Arts Literature

The Literary Gardener: Alice in Search of a Garden

By Carol Howard

Spending time in a garden can be a good antidote to the moodiness that comes from being cooped up without a regular daily routine. Take Alice before Wonderland, for example. She is bored. She has nothing to do. In her case, as luck would have it, a white rabbit happens by, and she finds herself on a series of adventures. In this strange world of talking animals, she becomes determined to enter an idyllic garden of bright flowers and cool fountains that she spies through a tiny locked door at the bottom of a rabbit hole. Alice spends a good part of her adventures in Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic trying to make her way into that beautiful space.

Literary Gardener: Alice in Seach of a Garden

Talking Flowers. Stephanie Sipp, illustrator

Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) for Alice Liddell, one of the children who frolicked in the deanery garden beneath his office window at Christ Church, a college of Oxford University. The author of the beloved children’s books was a lecturer in mathematics and a librarian of the college. While the college, to this day, has several beautiful gardens, the elusive Eden of the tale was modeled on the walled Cathedral Garden, where the real Alice, one of the college dean’s daughters, was not allowed to play. The garden still features an old horse chestnut tree that inspired Carroll’s fictional tree-bough perch for the Cheshire Cat.

When the fictional Alice finally succeeds in unlocking the door, the garden turns out to be anything but the oasis she has yearned for from afar. To be sure, it is a beautiful place, but it is not a place of blissful solitude. The garden is inhabited by a pack of anthropomorphized playing cards fighting internecine battles at a royal court. Alice first encounters bickering “gardener” cards painting the blooms of a white rose tree with red paint. (In keeping with the author’s habit of making puns, the gardeners are of the spade suit.) They fear the displeasure of the Queen of Hearts, who tolerates only red blossoms in her realm. Like so much in Carroll’s tale, where episodes refer obliquely to historical people and events, this scene recalls England’s 15th-century Wars of the Roses, in which two rival dynasties vied for power—one noble family line symbolized in heraldry by a red rose, the other by a white rose.

In the Looking-Glass sequel, Alice clambers through a magical living room mirror into an identical, yet backward, version of her house. She quickly decides she should return home, but not before she has had a chance to see the garden beyond Looking-Glass House. As she struggles with bewildering paths in an effort to survey the landscape from a hilltop, she stumbles upon a bed of talking flowers—tiger lilies, roses, daisies, violets—who make puns, speak rudely to her and squabble with one another. Here Carroll may have been playing with Charles Darwin’s research on plant motility. Carroll was an avid reader of Darwin.

One lesson to be learned from Alice’s adventures is that if you go searching for a garden in a topsy-turvy world, it is best to avoid a crowd.

Carol Howard is dean of academics at Warren Wilson College.

Leave a Comment