The Garden History Blog

Amaryllis reginae, (Mexican Lily)  1775 
© The Trustees of the British Museum

Mary Granville could easily have been the protagonist of one of those boringly wordy Georgian 3 volume novels, now long unread and forgotten.    The first tome would have covered her early life: from the minor aristocracy, well-educated and talented but not very well off.  Married off young to an elderly powerful admirer she disliked, this opening volume closes with him dying but leaving her high and dry and homeless.

Mary from an enamel and gold portrait box by Zincke, c.1740 Christies

The second volume would have  Mary   living on the fringes of court life, pursued by many suitors until she meets and then finally marries a quiet unassuming but much older clergyman for love, then retiring to a beautiful villa and creating  a splendid garden. This volume is much more lively and positive but ends with his death and her return to London once again with little money.

Magnolia tripetala (Umbrella Tree). 1779  British Museum

The final part of the trilogy would explain how she spent her last years as a much-loved widow following her hobbies and somehow meeting and being befriended by the royal family before finally dying aged 83.

And if that was all there was to her story who would ever have heard of Mary Granville. But luckily it wasn’t. She was a woman of “accomplishments” and her skills in them were far from ordinary and she left behind an extraordinary artistic legacy including shell-work, fine needlework, plastering, japanning, drawing, painting and most famously her ‘paper mosaiks’.   And for that, of course she is better known as Mrs Delany.

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