This week on ‘Picture Postals’, a peek inside the glasshouses of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. The ornamental Japanese Gardens there became one of the key places that Lovecraft loved the most in New York City, a refuge from the harsh city outside. I’ve previously had posts here on the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens – part one and part two and I noted various influences, including on his New York friend Belknap Long via Long’s wartime “Curator of the Interplanetary Gardens” series of sci-fi plant yarns for boys.
The glasshouses were very near the Japanese Gardens, on the terraces that ran into them, and we know from the letters that Lovecraft went inside.
Seen here before, my newly colourised view of one of the conservatories (aka glasshouses, greenhouses, hothouses or now just ‘houses’) as seen in 1936. Probably the “Palm House”.
But now we can follow Lovecraft inside. Here we see an admittedly later view, on the painted cover of New Yorker magazine from 1950. It appears to also be the “Palm House”.
There was also an “Economic House” (fruits and useful produce), which has this superb 1927 archival view of the interior by Louis Buhle. Near perfectly timed for showing us what Lovecraft encountered in the mid 1920s. I’ve here colorised it…
As with the boys seen here, Lovecraft was early fascinated with such things and recalled…
“In childhood I used to haunt such places [florists’ shops] about February, when the strain of hated winter became unbearable. I liked to walk through the long greenhouses & imbibe the atmosphere of warm earth & plant-life, & see the vivid masses of green & floral colour. One of my early doggerel attempts was a description of an hypothetical glass-covered, furnace-heated world of groves & gardens …” (Selected Letters Vol. III, page 138).
Something which would appear in the alien gardening of his seminal science-fiction story “The Shadow out of Time”…
“The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness, with bizarre and unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad paths lined with curiously carven monoliths. Abnormally vast fern-like growths predominated; some green, and some of a ghastly, fungoid pallor. Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites, whose bamboo-like trunks towered to fabulous heights. Then there were tufted forms like fabulous cycads, and grotesque dark-green shrubs and trees of coniferous aspect. Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognisable, blooming in geometrical beds and at large among the greenery. … Fungi of inconceivable size, outlines, and colours speckled the scene in patterns bespeaking some unknown but well-established horticultural tradition.” — “from The Shadow out of Time”.
His poetry is abundantly seeded with arboreal nooks and verdant pastoral scenes, although except for a few strange fungi these are usually cultivated within the fences of poetical convention. Part of the attraction of such garden places was often the sense of their being frozen in time…
“I am very fond of gardens — in fact they are among the most potent of all imaginative stimuli with me” [real] “old-fashion’d gardens, stone walls, sloping orchards, and picturesque lines of barns and sheds became so overwhelmingly pervasive that one felt almost opprest for lack of opportunities for instant lyrical utterance. Here, indeed, was a small and glorious world of the past completely sever’d from the sullying tides of time” (Selected Letters III).
In the Wandrei letters (p. 252, 253, 265) we also encounter various extended musing on his ‘ancestral’ memories of deep woods, forests, including “vast-boled, low-branching, palaeogean forests”. But his ideal was a cultivated dream-garden, as if encountered deep in his Dreamlands…
“the experience of walking (or, as in most of my dreams, aerially floating) through aethereal and enchanted gardens of exotick delicacy and opulence, with carved stone bridges, labyrinthine paths, marble fountains, terraces, and staircases, strange pagodas, hillside grottos, curious statues, termini, sundials, benches, basins, and lanthorns, lily’d pools of swans and streams with hers of waterfalls, spreading gingko-trees and drooping, feathery willows, and sun-touch’d flowers of a bizarre, Klarkash-Tonick pattern never beheld on land or beneath the sea.” “… a type of dreamlike scene which I have always envisaged as a sort of imaginative phantom — The Gardens of Yin, as it were” (Selected Letters III).
“There is somewhere, my fancy fabulises, a marvellous city of ancient streets & hills & gardens & marble terraces, wherein I once lived happy eternities, & to which I must return if ever I am to have content.” [Returning down] “bewildering avenues to all the wonders & lovelinesses I have ever sought, & to all those gardens of eld whose memory trembles just beyond the rim of
conscious recollection”. (Selected Letters II).
He was lucky enough in his life to encounter two real ornamental gardens that came very near to his ideal.
