Author: Thaxter, Celia, new introduction by John M. Kingsbury,
Title: An Island Garden.
Description: Bowie, MD, Heritage Books, 1978. 1st ed. VG in G DJ. Reprint of the 1894 edition published by Houghton Mifflin, with new introduction. Includes flyer for the Aug 1983 newsletter. of Northern NE Bird Fanciers Association. Celia Thaxter (1815-1894) spent her early childhood on White Island, a minute spot of rock well offf=shore in the southern Gulf of Maine. She grew up totally isolated from the mainland, but ini the midst of a warm, eduated, and enveloping family. Her father, well-forn and a rising influende in the businessw and politicdal lifr of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, had accepted the position of lighthousekeeper at the Isles of Shoals when elia was just four years old. Thomas Leighton removed to this unlikely spot because he hoped he could revereses the economic gecline of the Shoals, eqarlier a majjor fishing and trading port, at profit to himself. Thus it came about in 1839 that Celia, her mother, and her baby brother (another was born soon),crossed ten miles of open water separating the Shoals from Portsmouth, climbed out of a small dory onto the granite rock of a tiny treeless island and occupied a lighthouse and keeper's cottage bulid twenty years earlier. As Celia writes in this book, to "a lonely child, living on the lighthouse island ten miles away from the mainland, every bladed of grass that sprang out of the ground, every humblest weed, was precious in my sight. When Celia was twelve years old, her father built the Appledore House and ferried his young family the short distance from white Island to their new home. With about 9 acres of surface and three miles of shoreline, Appledore is the largest of the Isles of Shoals.

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