A thing of beauty is a joy forever, or so John Keats (1795–1821) stated in the opening stanza of his poem Endymion (1818). While the line is well-known, its”meaning in relation to the story of the shepherd Endymion and his complicated love life is rather more obscure. In fact, when you consider exactly what is meant by that opening line, you must wonder if anything should be a joy forever.

Before I get to Keats, I should mention that during the 19th century, the name Endymion was famous because of the book of the same name by Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, a former prime minister and best-selling novelist, beloved by the public for his romanticism, which often came with a political edge. When he published his final novel Endymion in 1880, the newspapers wrote that “first class passengers, especially ladies, carry it with them as they would a favorite pug or a flask of fluid refreshment.” In Disraeli’s novel, Endymion is the son of a disgraced politician, determined to redeem the family name by becoming a politician for the other side. Disraeli’s hero is good, virtuous, and ultimately successful, with the book ending on his assent to prime minister. The connection to the poem is purely superficial, but the name is used to denote goodness and love together with a sense of renewal and revitalization. You could also guess that for the young women clasping the book as they traveled, it was a joy until the last page, if not forever.

The wellspring of the name, well known to Disraeli, was obviously the poem. Keats based his work on the Greek myth of the beautiful shepherd on the slopes of Mount Latmus, named Endymion. From the various retellings, the shepherd was possibly also a prince and an astronomer, but what we can agree on is that he was so handsome that celestial beings placed him into an eternal sleep so they could worship him forever. Licymnius of Chios, an ancient Greek poet, told the story that Hypnos, the god of sleep, loved the shepherd so much that he cast his spell over him with the caveat that Endymion’s eyes remained open so Hypnos could gaze into them eternally. Mercifully, Keats told the marginally less creepy version of the myth, in which the slumbering beauty is visited by the goddess of the moon, Selena (or Cynthia as she is known in this poem). To the relief of all viewers of the art created from said myth, Endymion’s eyes remain closed.

In the traditional myth, Selena, the Titan goddess of the moon, fell deeply in love with the beautiful shepherd and begged Zeus, another of her lovers, to grant Endymion eternal youth so that the shepherd would always be with her. The goddess should have known never to trust Zeus, a tricksy devil at the best of times and one with a grudge in the case of our pretty shepherd. Turns out Endymion had also been the object of desire for Hera, Zeus’s wife/sister, and so Zeus chose to interpret the plea from Selena in a malicious manner. Instead of making Endymion immortal, he put the shepherd into an eternal sleep, preserving his beauty in a permanently unconscious manner.

Not that I’m one to speak in defense of Zeus, but he is not the only one to be petty in this myth. A lesser-known story connected to Endymion is that a girl called Muia found the sleeping shepherd and took a shine to him. He was a great listener, so she would sit and talk to him every night and her endless chatter disturbed his celestial sleep, which is quite a talent. This infuriated Selena so much that she turned the girl into a fly, doomed to annoy sleepers forever with her irritating buzzing. There are no romantic art depictions of this particular myth, unfortunately, so Selena’s shady past can be overlooked on this occasion.

When artists portrayed this poetic love story, the emphasis was always on the gorgeous supine shepherd, his beauty shimmering in the moonlight. Above him, sighing and longing, leans Selena, gazing upon the man she loves who will never gaze back. Anne-Louis Girodet’s 1791 painting The Sleep of Endymion shows a remarkably naked shepherd in all his glory, snoozing under a bush while a chubby child, presumably Eros, parts the branches so the silvery fingertips of moonlight can caress his splendid form. By the time of Jerome-Martin Langlois’s 1822 interpretation, Selena had taken an equally naked shape and is seen floating down on the beams of moonlight to get a closer look at the sleeping beauty with Eros helpfully lifting his blanket. Mercifully, Eros is missing from later paintings as his presence feels both a little unnecessary and rather weird. I’m sure the goddess can sneak a peek under the blanket on her own. By Victor Pollet’s work of 1854, Selena gazes upon the object of her desire alone, her body as pale as the crescent moon that cradles her. Endymion, covered by the smallest piece of animal fur, his shepherd’s crook clutched in his hand, remains an object of glory, the personification of perfection.

Another reason for the departure of Eros from the scene might be an extension of the myth where the moon goddess not only gazed upon her slumbering love but physically visited him every night, giving birth to fifty children by him, which is a little excessive. A magical interpretation appeared in John Atkinson Grimshaw’s 1879 Endymion on Mount Latmus, where Selena, fluttering like a fairy, glows above the object of her desire. It could be that the goddess is departing her love in the glow of the rising sun, curving her body to get a last look at his face, clutching her heart as she is banished by the day.

This rather lustier attraction becomes apparent in later depictions, such as Edward Poynter’s 1902 painting showing Selena skipping down from the sky to find her lover sleeping among the poppies, which denote his endless slumber. A year later, George Frederick Watts painted Selena as a swirling cloud engulfing her lover, creating a circle along with his golden sleeping form. The spirit of the goddess seems to enter the slumbering shepherd, who echoes her body above him, and they appear to form two halves of a whole. They become the phases of the moon together, symbolic of the time passing and the goddess’s love renewing eternally.

The tale of Endymion, the sleeping shepherd, adored in his unconsciousness, is remarkable for the passivity of the male protagonist. Our hero is eternally snoozing because a goddess wanted to possess him. His best qualities are being submissive, silent, and decorative—talents usually required of heroines and yet this feminization of a hero is accepted as a triumph and the pinnacle of romance. There is also a reflection of nature and its joyful cycles. You can interpret Selena’s swooping down to Endymion every night as the lowering of the moon so that the sun can rise, as his name may be derived from the Greek word for “to dive into.” Thus Endymion’s power is to tempt the moon down every night so that the sun can rise and day can come again. In that way, his beauty is his power, keeping the world turning even from his endless sleep. Likewise, Selena’s love is not destructive like that of some of her fellow immortals, but revives each night, new and passionate, to last forever.

They had names like Sofonisba and Lavinia and most of all Artemisia. They were brilliant and gifted and (sometimes)
ferocious—because they had to be, sure, and perhaps also because they wanted to be. They were courtiers and wives and warriors. They were artists at a time when women just didn’t do that.

But they did.

A handful of talented, tenacious, and perhaps rather lucky young women were able to work in what was then the unfeminine medium of paint. Smeary, messy, very physical paint, which required the grinding of stones and beetles and you-just-name-what-else, and mixing with linseed oil, and preparing heavy slabs of wood for the laying on of all that rich, expensive color. We’re talking about lone women working in studios populated by male creatures from first adolescence to well-advanced senescence, women painting some strikingly realistic arms and hands and other body parts into being, newly detailed thanks to a shift in painterly aesthetic. Women who sought to give a good long look to actual flesh, because you couldn’t quite paint it if you didn’t inspect it thoroughly first. And a typically well-brought-up female was never, ever supposed to look, let alone touch.

These women simply had to look. And grind. And mix. And create. They felt thwarted by the norms that limited what they could do … and then they painted circles around those norms. Of all these fiercely talented artists, one name stands out. You probably know it already: Artemisia Gentileschi, at the time called a “prodigy of painting, easier to envy than to imitate.” She came along at the end of the Italian Renaissance, born in 1593 and alive till about 1656; she worked at the height of the dramatic Baroque style—no, she helped define the Baroque, and she was one of its foremost practitioners.

And now I come to a trigger warning. Artemisia was born into a milieu in which femininity meant never being entirely safe. That was especially true in a male-dominated profession, for a lower-class girl, no matter how scrappy she was. In short, Artemisia endured a trauma that no one should ever have to experience, and we have to know about it in order to understand both her life and her oeuvre.”

But her story is not about being a victim. In the next forty years, she became a master of her art, and she is now known for big, bloody pictures of avenging women, heroines, and warrior queens. Given her history, it is natural to see Artemisia as a warrior queen herself … but I think her story and her art are more complicated than that. Painting as she did may have been partly revenge, but great art is never just revenge.

So if you read on, you’ll encounter Renaissance violence and injustice. You’ll also meet other remarkable artists who rose to prominence in the rich 16th and 17th centuries, women who broke with some traditions and created new ones in masterworks we celebrate today. Artemisia stands on their shoulders.

Just look at her 1638 Self-Portrait as Allegory of Painting: She’s glorious in mid-career, prosperous, and wearing a fine gown and gold necklace, all surfaces shimmering, all textures finely rendered … a lady. But she’s contorting in order to get the right sight line on the work and keep her fine-tipped brush headed for a precise spot. This is a beautiful woman whose beauty does not matter to her in the moment, because she’s focused on what she can create. Her pose shows the difficulty—for anyone, not only women—of doing the work. And it caps a new tradition for female painters.

As the centuries rolled on, these artists mostly sank back into perhaps colorful marginal notes as oddities … or else they got no notes at all and dropped into obscurity. But the past thirty or so years have seen a surge of interest in these artists as artists, and not just as female ones. Their work embodies the culture and shifting aesthetics of the era; they also created new modes and genres of paintings, most significantly the self-portrait of the artist as (in fact) an artist. They delved into the problems of flesh, the body, the self, and the nature of art, and their eyes are watching us now.

So let us celebrate, once again, their lives and creations, from birth to success and whatever else came along.

A Rebirth of the Flesh

O those terrifically louche, very physical ancient Greeks and Romans! The heavenward gaze of the Middle Ages had preferred not to look at what prior cultures had done, with their pagan emphasis on the body and their glory in some of the more animal impulses—depictions of lust, anger, and love, for example, in a recognizably three-dimensional space. Most Inset: Miniature Self-Portrait (1556), by Sofonisba Anguissola medieval art centered on the Christian divine, placing what later seemed like flat, idealized forms in an equally flat symbolic space.

Sometime in the 1300s, our focus started to shift back to all the messiness of humanity, where it stayed until the religious resurgence of the 1600s. In 1550, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (more on that worthy tome later) referred to the change as a rinascita—a rebirth. In English and French, the concept caught on around 1855 as the Renaissance. Physicality was just one aspect of humanism, which was an all-around return to interest in people (rather than divinity) with all their flaws and curiosity and doubts and capacity for growth. In other words, creativity and philosophy now were about real, complicated flesh and emotions.

This is not to take anything away from medieval art, which we love. Women were active painters then too, illuminating manuscripts in convents—where would we be without our perennial girl crush Hildegard von Bingen?—and creating even more pictures with thread in the one medium always approved for women and girls: embroidery. These Renaissance painters emerged as much from these artistic traditions as from the male- dominated studio system.

As more women took up the brush outside of the convent, they participated in a movement by which the idea of beauty itself—both as something a person possessed and as something they could represent in art—was becoming more individualized. So each face and figure had to stand out as unique. For example, in self-portraits, Artemisia’s pointed nose sets her apart from Sofonisba’s rounded cheeks and blue eyes; they are artists, not an icon meaning Artist. Backgrounds and settings also became more distinctive and realistic, with a rediscovered sense of perspective, because bodies now lived inside a network of light, shadow, and depth, a complex sense of space in which other objects loomed or dwindled with distance.

Just look at the work of another superstar, Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614). She was known primarily for portraits, but she was also one of a few women who took on religious subjects and classical mythology. The bodies in her work have a certain jarring beauty not entirely in line with what we think we observe every day. That’s because Lavinia’s aesthetic followed the Mannerist school, which strove to achieve elegance and grace through exaggerated poses and sometimes slightly off-kilter proportions. Maybe it was paradox, maybe genius, but it was all still realistic by standards of the time, under a somewhat heightened reality. Lavinia, let us say, was a leg woman. Her archangel Gabriel, in the Annunciation of 1575, has thighs nearly to his underarms— but they suit him, as if there’s no other way for an angel to be. The same is true for her always-a-bit- larger-than-life Christ figures.

They dominate the space; they force us into a relationship with the body as a body. And her nudes are positively sinuous, as we’ll see below. Therein lay a danger, plus a major obstacle to female painters: Good girls were not supposed to be so familiar with the body.

Apprenticeship and the Forbidden Lesson

There’s no denying that art in the Renaissance was a man’s world. The guilds, the academies, the commissions—all were controlled by men. A girl with a talent and a yearning to accomplish something exceptional had to gain entrée somehow, and that meant learning from (yes) a man. So Catharina van Hemessen took lessons from her painter father, Jan; Lavinia Fontana was trained by her father, Prospero, who bragged about her talent and seems to have needed her to help support him; Nunzio Galizia taught his daughter, Fede (c. 1578–c. 1630); and Artemisia learned from her father, Orazio.

One exception is the Florentine nun Plautilla Nelli (1524– 1588), who is said to have been self-taught. That reputation may be misleading; she resided in a convent originally sponsored by Savonarola (1452–1498), the bossy little zealot who vowed to make Florence great again with bonfires of the vanities and restrictions on citizens’ freedom. He might have been a fanatic, but he did encourage women to draw and paint religious subjects as a way of staying busy. Convents such as Plautilla’s became (in a way Savonarola did not expect, and often after his death) flourishing art colonies. Plautilla would have learned from some of the best. She did quite well with some massive church pieces
and even painted her way into Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists,” the exclusive men’s club of a Who’s Who. Three other women also made the book: sculptor Properzia de’ Rossi and painters Madonna Lucrezia and Sofonisba Anguissola. (We’ll visit with her again in just a moment.)

What girls picked up in their apprenticeships was not always what an artist wants to learn. The most vital lesson was forbidden: drawing from life. It was a somewhat new idea that in order to paint the body realistically, you had to look at it intimately. Some male painters even dissected bodies to gain an understanding of how muscle and sinew and skin work together. That sort of gaze was forbidden to female painters.

Not quite paradoxically, the new understanding of the body was possible only because of women’s work. Western art has long depended on sex workers as models and muses. Just imagine everything we’d have missed if prostitutes and mistresses had refused to spend hours on end posing for those serene paintings of the Annunciation or the torments of the Pietà.

And now we come to the nudes … those enchanting erotic beings who transcend the paint that has made them. In the art world, there’s a difference between someone who’s naked and a nude. Think, for a moment, of what happens when the body undresses. Is it just going about its daily life, or is it trying to prevent you (O presumed-to-be-masculine viewer) from going about yours?

The nude displays itself for the viewer’s gaze in a certain way, hoping to provoke a reaction. Perhaps a wisp of gossamer veil preserves a last inch or two of modesty, but we confront breasts, bottoms, and bellies, bare arms and legs, set up for a certain pleasure that will not be found, say, in a picture of the Virgin breast-feeding Jesus or in a martyr’s tortured flesh.

So nakedness might be natural; the nude was (is) dangerous. And women, of course, could not be trusted to make a smart distinction between them. Who knew what ghastly things might happen if they got themselves near enough any bare flesh at all? A girl should not stare at a naked man, obviously, though there must have been plenty of them around the cities, urinating in the streets, wrestling on the bridges of Venice, and whatnot.

Women were not allowed to look at prostitutes and paint them either. The girls who did manage to train as artists were of a higher social class and had to be protected from those immoral creatures. So instead, a female apprentice spent extra time poring over miniature versions of famous sculptures and plaster casts of hands and feet. A woman would not have the right to paint a nude until Lavinia Fontana, whose Mars and Venus, as we will see, is a masterwork both witty and erotic.

Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532–1625) had no teacher in the family and not that much of a family fortune, but she did have sisters who were also inclined toward the easel. Her parents managed to give their six daughters and one son good educations that included apprenticeships to local artists. Three other sisters stuck with painting and became professionals, but Sofonisba was the most talented of all. On a sketching trip to Rome at age twenty-two, she impressed a painter whose name now is lost—and he introduced her to one whose name is everything: Michelangelo.

Michelangelo was gobsmacked. It is easy to imagine the two of them together: he turning over pages of her portfolio, she explaining about all those plaster hands and feet and the statues she was sketching in Rome, along with some drawings of people in the street. Not being allowed to look at a nude—well, it was crippling her work. Michelangelo probably sympathized; he also knew how hard it was to work without being able to study the body so closely. He had fought to win the right, at around age nineteen, to attend public dissections before reputedly finding a way to conduct a dissection himself.

For such a gifted and otherwise well-educated painter as Sofonisba to miss that opportunity must have been beyond frustrating—but Sofonisba was resourceful. She used her sisters as models. And for at least two years, she enjoyed an honor no doubt envied by just about anybody at work in the art world: She was Michelangelo’s long-distance protégée, sending drawings through the mail for his critique.

Artemisia came along after all these women had served their versions of apprenticeships, but getting an education was no easier for her—in fact, it was even more difficult, as her family was neither noble nor rich. Her mother died when Artemisia was twelve, and she grew up a bit rough-and-tumble, surrounded by violence and general seediness. Her father, Orazio, was an artist, but his connections were considerably less accomplished and gentlemanly than Michelangelo. They posed a constant, if low-level, danger. When the Gentileschis decided to take in a tenant to help make ends meet, Orazio chose a woman, perhaps thinking she would provide some sort of companionship and motherly influence to young Artemisia … which would turn out to be no help at all, as we will see.

All these women artists would outshine their fathers and other teachers. Well, except maybe Michelangelo; he seems to be standing the test of time.

Herein lie gardens to dazzle the senses and boggle the mind. Some are meant for a community, some just for you; in a few, you should not touch, taste, even breathe, lest ye be harmed … Some you will have to fight for.

All are within reach if you want to try out your green thumb. Working your own plot can be a form of meditation; it connects you to the cycle of life and rebirth, gives a little aromatherapy, deepens your thoughts and your connection to both natural and human-made worlds.

Maybe we were created in a garden, maybe not. But something has always driven us to shape and prune and rearrange the plants we find in nature according to our varied ideas of beauty and convenience. That means a garden is not exactly “nature” in the sense of what’s growing wild and doing its own thing: It is cultivated, meaning that a human has decided what to grow, where to grow it, and how to keep it flourishing in a complex tapestry of plant life.

That’s not a bad thing. A garden can be every bit the artwork that the Mona Lisa is.

SECRET

First of all, you need a secret garden.

A garden that’s for you and only you—ideally growing where no one else can find it—is part of your self-care, your inspiration, your self-expression. It is the place where you relax and reflect. Secrets emphasize your independence and resilience; something that’s just for you can make you stronger. And, incidentally, that’s good for your community and your planet.

We come to our secret spaces in different ways. Perhaps you’ve stumbled upon a little plot of land somewhere, formerly well tended but now growing wild in an unhealthy way. You yearn to bring it back to its original glory. Let Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel, The Secret Garden, be your guidebook. In the classic tale, an unloved, unwanted, and frankly unlikable orphan named Mary Lennox is sent to Yorkshire to be raised by a distant relative. There she hears tell of a rose garden lost behind a stone wall somewhere and neglected for the last decade. As Mary searches for the garden and then learns to restore it, her temperament improves; she makes friends and even solves a Jane Eyre–worthy mystery about the cries that tear through the manor at night. The garden makes her want to be a better girl, and in turn she makes the manor’s menfolk better too. This book has long provided a handy metaphor for the way girls view gardens and their own bodies.

Secret gardens are very personal … and synonymous with women and, metaphorically, their bodies. That high stone wall represents your virtue, ladies—or in more modern terms, it is your self, and you can choose how far to open it up to other people. Or you might struggle not to get stuck in a garden that’s imposed on you, like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, wherein every attempt at taking a new pathway just leads right back to the house.

A personal garden was a lifelong project for landscape artist Mien Ruys (1904-1999) of the Netherlands. It was conceived over her lifetime as a series of “experiments,” occupying thirty so-called “rooms.” Each one of those rooms has an identity that was important to Ruys’s own growth, from her very first—a harmoniously composed “wilderness” laid out when she was just twenty—to a water garden and more. Both privately and professionally, Ruys celebrated perennial flowers and layers of color rather than monoculture lawns and single-species beds, and she popularized the “desire path”—a trail not planned but created naturally by the feet of animals and humans, meandering as the fancy takes them.

Many cities feature small horticultural gems hidden behind walls. You pass a courtyard door just as it swings shut, and you glimpse a miniature parterre, a formal garden with symmetrical flowerbeds, everything balanced and stately. Or in London, you make a pilgrimage to the Chelsea Physic Garden, founded in 1673, where you find five thousand healing plants behind a tall brick wall.

When you create your own precious sanctum sanctorum, you don’t owe anyone a glimpse of or a say in what you’re growing. That’s the idea. If you don’t have a wall, put up a privacy fence. Grow a tall hedge. Or just let the trees and bushes around your property go wild and create a thorny tangle. Use the space within for painting, writing, reading, dancing, meditating—whatever feeds your most secret self.

MAZE

A maze is perhaps more a garden feature than a garden in its own right—but have you ever been lost in one? The twists and folds of boxwood or yew hedge make the space telescope to contain entire worlds. And they just might include a secret garden too.

A maze represents the path we take toward enlightenment. In Christian (and formerly Christian) tradition, labyrinths are a part of religious allegory, whether growing from hedges or laid out in stone on a cathedral floor. There might be just one path to the center, or you might have options. Either way, as you aim toward the peaceful space in the middle, sometimes you seem to be getting very close to grace and fulfillment, only to find another turn taking you back to the outer edge. Frustration and feeling lost are a part of the allegory you’re living—wait, I mean part of the fun. When you finally reach the center, you might find a fountain, bench, or tower in which to contemplate the journey and the future (or sneak a quick kiss or photo with the person who got lost with you). If you’re lucky, no one else arrives for a while, and it is your personal Eden.

A single fragrant rose blooming alone there is sometimes called the rosa mundi, the rose of the world (not to be confused with the garden rose of that name). The name is a nod to Rosamund Clifford, the alluring mistress of England’s King Henry II. Folklore says that to protect Rosamund from seducers and a jealous queen, Henry built her a castle that was also a knotty maze, with the beauty in a garden at the center. That single flower can also refer to the Roman de la Rose, an epic French poem of the 1200s in which the Lover seeks to find a beloved who is represented as a rose blooming behind a complicated stone wall. A labyrinth with love in the center is a powerful symbol for all sorts of quests, and for life itself.

Mazes are featured at several châteaux of the magical Loire Valley, which brims over with almost too many treasures. At Villandry—world-famous for all its gardens—the squared-off labyrinth follows a traditional Renaissance pattern and there’s just one path to the center. And at Chenonceau, the brightest jewel in the valley’s well-studded crown, a round maze is a short hike from the castle and a world apart. Surrounded by woods, it’s a get-yourself-lost puzzle.

The most famous garden maze in the world is at Hampton Court, near London, and it’s a notorious wedge-shaped puzzle that takes an average of twenty minutes to solve. Designed around 1700 at the behest of William III (a.k.a. William of Orange), it’s a star in its own right, having been featured in Virginia Woolf’s 1919 novel, Night and Day, and Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear and the Marmalade Maze. You’ll also recognize it from the movies Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again and The Favourite, the series Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, and a dizzying array of other inked and filmed productions. Perhaps getting lost there is just what you need for your next big chapter.

HANGING

The second-most famous horticultural hotspot in history, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, were designed around 600 BCE with the intent to make a tall building look like the mountainous landscape of a queen’s former home. Trees and plants were cultivated on a series of tiered terraces that rose toward the sky in a marvel of engineering and irrigation. Webs of scent floated down from all those blossoms, entangling passersby. They looked toward the sky, wondering …

The Hanging Gardens were in fact one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—and they are the only such wonder for which we have no archaeological evidence, since they were lost to an earthquake in 226 BCE. Or maybe the evidence is all around. Seeds that blew off a rooftop sowed the surrounding area with flowers and trees that now are simply what grows.

A hanging garden (you have deduced by now) doesn’t so much hang as it rises. Its plantings are not rooted in the earth; it brings soil up onto a human-made structure. So those kitchen herbs you grow on your windowsill qualify, and so do the potted trees and plants on your rooftop or balcony.

Hanging gardens are some of the most spectacular—and planet-friendly—you’ll see today. For Willie Wonka–style dramatic impact, visit the Jardins Suspendus de Marqueyssac. Located in Vézac, France, on the grounds of a turreted castle, the site is the dreamchild of a military man who retired in 1861 and unleashed his creativity (beating his sword into a ploughshare, as the saying goes). There are fifty-four acres of otherworldly topiary, cyclamen, and secret nooks and pathways growing on terraces hewn into the cliffs above the Dordogne River. Not to mention dozens of peacocks.

In a more casual hanging garden on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the High Line stretches for almost a mile and a half along an old spur of New York Central Railroad. The tracks almost vanish under plantings inspired by the weeds that once struggled along them; railroad ties emerge here and there as a flirty reminder of how this refreshing space emerged out of the arc of history, industrialization, and urban decay.

Like the High Line, your own hanging garden can create a green-lunged haven with a big environmental impact. In Paris, the bee and butterfly populations surged after a citywide push to grow pollinator-friendly flowers on rooftops and balconies. Urban green corridors like the High Line and the hanging gardens of Paris’s La Défense can reduce nearby temperatures by as much as ten degrees on a hot day. You can attract pollinators with plants like black-eyed Susans, cosmos, lavender, verbena, coneflower, and more. Choose organic plants and seeds to avoid chemicals toxic to the pollinators.

Here’s hoping that we can beat more swords into garden trowels.

POISON

Maybe you’re a modern-day Brother Cadfael who lingers for hours over an herb garden. You rub sweet, pungent basil and lavender between your fingers; you harvest lemon balm to heal scratches, oregano for digestion, saffron for insomnia. I hope you also have a sizable patch of mint, because some people swear by it as an antidote to poison (no guarantees here). And somewhere just down the road, someone is growing mugwort, henbane, devil’s cherries, and angel’s trumpets, all with malicious intent.

As an idea, the poison garden is probably as old as horticulture or even agriculture. In the words of Renaissance physician Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, a.k.a. Paracelsus, “There is no substance which is not poison. The difference is in the dosing.” This means that even the wonder drug that has saved your life could be the same substance that ends it.

It’s a quick jump from a monastery’s garden of healing to a witch’s (theoretical) plot of malevolence. Medieval people looked on monastery gardens with approval, but any wisewoman’s medicinal garden might be a plot full of ingredients to render a woman infertile, a man impotent, a cow dead of the bovine plague Rinderpest. And sometimes it did happen …

Here are a few of the greatest hits we love to see in a poison garden:

• Foxglove, or digitalis: As a medicine, it can bring the beat back to a slow heart; in a different dose, it could speed a heart up so fast that it beats itself out. It also makes some very pretty flowers.

• Hemlock: This is the plant that sent Socrates off to his reward. Even if you never brew that particular tea, you should keep some hemlock growing as a monument to women and men who know too much and dare to ask questions.

• Belladonna: Popular for Ancient Roman murders, this extremely poisonous plant was ingested during the Renaissance—in small quantities—to dilate the pupils and make eyes appear bigger and brighter. At what price beauty …

• Mandrake: The infamous root looks like a human figure, right down to the genitalia (which are usually seen as male, sometimes female). It is so potently poisonous that it must be harvested in the full moon. Don’t be alarmed—it screams as it leaves the earth, yes, but that’s just science.

You’ll find all these plants and more in the Alnwick Garden in Northumberland, England, where the world-famous Poison Garden does not mince words or toxins. Over a hundred species of deadly, hallucinogenic, and narcotic plants grow behind tall iron gates. Entry is by guided tour and for intrepid souls only; although your guide will prevent touching and tasting, visitors have been known to faint from inhaling the air in which laburnum, hellebore, opium poppy, and much more respire in deadly photosynthesis. The same warnings apply at Ireland’s Blarney Castle, where the poison garden is intended to educate visitors about commonplace plants that turn fatal when cooked into something else—soaps, jams, teas … It really is all in the dose and, in this case, the concentration.

A poison garden is perhaps the ultimate secret, or it should be. A very tall fence should keep out the most curious neighbors and help make sure that there’s enough toxic material left for your needs.

I am often the last person to leave the library in the evening. Just before I turn out the lights, I always pause. At the front of the building, a seven-foot statue of Athena Lemnia towers, her sage countenance promising holy mystery. Even if she is only plaster, as the patron goddess of this place she is owed the final words uttered here every evening.

“Good night, library. Good night, Athena.”

I may be a librarian by trade, but I often joke that I have fulfilled my childhood dream of becoming a temple priestess. That’s because the Providence Athenæum in Providence, Rhode Island, is not only a working library but also a temple to wisdom, to history, and to the enchantment one finds tucked between pages. Founded in 1836 and residing in its Greek Revival home since 1838, the Athenæum has led a remarkable life. It has seen many illustrious visitors come and go in its nearly 200 years; it has appeared in books and films, had its artworks stolen and recovered, witnessed tragic romance and heartbreak, and become a fixture of local legends.

Visitors to the Athenæum can feel the library’s secrets the minute they walk in the door. Despite its classical edifice, the library is cozy inside, full of dust and homey old armchairs that squeak when you plop down into them. The library ladders are meant for climbing, and the mezzanine floors creak comfortably. The reading room is lit up with fairy lights. We welcome canine visitors in the library, and you can often find a patron’s pup snoozing on one of the wool rugs while their human reads the newspaper. Upstairs, the desks in the alcoves are full of little poems and love notes written and left there by decades’ worth of visitors. I love to catch our visitors leafing through them and, occasionally, adding their own scraps to the collection.

Then there’s the books. On the shelves of the Athenæum, along with all the latest mystery novels (charmingly labeled “Detectives” in the stacks), one will find flaking red leather tomes dating back to the mid-19th century. There are beautiful green books on botany with gold embossing on their spines, and dusty tomes by travelers to distant lands. In the card catalog, handwritten cards prompt wild goose chases in the stacks. The musty, sweet scent of old books is so thick in the library that my spouse can smell it in my hair when I come home each night.

I’m often asked by visitors to the Athenæum whether the library is haunted, and I have no simple answer for them. I may never have seen a ghost in this place, but the library is full of echoes. Every day I hear the spectral steps of Ralph Waldo

Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, all of whom spent time in the Athenæum. (According to her journal, Gilman often ate crackers in the library. Tsk tsk!) I hear the echoes of two centuries of bibliophiles, poets, seekers, and romantics who have leafed through these books.

Edgar Allan Poe was one such visitor who left a particularly poignant mark on the Athenæum. Visiting Rhode Island in 1848, he conducted a tragic love affair in the stacks with a local poetess named Sarah Helen Whitman. (Whitman, like Poe, was an ur-goth icon; she wore a tiny wooden coffin charm around her neck on a black silk ribbon.) She called off their engagement at the library, three days before their planned Christmas Day wedding—after Poe broke his promise of sobriety to her. We still have a book in our Special Collections in which Poe dramatically signed his name to impress Whitman on one of their dates in the library. Some say Poe’s ghost can still be seen beating a path along Benefit Street between Whitman’s home and the Athenæum, caught in a loop of doomed courtship forever.

But Poe’s ghost is not the only feature of interest on brick-lined Benefit Street. In front of the library is a Gothic Revival fountain that burbles with cool water, framed with the adage “Come Hither Every One That Thirsteth.” Installed as a public drinking fountain in the 1870s (likely one of the first in the country), this fixture inspires local folklore and botanical offerings alike. A single bloom or autumn leaf often floats poetically in the basin, an anonymous gift of devotion to Athena’s wisdom. I like to think that these votaries have sipped—or at least anointed themselves with—a splash of water from the fountain, ensuring, according to local legend, that they will return to Providence some day. Other variants of the legend hold that imbibers may be cursed by the ghosts of Poe or even H.P. Lovecraft, another local specter, but we’ve seen no evidence for this … yet.

But to speak of curses in such a place seems heretical. The Providence Athenæum is too magical for that. After I say good night to Athena and turn out the lights, I sometimes stop at the fountain and dip my fingers in the cool elixir that burbles forth there. I need no reassurance that I will return to this place again; after all, someone needs to turn the lights back on tomorrow. But these waters—like the stories this building holds, like the perfume of antique books, like the wisdom of Athena herself—soothe a weary temple priestess and inspire her for another day.

Feature Image:
Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (1864), by Simeon Solomon

According to the Ancient Greek poet Alcaeus of Mytilene, “No man sings like a Lesbian singer.” A very progressive statement for 600 B.C., but he was actually speaking of the magic and beauty of the lyric poets of the island of Lesbos and, more particularly, of his contemporary Sappho. Possibly the most heralded singer-songwriter of pre-Christian times, Sappho is mainly remembered today for her love of the ladies, as so little of her poetry survives. Yet for a woman who literally gave her name to a euphemism for female gayness, she wrote an awful lot of lust poems about men as well and even apparently threw herself off a cliff because a man didn’t love her. All this complication leads me to Sappho’s unexpected heyday, the 19th century, where this magical Greek poet by necessity became all these things and more.

Let’s start with who Sappho was. As someone who lived around six hundred years before Christ, she didn’t leave a lot of personal information, but we know that she wrote lyric poetry that was intended to be sung with accompanying music and that her work was so popular that she was christened the “Tenth Muse.” Much of what we know about Sappho is inferred from her poems, as the earliest biography of her wasn’t written until nearly 800 years after her death. Most of her poetry is now lost, however, with only fragments and one complete poem, the famous “Ode to Aphrodite,” surviving. But such was the power of her reputation and the lines that were discovered that she remained in the canon for centuries. Then along came the Victorians, for whom she would personify all aspects of womanhood. Do you want a talented poetess whose work has transcended centuries? Do you want a decadent lover, whose queerness knows no shame? Do you fancy a suicidal, spurned tragic heroine? A love witch with incantations for her errant lovers? There is a Sappho for every occasion—but how many of them were figments of the 19th century imagination?

The Victorians loved the classical period. Painters joyously placed wistful figures on cold marble benches, draped in flimsy fabric. In Sappho, they found the perfect subject onto which they could project all the ideas of the civilized intellect that the homogenous “classics” evoke. In Sappho at Mytilene (1876), Pierre Coomans shows bevies of classical beauties listening to Sappho while offering her laurel crowns. Similarly, John William Godward’s 1904 Sappho of Lesbos shows a buxom woman wrapped in diaphanous fabrics, sensibly sitting on a fur rug—I’m guessing marble is a tad cold, especially first thing in the morning. In Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s 1881 Sappho and Alcaeus, the painter, well-known for his classical scenes, places the two poets together, with Sappho leaning forward in contemplation as she listens to her contemporary’s song. These images are like corporate portraits: Sappho at work as an intellectual, among her peers who respect and celebrate her. It’s unsurprising that poets such as Felicia Hemans, Katherine Bradley, and Edith Cooper (who wrote under the male pseudonym Michael Fields) wrote in praise of their sister poetess.

Not that there weren’t scores of male poets who also aligned themselves with Sappho. Most famous among them was Algernon Swinburne, whose extremely florid verse envisaged “the Lesbians kissing across their smitten / Lutes with lips more sweet than the sound of lute-strings.”

Possibly what Swinburne was imagining in “Sapphics” (1866) was an 1864 painting by Simeon Solomon, Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene. In this work, Sappho is not kissing her beloved Erinna across her smitten lute; she has instead sensibly put her instrument to one side. No one wants a lute awkwardly poked in their ribcage during an embrace.

Solomon in turn was apparently inspired by Swinburne’s earlier poems about the life and loves of Sappho, including
of her fellow poet Erinna. In Sappho’s own poem “Ode to Aphrodite,” the poet calls upon the goddess to make the girl she desires fall in love with her. In return Aphrodite recites an incantation, some love magic that will win her heart: “She who shuns love soon will pursue it, / She who scorns gifts will send them still: / That girl will learn love, though she do it / Against her will.” In Solomon’s painting, it’s noticeable that Sappho seems far more enamored of Erinna, leaning in, eyes closed. Erinna, by contrast, just sort of sits there, not really getting involved. It is tempting to think that Sappho was calling for help from Aphrodite because Erinna was just not that into her. Here, however, we encounter the main problem with Erinna and Sappho’s relationship: They never met. Erinna played very hard to get by being born a few centuries after Sappho’s death. Sappho undoubtedly sang to Aphrodite about the love of a girl, or possibly a few girls, but who they were remains unknown.

Another problem with the well-known Lesbian is that she also wrote about her love of boys. In my favorite of her fragments, she foreshadows Charli XCX’s 2017 lyrical ballad “Boys,” telling her mother she can’t possibly do any weaving today as she is busy thinking ’bout boys …

I can’t take the shuttle in hand,
There is a boy, and lust
Has crushed my spirit …

This bisexuality could well have come from some overzealous translators correcting Sappho’s “mistake” of putting girl where she obviously meant boy. There is a fair amount of back and forth in the translations, as some poems could be interpreted as a boy speaking of his love of a girl, and some feature boy lust that leaves you too weak to weave. All of these could be said to have a narrator who is not Sappho but a character. But when Sappho names herself in the poem, such as in “Ode of Aphrodite,” there is no mistaking that she is asking for the love of a girl. Then the obvious conclusion is that Sappho fell in lust with everyone. No wonder she had no energy for weaving.

All this rampant queerness startled some of her more conservative translators and readers, and so another myth of Sappho came to take the artistic world by storm: that of a tragic leap to her death. According to legend, Sappho fell in love with Phaon, a boatman who had been made young and beautiful by a magical ointment given to him by Aphrodite. His newly found hotness turned him into a very unpleasant chap indeed, and when he mistreated Sappho, she threw herself off the Leucadian cliffs to cure herself of her love for him.

But this is rather spurious, as Phaon was entirely mythical. For Sappho to die for his love would be a bit like me falling into despair because Sherlock Holmes won’t call me back. Yet the idea of the poetic, lovelorn Sappho atop a cliff became a recurring theme for such artists as Charles Mengin. In his Sappho (1877), the poet is so distraught in love that her boobs have fallen out of her frock. Similarly, Miquel Carbonel Selva’s The Death of Sappho (1881) shows the poet casting aside her lyre and preparing to plunge into the tumultuous seas below. Charles Lenoir goes a step further in his 1896 painting, showing the drowning Sappho sinking beneath the water, clutching her lyre, completely naked. Unrequited love seems to make all your clothes fall off.

My favorite take on this motif must be Lawrence Koe’s 1888 masterpiece of Sappho, naked on a rock, clutching her lyre. It’s hard to work out if she’s dead, mad, or just having a bit of a tough day, but there are shades of Ophelia about her. While we have no proof that Sappho hurled herself off a cliff for the love of a feckless man, there are shades of that torment in her poems, such as “In all honesty, I want to die,” where Sappho and her lover say that despite everything they have been through, they can’t help but remember the good times, and it is hard to say goodbye to that.

The poetry of Sappho, more than 2,500 years old, has a magic that is eternal. This fact was apparent to Sappho herself, who says to us in a fragment:

“I declare / That later on, / Even in an age unlike our own, / Someone will remember who we are.”

For previous eras, she spoke openly about love in all the different shades and flavors, how she loved those that did not love her, how she was parted from those she loved and learned to love again. The reason the Victorians were drawn to her work was partly because of the discovery of more fragments in archaeological digs, but it was also that her free discussion of love chimed with the decadent aesthetic period. Feel your feelings and love your loves!

Yet the myth of the suicidal Sappho also serves as a warning against such behavior: Too much love will be the death of you. A woman in full pursuit of a lover will never be successful; let that be a warning to you. Despite that, the Victorians made her beautiful and uncompromising even in death.

When I see the paintings of Sappho sitting on a marble bench looking thoughtful, I don’t believe she is having the intellectual thoughts the artist probably intended. Instead I imagine her thinking one her poems: “May you bed down, / Head to breast, upon / The flesh / Of a plush / Companion.” Our girl Sappho spoke the eternal truth that everybody needs a bosom for a pillow.

The waies, through which my weary steps I guyde, In this delightfull land of Faery,
Are so exceeding spacious and wyde,
And sprinckled with such sweet variety,
Of all that pleasant is to eare or eye,
That I nigh rauisht with rare thoughts delight,
My tedious trauell doe forget thereby;
And when I gin to feele decay of might,
It strength to me supplies, & chears my dulled spright. —Book VI, The Faerie Queene

As a quixotic youngster, The Faerie Queene always caught my eye in musty used book stores. There always seemed to be a copy on the shelves: a 19th century leatherbound with flaking cover and the smoothest paper; a 1930s edition bound in green cloth with gold embossing; a hefty Penguin paperback peppered with some undergraduate’s scribbles. Of course, a number of these volumes ended up on my own shelves over the years, and when I finally traversed this storied landscape (as an undergraduate, scribbling in a paperback Penguin), I was surprised to find myself so besotted with a world that was nowhere near as richly built as others I had known and loved. Spenser’s “Faery lond” is neither lush nor whimsical: This is no Narnia, no Middle Earth. In fact, there are very few descriptions of the landscape itself, and they change drastically from section to section. But as I fell in love with the lady knight Britomart and the temperate Sir Guyon, I fell in love with Faery too. What was it about this mysterious and mutable place that captured my imagination?

The Faerie Queene is an unfinished epic poem massive in its original scope. Edmund Spenser (ca. 1552–1599) intended to write twelve sections that tell the stories of twelve knights on their quests toward specific virtues, but he died after completing just six. His heroes (and occasional shining heroine) travel through Faery, questing not only for dragons and true love
but also for the virtues of Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. In reading The Faerie Queene, I found a kindred spirit in Spenser. I love characters who strive toward some idea of virtue or goodness, no matter how embarrassingly out of step with postmodern sensibilities that may be. I am inspired by characters like Spenser’s knights, wending their way messily toward a principled future, who encourage me to strive for growth and goodness in my own life. Whether I’m struggling to let go of a grudge or to be a better listener to my loved ones, and especially when I fall short in such goals, the quests of these knights feel imperative and their little failures poignantly human. Spiritual and moral growth were so important to Spenser that he deliberately devoted an entire world to their attainment. This is part of what made Faery so appealing to me; within its landscape, the mundane task of being a better person takes on an epic resonance and becomes achievable.

I wanted to parse how the ambiguous landscape of Faery related to and differed from my own world, so I looked first to the physicality of the space. I wondered if there was something about the way Spenser’s landscape or its inhabitants looked or felt that marked it as “other,” but there were no hobbits, no Hogwarts here to identify it by. Faery looks much like the Britain of Arthurian legend, with its only otherworldly markers being the odd dragon or sorcerer. Spenser intentionally occupied an anachronistic space with this poem, even using an affected form of medieval English to enhance the appearance of high romance, so it’s not surprising that his worldbuilding also uses that idiom. Just as Arthurian Britain overlaps with our own world in some mythic, pseudo-historical way, it would appear that Spenser’s Faery should similarly map onto our own physical world. However, Spenser assures us that this is not the case, asserting that “none, that breatheth liuing aire, does know, / Where is that happy land of Faery.” Not to mention the shimmering, transcendent quality that marks it as something other than our own.

So if Faery isn’t easily defined by the feel of its landscape, what is it about this place that feels so magical? And if Spenser isn’t interested in worldbuilding in the traditional sense, then why not set these quests in his own world? The answers lie in the particular journeys of his protagonists. Because Spenser is interested in his characters’ moral development, Faery provides an entirely different setting for every journey. For each of his questers, the landscape offers the perfect combination of challenges, resources, and examples to aid them in realizing their goals. Sir Guyon, in his quest for Temperance, must be provided with a hedonistic “Bower of Bliss” to resist and, ultimately, destroy. When the Redcrosse Knight must learn Holiness, Faery offers up the perfect example in Una and her lion. This nature of “offering,” is where the mystery and even magic of Spenser’s Faery exists: Unlike other created worlds, it looks strikingly like our own, except for the way it seems to provide the perfect support to its heroes’ quests, co-creating their virtue with them.

This is the crux of what makes Faery so alluring. Faery actively participates in the spiritual growth of those who wander its terrain, and I wanted to enter that space, to see my own faltering journey strengthened and supported by a benign and even sentient world. I wished my environment could offer up the precise formula of challenges, resources, and examples to guarantee my own success. No wonder we never see any of Spenser’s heroes return to the real world after their quests are over. Who wouldn’t wish to remain in a world that worked its creative forces upon your own being? This troubled me, though. I couldn’t imagine that Spenser would just abandon his heroes in a well-wrought, virtuous limbo, with no hope of bringing their growth back into their own lives. We all know that an important part of the hero’s journey is the return to the ordinary world, that the journey must always be “there and back again.”

As I wend through my own mutable landscape, questing after virtue and often falling short of my own expectations, I question whether Faery really is, as Spenser suggested, somewhere out there. The idea of this magical world, with its intrinsic nature of offering, of co-creating spiritual growth with the people that wander within it, is appealing but not unfamiliar. In this very ordinary world, when I find myself wandering the local cemetery with a case of severe February hopelessness, I am sure to find snowdrops. When I fear cataclysmic change, I watch the old maple in my garden thrash about in the wind without shedding a branch. When I feel at a loss in a situation, it never fails that the right advice comes my way, whether in the form of a serendipitous library book or a letter from a friend. When anxiety about the future of my home planet threatens to overwhelm me, I pick up trash in my neighborhood woods and marvel at the way that even plastic bags have degraded in a handful of years, burgeoning with fungus and seedlings and insects and even the odd salamander. If Faery land’s true nature is offering and co-creation, then I’ve been here all along.

America’s favorite sharpshooter suffered a sugary makeover in Hollywood and Broadway depictions, which depicted her as someone willing to throw matches and stomach bratty men. In truth, the Ohio-born performer was both steelier and savvier, with lots for a modern feminist to love. First, she married smart. If you’re going to wed at all, pick a husband as handsome and loyal as the Irish immigrant Frank Butler, who set aside his own flourishing career in order to promote hers. (He also wrote her cute poems.) Second, she went after her enemies with something more powerful than a shotgun.

When William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate, allowed his chain of newspapers to run patently false stories depicting her as a thieving drug addict—a serious threat to her dignified brand—Annie Oakley took him to court, not once but fifty-five times. In a Harvey Weinstein-like move to thwart her, Hearst sent a private investigator to dig up dirt in Darke County, where Annie grew up, but nothing was found. In a series of expensive, historically significant lawsuits that lasted years, she prevailed in all but one courtroom. Take that, tabloids and haters.

My forthcoming novel, Annie and the Wolves—a blend of fact and speculative fiction—links Annie’s determination to battle adversaries with trauma caused in her childhood, when she was hired out to live with a farm family that abused her. (The backstory is, unfortunately, true.) It also suggests her battle with Hearst exaggerated other midlife woes. Whether she herself would have admitted the connections, Annie Oakley undeniably pioneered her own route out of poverty and thrived as a modern businesswoman, insistent upon protecting her brand, whether she was traveling with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show or working her own profitable gigs.

Like an 1800s Dolly Parton, she appeared to be apolitical and demure, yet at the same time led by example, championing the inclusion of females in the military and training women to protect themselves from men. Knowing that still wasn’t enough to right the world’s gender wrongs, she donated her wealth to underprivileged girls. That strength and generosity—not only her ability to shoot dimes tossed in the air—are what endear me to Annie Oakley, a badass whose real actions outshine the silly musicals that got her so wrong.

Andromeda Romano-Lax is the author of Annie and the Wolves (Feb 2, 2021) selected by Oprah Magazine as one of 2021’s best and most anticipated historical novels.