The Garden of Live Flowers — Illustrations for Through the Looking Glass by John Tenniel

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The Garden of Live Flowers

Sir John Tenniel

1871

Wood-engraving by Dalziel

Illustration for Chapter 2 of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass

"O Tiger-lily!" said Alice, addressing herself to one that was waving itself gracefully about in the wind, "I wish you could talk!" "We can talk," said the Tiger-lily, "when there's anybody worth talking to." [For commentary, see below; mouse over the text for links.]

In 2000 student assistants from the University Scholars Program, National University of Singapore, scanned this image and added text under the supervision of George P. Landow.

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Commentary by Ray Dyer

Lewis Carroll's interest in flowers should come as no surprise, considering that his upbringing was entirely rural, in villages such as Daresbury on the Cheshire plain, in Croft near Richmond in North Yorkshire (then known as the North Riding of Yorkshire), and in essentially pre-industrial Oxford. Both his Alice books thus abound in the natural scenery of woods, forests and garden flowers. In his final major children's books, Sylvie and Bruno, and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, he maintained a similar and knowledgeable backcloth to his narrative action. Thus, Sylvie's garden is full of named flowers, including heartsease, violets and harebells (Sylvie and Bruno, 200, 202, 213); and Lady Muriel notes that she presses the flowers for her father's Hortus Siccus [Lat. dry garden] (Ch. XX). Orchises are also drawn into a later chapter (Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Ch. III); and Lady Muriel's father the Earl is noted as a keen botanist.

Carroll's child friends in real life were also treated to his benign love of flowers. On Friday 29 April, 1881, whilst walking the river bank in the notable Oxford Wetlands [now a conservation area], he carefully picked some rare fritillaries, dried them and posted them wrapped in damp cotton-wool and in a tin box, to his now grown-up friend Edith Denman (1855-1884, then already Mrs. W. H. Draper of Alfreton, Derbyshire), who was an artist wishing to paint them (see diary entry). The actress Isabella "Isa" Bowman (1874-1958), in her biographical reminiscences of Carroll [whom child friends usually called "Mr. Dodgson" or "Uncle"] notes his love for the fairytale of the foxgloves. Carroll there derived the flower's name from "folk's gloves," saying that they were especially useful as "fairy gloves," as the flowers were just the right size for any imagined "little folk" (Bowman 74).

Related Material

Victorian Botany — sitemap

Bibliography

Bowman, I. Lewis Carroll As I Knew Him. 1899. Ed. M. N. Cohen. New York: Dover Books, 1972.

Carroll, Lewis. Lewis Carroll's Diaries. The Private Journals of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Ed. Edward Wakeling. England: The Lewis Carroll Society, 2003.

_____. Sylvie and Bruno. London: Macmillan, 1889.

_____. Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. London: Macmillan, 1893.

Last modified 22 April 2021