Abby Chandler, PhD
Garden History and L.M. Montgomery: “All the Flowers I Want”
Canadian writer L.M. Montgomery is best known as the author of multiple novels including Anne of Green Gables. The plots of these novels are underscored by gardens which are described in enough detail to allow readers to mentally trace the paths leading from one plant to the next. Her letters and journals document her own life as a gardener from flowering pots on windowsills in the 1890s to the gardens she created at her homes in the early 1900s. Montgomery’s gardens, whether the fictional ones she gave her characters, or her own, directly reflected the emergence of new gardening styles at the turn of the twentieth century. By using Montgomery’s writings as source material for studying early twentieth century gardens, this presentation will offer a new look at a beloved writer and the worlds she created.
Abby Chandler, PhD, is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her second book, “Seized with the Temper of the Times”: Identity and Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary America, was published by Westholme in 2023. She is also a gardener and a life-long reader of L.M. Montgomery, and is working on a book which considers Montgomery’s writings about gardens in context with the cottage garden movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
