Mine is a Wilderness — Wyman, Marlena

In their diaries and letters, settler women often wrote of the beauty of the wild plants and flowers on the land. They also planted ornamental flowers among the vegetables in their gardens to remind themselves of the more genteel life they left behind. The garden was an important source of food and family income, but flowers were what their hearts longed for.

Inspired by a letter from Amy Ellett to her friend Doreen Morris of East Grinstead, Sussex, England. Amy Ellett came from London, England to a rural area south of Edmonton, Alberta ca 1895. (Provincial Archives of Alberta #PR1995.0394)

10 July 1956. “My dear Doreen, How I did laugh to think of you two enthusiastic women, each with an umbrella, admiring your garden! Mine is a wilderness, has some lovely blossoms of columbine, such delicate colours and such artistic combination of colours, they thrill me to see them…Alice has a rose tree against the house which is of a soft grey stucco & this tree has one branch well sheltered against it with lovely pink flowers on it. Pink, green & grey do well together. My garden is near a hay-meadow & many grass seeds find a resting-place in it. I don’t mind as I think they are very graceful; brome, Timothy, June-grass, crested-wheat & so on…I admire what I can and overlook the rest.”