The Secret Life of Flowers

I will never forget the thrill of disbelief when I first encountered Mrs. Delaney’s floral “mosaics” in the British Museum. This took place in the hushed inner sanctum of the Print Room, which is lined, on two levels, with mahogany cases holding solander boxes filled with prints and drawings. During the year I spent there as a volunteer assistant (1975–76), my desk was juxtaposed with that of Edward (“Teddy”) Croft-Murray, the imposing and eccentric Keeper Emeritus. He wore an 18th-century vest, carried an 18th-century cane and wrote with a goose quill pen (a supply of which was kept on hand specially for him). One day, when he thought I needed a break, Teddy asked whether I had discovered Mrs. Delaney’s albums.

It is all but impossible to believe that the 985 collages made between 1772 and 1783 mounted in ten leather-bound volumes entitled “Flora Delanica” after their creator, Mary Delaney, were made using hand-coloured papers, scissors and flour paste. The minute detail, subtlety of shading and trompe l’oeil effects give them the appearance of paintings. Amazingly Mrs. Delaney only began them at the age of 72, following the death of her beloved second husband, the Reverend Patrick Delaney, and stopped when her vision gave out. Through the “spiritual connection between the artist as creator and the Creator of nature” she sought to sublimate her grief and immortalize their passion for the garden they had created at Delville, near Dublin. Her work was promoted in London by her friend and patroness, the Duchess of Portland, with whom she lived at Bulstrode. King George III and Queen Charlotte paid personal visits and arranged for Sir Joseph Banks to send over specimens from Kew.

Born into the British aristocracy and groomed for a court appointment, Delaney mastered the arts of silhouette portraiture, embroidery and fashion design at an early age. After being married off in her teens by her impecunious family to a dissipated, elderly, drunken sot named Alexander Pendarves, who abused her for seven years in his decrepit Cornish castle, she embraced widowhood and the freedom to pursue her intellectual and artistic interests for decades after his death. At a time when women were barred from professional artistic training, she became an amateur extraordinaire, one of the most independent women of her class and century, and the inventor and practitioner of a medium with neither precedent nor rival.

If Mrs. Delaney had only been a great crafts woman her work would constitute an extraordinary technical feat. By employing “the serpentine line of beauty” taught to her by Hogarth, her collages became sinuous and elegant, but this is not the key to their greatness. It is thanks to the symbolic language of flowers and their transient nature, a metaphor for the brevity of human life—sic transit gloria mundi—that her flower portraits were transformed into elegiac poems and prayers.

For a print and drawing curator it is refreshing and revealing to see the achievement of the artist through the eyes of a poet. When Molly Peacock began this project that turned into The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delaney [begins her life’s work] at 72, she wondered whether she was up to the detective work required that “would combine the skill sets of mind-reader, forensic art historian, psychologist, biologist, all with expertise in landscape in paper making, in 18th-century collecting, in botany, in conchology. Could an amateur ever do it?” In fact, the status of the amateur was highly respected until the late 19th century, implying, as it did, that some of the finest achievements result from individual dedication to a field of inquiry.

Peacock proved more than equal to the challenge. Although the 18th century, with which she had no prior engagement, is not an easy century to drop in on, her narrative flows smoothly (at least to this reader). To scrupulous research she brings poetic sensibility and structures her narrative in a way that echoes the flowers themselves. The result is as innovative a piece of literary craftsmanship as her subject’s was artistic.

The author needed to come up with a non-linear narrative format for, had she followed a chronological sequence, she would not have been able to introduce her central theme, the floral mosaics, until page 300. She handles this by dedicating each chapter to a floral mosaic to which she attempts to link Mrs. Delaney’s evolving life story. Here she takes perhaps too much poetic licence. Peacock sees sexuality in every stamen, pistil and petal, and speculates on the possible links between the flower depicted and Mary Delaney’s sex life. Given Mary’s appalling introduction to physical intimacy, and her steadfast refusal for decades to marry attractive suitors, I find this far-fetched and anachronistic. But this 21st-century reading is the only false note in an otherwise ingenious biography.

To those who engage in it, the process of historical research can be almost as fascinating as the results and, when you are on the inside track as Peacock certainly is, serendipity, coincidence and synchronicity take over. You find yourself sliding down a time tunnel and watching as pieces of the historical mosaic fall into place. Peacock has encapsulated the Delaney narrative within the story of her quest for information. As soon as we are comfortably settled in the 18th century, convinced of our storyteller’s omniscience and made to feel totally at home in the world of Handel, Hogarth and Swift, she yanks us back, changes voice and vocabulary, and deposits us in our own era where we suddenly find ourselves squinting at the Delaney exhibition at 50 lux in the Pierpont Morgan Library, sitting face to face with Kim Sloan in her office in the British Museum, pouring over letters at the library in Newport, Wales, examining a sketchbook in the National Gallery of Ireland or being greeted by Ruth Hayden, a lateral descendent of Mary Delaney’s, at her country cottage. In this way we are reminded that Peacock’s book is a carefully crafted work of art in its own right.

Peacock has, however, gone one step further. The structure of the book is analogous to that of a flower: if the stamens and pistils tell Mrs. Delaney’s story, the first row of petals tell the story of Peacock’s research and the second Peacock’s personal story. The poet slips back and forth between the narrative layers with varying degrees of success as she draws parallels between Mrs. Delaney’s life and her own. Her quest grows from a need to confront her own fears about the prospect of widowhood and aging. Despite the severity of the challenge, Peacock finally comes to the conclusion that she, like her subject, is capable of adopting “the biennial approach to life.”

Peacock makes it clear that history is ever present and relevant to our time. Inspired by the voices of poets of different eras she talks of “sharing the mitochondria of imagination.” One of the great achievements of this book is the way in which she sees and articulates the interconnections between the intellectual, scientific, aesthetic, literary and physical creations of Mrs. Delaney’s contemporaries and their lines of transmission to our own time. She also shows how successive generations of women descended from Mary’s sister Anne, culminating in Ruth Hayden, have looked after her work and kept her memory alive, thus making this narrative possible.

Molly Peacock articulates her themes with grace and artistry. They are as elegantly introduced and intertwined as ribbons on a maypole. On the last page they come together and are tied in a bow. Although there were moments when I raised my eyebrows, as I closed this beautifully designed book with its exquisite reproductions and sensuous paper, one word came to mind and has remained with me ever since: amazing.