George Washington Cable’s Garden Wisdom: From Hummingbirds to the “Joyous Gard”
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
October 12, 1844
Dearest reader,
On this day, George Washington Cable was born—a son of New Orleans who would become celebrated as the first modern southern writer.
Though a German Protestant by heritage, Cable possessed a rare and keen understanding of Creole culture, vividly captured in his early fiction such as Old Creole Days (1879), The Grandissimes (1880), and Madame Delphine (1881).
His affection for his hometown extended beyond words; Cable also designed the gardens of his home in the Garden District at 1313 8th Street, which today stands as a National Historic Landmark, inviting visitors to walk amid the lush greenery he envisioned.
New Orleans, with its vibrant culture and blossoming nature, deeply inspired Cable.
In his story The Taxidermist, he begins with an exquisitely tender passage capturing a moment in a greenhouse where a hummingbird becomes ensnared in a cobweb:
“One day a hummingbird got caught in a cobweb in our greenhouse.
It had no real need to seek that damp, artificial heat.
We were in the very heart of that Creole summertime when bird-notes are many as the sunbeams. The flowers were in such multitude they seemed to follow one about, offering their honeys and perfumes and begging to be gathered.
Our little boy saw the embodied joy fall, a joy no longer, seized it and, clasping it too tightly, brought it to me dead. He cried so over the loss that I promised to have the body stuffed.
This is how I came to know Manouvrier, the Taxidermist in St. Peter Street.”
Such eloquence hints at Cable’s love for capturing the fleeting joys and sorrows of life—and nature alike.
In his essay My Own Acre, Cable shared a philosophy of gardening free from harsh commands and prideful display, writing:
“A garden, we say, should never compel us to go back the way we came; but in truth, a garden should never compel us to do anything.
Its don’ts should be laid solely on itself.
‘Private grounds, no crossing’ – take that away, please, wherever you can, and plant your margins so that there can be no crossing.
Wire nettings hidden by shrubberies from all but the shameless trespasser you will find far more effective, more promotive to beauty, and more courteous.
‘Don’t’ make your garden a garden of don’ts.
For no garden is quite a garden until it is “Joyous Gard.”
Let not yours or mine be a garden for display.
Then our rhododendrons and like splendors will not be at the front gate, and our grounds be less and less worth seeing the farther into them we go.
Nor let yours or mine be a garden of pride.
And let us not have a garden of tiring care or a user up of precious time.
Neither let us have an old-trousers, sun-bonnet, black fingernails garden–especially if you are a woman.”
Cable urged us not to cultivate gardens of pride or endless toil, or those “user up of precious time,” nor “an old-trousers, sunbonnet, black fingernails garden–especially if you are a woman.” A reminder that gardens are for joy, not drudgery.
In The American Garden, he offered further kindness to gardeners:
“One of the happiest things about gardening is that when it is bad, you can always–you and time–you and year after next–make it good.
It is very easy to think of the plants, beds, and paths of a garden as things which, being once placed, must stay where they are; but it is shortsighted, and it is fatal to effective gardening.
He compared garden design to arranging furniture, emphasizing flexibility and renewal over rigid permanence.
“We should look upon the arrangement of things in our garden very much as a housekeeper looks on the arrangement of the furniture in her house.
Except buildings, pavements, and great trees–and not always excepting the trees—we should regard nothing in it as permanent architecture but only as furnishment and decoration.”
So, dear reader, let George Washington Cable’s words be a balm and inspiration—gardens exist as living, breathing spaces meant for pleasure, adaptation, and the quiet poetry of nature walking with us, ever inviting us to explore anew.
