Friendship of Nature: A New England Chronicle of Birds and Flowers, The

Environmental History, Oct 2000 by Schulze, Robin

The Friendship of Nature: A New England Chronicle of Birds and Flowers. By Mabel Osgood Wright. Edited by Daniel J. Philippon. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999- 172 pp. Illustrations, notes, selected bibliography, index. Cloth $42.00, paper $16.95.

Daniel J. Philippon's new edition of Mabel Osgood Wright's The Friendship of Nature: A New England Chronicle of Birds and Flowers (1894) is a welcome addition to a growing body of reprints of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American nature writing. Wright's book provides an important introduction to the early career of a forgotten champion of America's flora and fauna.

As Philippon explains in his fine introduction, Wright's career as a nature writer grew out of her childhood experiences exploring the eight wooded acres in Fairfield, Connecticut, that held the Osgood family summer home, Mosswood. Throughout Wright's early years, Wright's father, Unitarian minister Samuel Osgood, transformed the estate into a model of cottage landscape design, complete with numerous gardens. Following her father's death, Wright retained the property and, from her base at Mosswood, launched her career as a popular nature writer and conservation activist. Between 1894 and 1931, she authored twenty-seven books including field guides, natural history books, nature stories for children, and novels. Elected president of the Connecticut Audubon Society in 1898, Wright became a guiding force behind bird conservation in Connecticut and beyond.

The Friendship of Nature (1894), Wright's first book, consists of eleven essays that together form a seasonal account, spring to winter, of a dizzying array of New England flora and fauna. Philippon reads Wright's work as principally a "regional chronicle"-a book whose scientifically informed descriptions "of a landscape in motion" serve to root Wright's readers in the Connecticut countryside. Wright's record of the particulars of place, Philippon argues, is in turn meant to lead readers to the sense of interconnectedness between man and nature that, for Wright, formed the core of human experience. "Nature," Philippon states, "in Wright's view, exists in relationship with human activity" (p. 26).

Throughout her essays, the "friendship" that Wright posits between man and nature seems specifically designed to counter harsher Huxleyan views of man's role as Uber-gardener in a brutal Darwinian universe driven by competitive instinct. In Wright's chronicle, it is man's job (or, more truly, woman's) to aide nature rather than dominate her, to create a more perfect space where all favored creatures, particularly song birds, can exist without fear. "The gate [to the garden] is never closed," she writes, "except to violence" (p. 95). The gardener's job, Wright asserts, is that of a loving protector. With a little help, Nature will do what she does best, and the results are never dire.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Wright's friendly vision of relationship lies in her depiction of productive landscapes. Throughout her chronicle, Wright remains fascinated by the blurring of borders between domesticated spaces and wilder ones. Her best-loved places are those in which human production does not preclude a healthy relationship with plant and animal neighbors. She focuses on the joys of the old orchard where the trees, "long past their prime," remain with their "boughs... untrimmed in thriftless beauty." Such an orchard, she explains, provides "a complete brotherhood of birds" (p. 40). She appreciates the cider mill "one side half fallen down" that, being idle all the year save for a month or two, stands covered with vines and mosses that "spread mimic forests on the roof." The barren onion fields near her Connecticut home, where man "wages war" with nature, strike Wright as the most piteous of waste lands (p. 65). Decades before Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, Wright implores her readers to value the beauty and diversity of nature over the land's purely productive efficiency.

Reviewed by Robin Schulze. Ms. Schulze is the author of The Web of Friendship: Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens (1995) and Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems of Marianne Moore in Their Publication Contexts (forthcoming 2000). She is an associate professor of English at Penn State University and has published articles about Marianne Moore's poems on plant and animal subjects. She is currently working on a study of modernist poetry and American nature writing.