On your day off, you tend to the front garden. It’s a different kind of work than doing the laundry or scrubbing the kitchen floor, a work more welcome. You get dirt under your fingernails, pulling up weeds and protecting your mother’s flowerbed. Your arms ache from carrying the water pail back and forth, careful not to spill a drop anywhere but on the thirsty plants. As the bells from the nearby church toll, you trim dead leaves off of the rosebush.
And you keep a little prize for yourself.
You paste the flower’s petals into your journal with the utmost care. You know by now through trial and error how to press the flowers just right, how to make sure they’re dry and ready. You scrawl Front Garden, 1907 in the margins next to the bright pink petals in your looping cursive handwriting. You paste a clipping of the weeds in too. (Just because you didn’t want them in the flower beds doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be in your journal.)
You scrub the dirt and paste off of your hands with cold water in the basin, shaking them off to dry. You sneak up to the bedroom, careful not to wake your siblings. And you tuck the journal underneath your bed right before you fall asleep, muscles pleasantly tired from a day of satisfying work in Mother’s garden.
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In the Spring semester of this year, I took a course in the UVA English Department called Plants and Empire, taught by Professor Mary Kuhn. From the syllabus: “This course asks how plants might serve as a powerful lens for understanding the social and environmental implications of imperial worldmaking, including its legacies for the way we live and the stories we tell today.” From my friend Reagan who also took the course: “This is the crunchiest English class I have ever taken.”
One of our major assignments in this course was to investigate a seed catalog from the UVA Special Collections Library, in order to “discern the values and ideas about plant life contained within its pages.” Seed catalogs are pretty much exactly what they sound like: advertisements, catalogs compiling seeds and their prices. They’re still used today. You can find seed catalogs marketing to everyone from good old-fashioned farmers to casual gardeners.
However, one of the pieces pulled from Special Collections for our class was quite unlike the others. While the other pieces were more conventional commercial seed catalogs, by chance Reagan and I were sitting in front of a piece listed as Folk Art Herbarium.
It was clearly homemade, a sort of scrapbook, filled cover to cover with beautiful cuttings of flowers, leaves, and artwork. Edge to edge of every nearly single page of this journal was covered. I felt as though by flipping the pages of this journal I was sinking my fingers into untilled soil and uncovering rich earth to explore.
Reagan and I both wrote our individual papers on this document. But even after the assignments were turned in, both of us had one strong, lingering question in our minds: Who was the author of this journal? We decided to put on our detective hats.
Step 1: How old was the author?
Reagan found an entry in the journal where the author mentioned being 5 years old in the year 1900, which would place their birth year at either 1894 or 1895. The entries in this journal range from 1907 to 1913, meaning that they started their collecting and compiling of this journal around the age of 13 or 14, and continued until 18 or 19.
Step 2: Where did the author live?
We knew that without a name, it would be helpful to first locate the author geographically. And lucky for us, the mystery author didn’t just include plants in their journal, but also pages of artwork, sometimes of real places.
Two main contenders stood out as possible home addresses: 31 Leicester Street and 54 Hoghton Street. Using my Google Maps skills, I confirmed that both of these buildings were in the same town, Southport, UK, and that they were clearly places of residence, although today 54 Hoghton Street currently appears to be a daycare.
Step 3: Who was the author?
Okay, so we had a town, two possible addresses, and an approximate age that we knew for certain of the author of this book. It was time to search the sites. I made free accounts on three or four genealogy sites, and scanned through rows of names to see if I could spot someone who matched this profile. I checked a number of records for 31 Leicester Street and came up empty. I typed in the second address. If this search didn’t yield results, I had no idea what further steps we could take, if there was any way we could figure out this mystery author.
Finally, I saw her: Elizabeth Gordon, b. 1895, d. 1984. She lived at 54 Hoghton Street during at least the 1901 and 1911 censuses. She never married, and worked as a “Domestic Servant” as of the 1911 census, conducted when she was fifteen. None of my other google searches yielded any more information about this woman.
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I sat there, in the hallway of New Cabell, staring at this genealogy site and wondering what it was that we had accomplished. So we had a name, but we didn’t find out a lot of information about this person, nor did we have any way of confirming whether or not our theory was correct.
But what we did know was that over the hundred years after this teenage girl filled up her personal plant and art journal, some unknown number of people had to choose to preserve and care for it, so that us two 20-somethings could admire and learn from it. While the collection of seed catalogs that were presented to us for the project were mostly commercial and impersonal, the archives and archivists still made space for the independent creation of some young kid, nearly completely forgotten by history.
A child made this journal. Someone going through all of the anxieties and stresses of growing up (albeit over a hundred years ago) made this journal, pouring hours of effort and care into meticulously crafting its pages. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it, all of its depiction of plant life and intricate and intimate art of the author’s surroundings and daily life. I didn’t care so much about how some 20th century company marketed their seeds — what I could have learned from the other documents pulled for this class’s assignment — but instead I desperately wanted to have a name to attach to this creation.
When I was a kid, even in elementary school, I would always wonder what would happen if my notebooks became historical texts. If my diaries and doodles were studied by future historians who wanted to know what life was like way back when. I was worried they would think the things I cared about were silly. But looking back, I think I was more worried that my things weren’t important enough to be saved (and maybe I wasn’t important enough to be saved?) in the archive at all for anyone to want to look at later.
I think a lot of what drew me to this document in the first place was that it seemed so out of the ordinary to what I would expect to find housed in the UVA Special Collections Library. When I think of the collection, I think about rare books, Faulkner’s manuscripts or original works by Thomas Jefferson. And yet, Folk Art Herbarium is housed there too, one of the approximately 13 million items in the manuscript collection here. I’m sure many of them have unknown authors, just like Folk Art Herbarium, and it would be unreasonable of me to expect the librarians here to do the same amount of research for these texts as we did for Folk Art Herbarium.
I think I felt that Folk Art Herbarium and its author deserved this attention and this time from me and my friend. That alongside these great important historical documents, there should be a place for and respect paid to the result of a teenage girl’s hobby a hundred years ago, just like how she included weeds in the same book as petals from the most beautiful roses she had ever seen. I remember tucking my own journals onto my bookshelf with such care, feeling silly while recognizing my slightly inflated sense of self-importance, but also so intent on keeping this record of myself safe. I don’t know what it was like to be fifteen in 1911, but I do know what it felt like when I was fifteen, feeling like all the world thinks my interests, thoughts, and desires are trivial. Elizabeth Gordon, whether or not she was the author my friend and I searched for, deserves a place and attention in the archives, in memory, in history. I want to believe that everyone, no matter how young or seemingly unimportant, does too. Without the “trivial” things, without the weeds, the archives — and we — lose the picture of the full flower, of the scope of human experience and perspective.
