slightly exhausted at the end.
You live several lives while reading."
...William Styron



I knew nothing of Mary Delaney prior to reading The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock.  This book was recommended to me by someone who sat next to me in the St. Louis airport several weeks ago.  We began talking books and she told me she had just finished The Paper Garden and enjoyed it very much.

image via Wikapedia

Having a week left of school and halfway through a book I was not enjoying, with gift card in hand I was soon off to the bookstore to look for this book.  I picked it up and walked around.  I placed it back on the shelf and walked away.  I browsed the shelves and handled other books.  I decided to just leave, I didn't have the time to commit to another book.   I passed the biographies one more time; temptation got the better of me.   I grabbed the book and soon found myself walking out with a new book in my hand and a smile on my face.

"Imagine starting your life's work at seventy-two.  At just that age, Mary Granville Pendarves Delany (May 14, 1700 - April 15, 1788, a fan of George Frideric Handel, a sometime dinner partner of satirist Johnathan Swift, a wearer of green-hooped satin gowns, and a fiercely devoted subject of blond King George III, invented a precursor of what we know as collage.  One afternoon in 1772 she noticed how a piece of colored paper matched the dropped petal of a geranium.  After making that vital imaginative connection between paper and petal, she lifted the eighteenth-century equivalent of an X-Acto blade (she'd have called it a scalpel) or a pair of filigree-handled scissors - the kind that must have had a nose so sharp and delicate that you could almost imagine it picking up a scent.  With the instrument alive in her still rather smooth-skinned hand, she began to maneuver, carefully cutting the exact geranium petal shape from the scarlet paper.

Then she snipped out another.

And another, and another, with the trance-like efficiency  of repetition - commencing the most remarkable work of her life."

image via

And thus Molly Peacock begins her own work of art intertwining the story of Mary Delany's seventy-two years of life and creations with occasional shadings of her own history and thoughts.

The Paper Garden is a lesson in history, art, botany and horticulture.  I am certain we might could say a little philosophy as well.  Ms. Peacock does a beautiful job of making this study both readable and enjoyable.  It was not difficult for me to find the poetry amid the prose.

I have no credentials to review a book.  I would never attempt to critique.  I am but a humble reader passing on a book I very much enjoyed.

I am forever grateful to a stranger in the airport.
I think book lovers are drawn to one another.

Happy Reading!