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* The Geograhy of the Emily of New Moon Series

Descriptions

New Moon

New Moon and Surroundings: Descriptions from the novels

New Moon Farm

There was a certain charm about the old house which Emily felt keenly and responded to, although she was too young to understand it. It was a house which aforetime had had vivid brides and mothers and wives, and the atmosphere of their loves and lives still hung around it, not yet banished by the old-maidishness of the regime of Elizabeth and Laura.

.. the scene before her was too interesting to worry long about Aunt Elizabeth. Delicious smells were coming from the cook-house–a little, slant-roofed building at the corner where the big cooking-stove was placed in summer. It was thickly overgrown with hop vines, as most of the New Moon buildings were. To the right was the “new” orchard, very wonderful now in blossom, but a rather commonplace spot after all, since Cousin Jimmy cultivated it in most up-to-date fashion and had grain growing in the wide spaces between the straight rows of trees that looked all alike. But on the other side of the barn lane, just behind the well, was the “old orchard,” where Cousin Jimmy said the columbines grew and which seemed to be a delightful place where trees had come up at their own sweet will, and grown into individual shapes and sizes, where blue-eyed ivy twined about their roots and wild-briar roses rioted over the grey paling fence. Straight ahead, closing the vista between the orchards, was a little slope covered with huge white birches, among which were the big New Moon barns, and beyond the new orchard a little, lovable red road looped lightly up and up, over a hill, until it seemed to touch the vivid blue of the sky.

Cousin Jimmy came down from the barns, carrying brimming pails of milk, and Emily ran with him to the dairy behind the cook-house. Such a delightful spot she had never seen or imagined. It was a snow-white little building in a clump of tall balm-of-gileads. Its grey roof was dotted over with cushions of moss like fat green-velvet mice. You went down six sand-stone steps with ferns crowding about them, and opened a white door with a glass panel in it, and went down three more steps. And then you were in a clean, earthy-smelling, damp, cool place with an earthen floor and windows screened by the delicate emerald of young hop vines, and broad wooden shelves all around, whereon stood wide, shallow pans of glossy brown ware, full of milk coated over with cream so rich that it was positively yellow.

Aunt Laura was waiting for them and she strained the milk into empty pans and then skimmed some of the full ones. Emily thought skimming was a lovely occupation and longed to try her hand at it. She also longed to sit right down and write a description of that dear dairy; but alas, there was no account-book; still, she could write it in her head. She squatted down on a little three-legged stool in a dim corner and proceeded to do it, sitting so still that Jimmy and Laura forgot her and went away and later had to hunt for her a quarter of an hour. This delayed breakfast and made Aunt Elizabeth very cross. But Emily had found just the right sentence to define the clear yet dim green light that filled the dairy and was so happy over it that she didn’t mind Aunt Elizabeth’s black looks a bit.

…They went gravely on ahead and she had only to follow, through the old orchard and then through the scrub maple growth beyond, along a twisted ferny path where the Wind Woman was purring and peeping around the maple clumps.

Emily loitered by the pasture gate until her eager eyes had taken in all the geography of the landscape. The old pasture ran before her in a succession of little green bosoms right down to the famous Blair Water–an almost perfectly round pond, with grassy, sloping, treeless margins. Beyond it was the Blair Water valley, filled with homesteads, and further out the great sweep of the white-capped gulf. It seemed to Emily’s eyes a charming land of green shadows, and blue waters. Down in one corner of the pasture, walled off by an old stone dyke, was the little private graveyard where the dead-and-gone Murrays were buried. Emily wanted to go and explore it, but was afraid to trust herself in the pasture…

Off to the right, on the crest of a steep little hill, covered with young birches and firs, was a house that puzzled and intrigued Emily. It was grey and weather-worn, but it didn’t look old. It had never been finished; the roof was shingled but the sides were not, and the windows were boarded over. Why had it never been finished? And it was meant to be such a pretty little house–a house you could love–a house where there would be nice chairs and cosy fires and bookcases and lovely, fat, purry cats and unexpected corners; then and there she named it the Disappointed House, and many an hour thereafter did she spend finishing that house, furnishing it as it should be furnished, and inventing the proper people and animals to live in it.

To the left of the pasture-field was another house of a quite different type–a big, old house, tangled over with vines, flat-roofed, with mansard windows, and a general air of indifference and neglect about it. A large, untidy lawn, overgrown with unpruned shrubs and trees, straggled right down to the pond, where enormous willows drooped over the water. Emily decided that she would ask Cousin Jimmy about these houses when she got a good chance.

She felt that, before she went back, she must slip along the pasture fence and explore a certain path which she saw entering the grove of spruce and maple further down. She did–and found that it led straight into Fairyland–along the bank of a wide, lovely brook–a wild, dear, little path with lady-ferns beckoning and blowing along it, the shyest of elfin June-bells under the firs, and little whims of loveliness at every curve. She breathed in the tang of fir-balsam and saw the shimmer of gossamers high up in the boughs, and everywhere the frolic of elfin lights and shadows. Here and there the young maple branches interlaced as if to make a screen for dryad faces–Emily knew all about dryads, thanks to her father–and the great sheets of moss under the trees were meet for Titania’s couch.

.. She wished the path might go on forever, but presently it veered away from the brook, and when she had scrambled over a mossy, old board fence she found herself in the “front garden” of New Moon, where Cousin Jimmy was pruning some spirea bushes.

… The garden was a beautiful place, well worthy Cousin Jimmy’s pride. It seemed like a garden where no frost could wither or rough wind blow–a garden remembering a hundred vanished summers. There was a high hedge of clipped spruce all around it, spaced at intervals by tall Lombardies. The north side was closed in by a thick grove of spruce against which a long row of peonies grew, their great red blossoms splendid against its darkness. One big spruce grew in the centre of the garden and underneath it was a stone bench, made of flat shore stones worn smooth by long polish of wind and wave. In the south-east corner was an enormous clump of lilacs, trimmed into the semblance of one large drooping-boughed tree, gloried over with purple. An old summer-house, covered with vines, filled the south-west corner. And in the north-west corner there was a sundial of grey stone, placed just where the broad red walk that was bordered with striped grass, and picked out with pink conchs, ran off into Lofty John’s bush. Emily had never seen a sundial before and hung over it enraptured.

—Emily looked about her with delight. The garden was lovely and the house quite splendid to her childish eyes. It had a big front porch with Grecian columns. These were thought very elegant in Blair Water, and went far to justify the Murray pride. A schoolmaster had said they gave the house a classical air. To be sure, the classical effect was just now rather smothered in hop-vines that rioted over the whole porch and hung in pale-green festoons above the rows of potted scarlet geraniums that flanked the steps.

- EoNM ch. 6

Interior of New Moon House

Emily had never seen a kitchen like this before. It had dark wooden walls and low ceiling, with black rafters crossing it, from which hung hams and sides of bacon and bunches of herbs and new socks and mittens, and many other things, the names and uses of which Emily could not imagine. The sanded floor was spotlessly white, but the boards had been scrubbed away through the years until the knots in them stuck up all over in funny little bosses, and in front of the stove they had sagged, making a queer, shallow little hollow. In one corner of the ceiling was a large square hole which looked black and spookish in the candlelight, and made her feel creepy. Something might pop down out of a hole like that if one hadn’t behaved just right, you know. And candles cast such queer wavering shadows. Emily didn’t know whether she liked the New Moon kitchen or not. It was an interesting place–and she rather thought she would like to describe it in the old account-book, if it hadn’t been burned…

Emily…went into the sitting-room. It was much more cheerful than the kitchen. The floor was covered with gay-striped homespun, the table had a bright crimson cloth, the walls were hung with pretty, diamond-patterned paper, the curtains were of wonderful pale-red damask with a design of white ferns scattered all over them. They looked very rich and imposing and Murray-like. Emily had never seen such curtains before. But best of all were the friendly gleams and flickers from the jolly hardwood fire in the open stove that mellowed the ghostly candlelight with something warm and rosy-golden. Emily toasted her toes before it and felt reviving interest in her surroundings. What lovely little leaded glass doors closed the china closets on either side of the high, black, polished mantel! What a funny, delightful shadow the carved ornament on the sideboard cast on the wall behind it–just like a negro’s side-face, Emily decided. What mysteries might lurk behind the chintz-lined glass doors of the bookcase! Books were Emily’s friends wherever she found them. She flew over to the bookcase and opened the door. But before she could see more than the backs of rather ponderous volumes, Aunt Elizabeth came in, with a mug of milk and a plate whereon lay two little oatmeal cakes.

- EoNM ch. 6

Left alone in her lookout, lighted dimly by the one small candle, Emily gazed about her with keen and thrilling interest. She could not get into bed until she had explored every bit of it. The room was very old-fashioned, like all New Moon rooms. The walls were papered with a design of slender gilt diamonds enclosing golden stars and hung with worked woollen mottoes and pictures that had been “supplements” in the girlhood of her aunts. One of them, hanging over the head of the bed, represented two guardian angels. In its day this had been much admired but Emily looked at it with distaste.

“I don’t like feather wings on angels,” she said decidedly. “Angels should have rainbowy wings.”

On the floor was a pretty homespun carpet and round braided rugs. There was a high black bedstead with carved posts, a fat feather-bed, and an Irish chain quilt, but, as Emily was glad to see, no curtains. A little table, with funny claw-feet and brass-knobbed drawers, stood by the window, which was curtained with muslin frills; one of the window-panes contorted the landscape funnily, making a hill where no hill was. Emily liked this–she couldn’t have told why, but it was really because it gave the pane an individuality of its own. An oval mirror in a tarnished gilt frame hung above the table; Emily was delighted to find she could see herself in it–”all but my boots”–without craning or tipping it. “And it doesn’t twist my face or turn my complexion green,” she thought happily. Two high-backed, black chairs with horsehair seats, a little washstand with a blue basin and pitcher, and a faded ottoman with woollen roses cross-stitched on it, completed the furnishing. On the little mantel were vases full of dried and coloured grasses and a fascinating pot-bellied bottle filled with West Indian shells. On either side were lovable little cupboards with leaded-glass doors like those in the sitting-room. Underneath was a small fireplace.

“I wonder if Aunt Elizabeth will ever let me have a little fire here,” thought Emily.

The room was full of that indefinable charm found in all rooms where the pieces of furniture, whether old or new, are well acquainted with each other and the walls and floors are on good terms. Emily felt it all over her as she flitted about examining everything. This was her room–she loved it already–she felt perfectly at home.

- EoNM ch. 27

Real Life Locations

Emily of New Moon is associated with the Malpeque area of PEI. LMM’s Aunt Emily lived in Malpeque and her home is allegedly prototype for New Moon. The Emily of New Moon TV series was also filmed in Cabot Beach Provincial Park in Malpeque, perhaps inspired by this belief.
Map Showing Malpeque Bay
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I first learned of a connection between Aunt Emily Montgomery’s Malpeque home and New Moon on Prince Edward Island: A Journey Home. The website shares the information that Ruth Campbell of the Anne of Green Gables Museum at Silver Bush grew up on the Malpeque farm, which family tradition called the “original” of New Moon.

Perhaps the tradition sprang from this anecdote of Montgomery family history, retold for the Murrays of New Moon:

Hugh Montgomery and his wife Mary… had been bound for Quebec. But poor Mary Montgomery had been most desperately seasick all through the long voyage across the Atlantic. In the gulf of St. Lawrence the ship was short of water and the captain anchored off Prince Edward Island and sent the men on shore for water. And he told Mrs. Montgomery she could go too and stretch her legs on land. Mary went; and when she got to land she vowed that she would never set foot on a ship again. Her husband had to land there also with his goods and chattels. There is no tradition of how he took ait and whether he was willing or unwilling. Fox Point is where Uncle John Montgomery and Aunt Emily lived. The old Montgomery homestead was there. It was a very beautiful spot and must have been wild and lonely enough when Hugh and Mary set up their roof-tree there. (June 1, 1931, SJ3 130)

Montgomery Homestead at Fox Point, photo from the Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery v.iv

On my trip to PEI in 2004, I received directions from the staff at the Site of Montgomery’s Cavendish Home to find Aunt Emily’s old home.

The house was empty and “for sale” when I came upon it, standing starkly on a barren headland with the sea on two sides. The fields ended in red sandstone cliffs falling sharply onto sand beaches. It was very near, and very open to the sea.

New Moon and its surroundings are described fully in chapter 7 of Emily of New Moon. It has orchards, “old and new,” a delightful dairy and cookhouse, and a splendid front garden with a vine-hung summer house. “Lofty John”’s spruce grove shelters the garden from the north sea winds. The pasture runs down to “the famous Blair Water–an almost perfectly round pond, with grassy, sloping, treeless margins. Beyond it was the Blair Water valley, filled with homesteads, and further out the great sweep of the white-capped gulf.”

As A Journey Home points out, there was an orchard, pine trees, and a white outbuilding in LMM’s photograph of her Aunt’s home; throughout time, the shore may have eroded, and LMM’s imagination may have made modifications.

Uncle John’s House at Malpeque, photo by L. M. Montgomery

LMM spent a few months with her Aunt Emily in Malpeque when she was 11 years old, and enjoyed her visit. But there is no indication of any great attachment to Malpeque or to Aunt Emily’s home in her journal entries, neither in her youth nor adulthood. Nowhere does LMM write that Malpeque was the setting for New Moon. In fact, she writes:

New Moon is in some respects but not all my own old home [in Cavendish] and “Emily’s” inner life was my own, though outwardly most of the events and incidents were fictitious.

– Wednesday, August 29, 1923 Leaksdale, Ont.

The old Macneill Homestead where LMM grew up was embowered in an apple orchard, and the atmosphere of the farm lanes and outbuildings and interiors seem to correspond. Emily’s Monarch of the Forest in Lofty John’s bush was drawn from LMM’s life, where “On the southern edge of the Haunted Wood grew a most magnificent old birch. This was the tree of trees to me. I worshipped it, and called it “The Monarch of The Forest.” One of my earliest “poems” – the third I wrote – was written on it, when I was nine.” LMM’s Haunted Wood (not to be confused with the Haunted Wood on the grounds of the Green Gables museum) “was a harmless, pretty spruce grove in the field below the orchard,” and was eventually cut down, a fate echoed for Lofty John’s bush.

Macneill Homestead, photo by L. M. Montgomery, c.1900

‘View from My Window’, photo by L. M. Montgomery, c.1900

View of the hills, from the window of Montgomery’s childhood “lookout” room, photo by L. M. Montgomery, c.1900

Emily’s first glimpse of Blair Water is not unlike Anne’s arrival in Avonlea; there is a vista of a pond with the sea beyond, and a white house on a forested hill. Perhaps this is a landscape very common throughout PEI, where there are rolling hills and countless gem-like lakes. But on approaching Cavendish, which LMM had already claimed to be Avonlea, one passes by the Cavendish pond and can likely see LMM’s home/ Green Gables on a hill. Passing the “Lake of Shining Waters” at Park Corner, there is a similar effect: a gleaming body of water, coastlines close by, and the two LMM museums on higher ground.

It was sunset when they came to Blair Water–a rosy sunset that flooded the long, sandy sea-coast with colour and brought red road and fir-darkened hill out in fleeting clearness of outline. Emily looked about her on her new environment and found it good. She saw a big house peering whitely through a veil of tall old trees–no mushroom growth of yesterday’s birches but trees that had loved and been loved by three generations–a glimpse of silver water glistening through the dark spruces–that was the Blair Water itself, she knew–and a tall, golden-white church spire shooting up above the maple woods in the valley below. But it was none of these that brought her the flash–that came with the sudden glimpse of the dear, friendly, little dormer window peeping through vines on the roof–and right over it, in the opalescent sky, a real new moon, golden and slender. — EoNM, ch. 6

The New Moon house is noted for its elegant “big front porch with Grecian columns.” (EoNM, ch. 7) The Macneill homestead in Cavendish appears, from photographs, to be a low white house, with a back porch but not a front. I wonder if Grandfather Montgomery’s house at Park Corner isn’t a candidate for New Moon, with its notable porch and air of grandeur. However, it is a newer home built during LMM’s childhood, and not an “old homestead.” A woodland path leads to “The Lake of Shining Waters” nearby, with a little family graveyard on its banks. The house is now “The L. M. Montgomery Heritage Museum/Ingleside.” It has a long black staircase inside and upstairs there is a room called the “lookout” which LMM inhabited on her visits, recalling Emily’s “lookout” room (although LMM’s also had the “lookout room” in Cavendish as a child).

Very likely many of LMM’s ancestral homes filtered into her imagination.

Wyther Grange

Emily had a burning curiosity to see Great-Aunt Nancy and Wyther Grange, her quaint, old house at Priest Pond with the famous stone dogs on the gate-posts.
- Emily of New Moon, ch. 22

They went through the spacious hall, catching glimpses on either side of large, dim, splendid rooms, then through the kitchen end out of it into an odd little back hall. It was long and narrow and dark. On one side was a row of four, square, small-paned windows, on the other were cupboards, reaching from floor to ceiling, with doors of black shining wood. Emily felt like one of the heroines in Gothic romance, wandering at midnight through a subterranean dungeon, with some unholy guide…

The back parlour was a pretty, quaint old room where a table was laid for supper. Caroline led Emily through it and knocked at another door, using a quaint old brass knocker that was fashioned like a chessy-cat, with such an irresistible grin that you wanted to grin, too, when you saw it. Somebody said, “Come in,” and they went down another four steps–was there ever such a funny house?–into a bedroom. And here at last was Great-Aunt Nancy Priest, sitting in her arm-chair, with her black stick leaning against her knee, and her tiny white hands, still pretty, and sparkling with fine rings, lying on her purple silk apron.

- Emily of New Moon, ch. 23

Wyther Grange is LMM’s Grandfather Montgomery’s old home, which LMM has early childhood memories of. The “old house” was later torn down and replaced by the house that is currently the L. M. Montgomery Heritage Museum.

Sen. Donald Montgomery’s farm at Park Corner, c. 1880

Friday January 7, 1910

“The first six of my life are very hazy. I do not seem to have any connected memories of them. Here and there a picture-like scene stands out in vivid colors. Many of these are connected with visits to Grandfather Montgomery’s place at Park Corner. They lived in the “old house” then - a most quaint and delightful old place as I remember it. I recall in particular a certain long “back hall”, with cupboards on one side and a window on the other. At the end of this was a short flight of steps going up to a little private sitting room of grandmother Montgomery’s. Out of this another flight of steps led down to Grandmother’s bedroom.

Priest Pond and Malvern Bay

Driving with Old Kelly to Priest Pond, Emily takes in the geography of Blair Water and its neighbouring lakelets:

“The road from Blair Water to, Priest Pond was a very lovely one, winding along the gulf shore, crossing fir-fringed rivers and inlets, and coming ever and anon on one of the ponds for which that part of the north shore was noted–Blair Water, Derry Pond, Long Pond, Three Ponds where three blue lakelets were strung together like three great sapphires held by a silver thread; and then Priest Pond, the largest of all, almost as round as Blair Water. As they drove down towards it Emily drank the scene in with avid eyes–as soon as possible she must write a description of it; she had packed the Jimmy blank book in her box for just such purposes.

The air seemed to be filled with opal dust over the great pond and the bowery summer homesteads around it. A western sky of smoky red was arched over the big Malvern Bay beyond. Little grey sails were drifting along by the fir-fringed shores. A sequestered side road, fringed thickly with young maples and birches, led down to Wyther Grange.”

Looking at a map of the north shore of PEI, it is hard to find three distinct lakelets “strung together” with a large round pond at its end. But driving from Cavendish to Park Corner and Malpeque, a drive LMM would have known well, one comes “ever and anon” upon countless. There is a a conglomeration of water bodies at New London Bay, and there is a series of lakes that end at sea-dunes from the Lake of Shining Waters at Park Corner to Malpeque.

Aerial View of Park Corner and Sea View, Google Maps 2008

In particular, there is an area historically known as “Three Ponds” “midway between Malpeque and New London Harbours” (SJ4 421)

It is my belief that “the big Malvern Bay” is really Malpeque Bay, undoubtedly the largest bay on the north shore. LMM could have easily changed the name Malpeque to Malvern.

Malpeque Bay at left, New London Harbour at right, Google Maps 2008

The Tansy Patch

The Tansy Patch was east of the Disappointed House, between the Blair Water and the sand-dunes. Most people considered it a bare, lonely, neglected place, but Emily thought it was fascinating. The little clap-boarded house topped a small hill, over which tansy grew in a hard, flaunting, aromatic luxuriance, rising steeply and abruptly from a main road. A straggling rail fence, almost smothered in wild rosebushes, bounded the domain, and a sagging, ill-used little gate gave ingress from the road. Stones were let into the side of the hill for steps up to the front door. Behind the house was a tumbledown little barn, and a field of flowering buckwheat, creamy green, sloping down to the Blair Water. In front was a crazy veranda around which a brilliant band of red poppies held up their enchanted cups. (EoNM ch. 12)

Lofty John’s Bush

We have three paths in it. We call them the To-day Road, the Yesterday Road and the To-morrow Road. The To-day Road is by the brook and we call it that because it is lovely now. The Yesterday Road is out in the stumps where Lofty John cut some trees down and we call it that because it used to be lovely. The To-morrow Road is just a tiny path in the maple clearing and we call it that because it is going to be lovely some day, when the maples grow bigger. (EoNM ch. 12)

Stovepipe Town

Stovepipe Town is a poor herring fishing village by the harbour, so-called because “because the houses have no chimneys, only pipes sticking out of the roof.” (EoNM ch. 15) Sailing vessels such as the Mira Lee (EQ ch. VI) are “anchor by the wharf at Stovepipe Town.”

“Everything was so beautiful in this magical moment before sunrise. The wild blue irises around the pond, the violet shadows in the curves of the dunes, the white filmy mist hanging over the buttercup valley across the pond, the cloth of gold and silver that was called a field of daisies, the cool, delicious gulf breeze, the blue of far lands beyond the harbour, plumes of purple and mauve smoke going up on the still, golden air from the chimneys of Stovepipe Town where the fishermen rose early. ” EQ ch. XIV

Shrewsbury

It looked south into the fir grove and its balsam blew in to her like a caress. To the left there was an opening in the trees like a green, arched window, and one saw an enchanting little moonlit landscape through it. And it would let in the splendour of sunset. To the right was a view of the hill-side along which West Shrewsbury straggled: the hill was dotted with lights in the autumn dusk, and had a fairy-like loveliness. Somewhere near by there was a drowsy twittering, as of little, sleepy birds swinging on a shadowy bough. EC. ch. 6

But if the house is ugly and my room unfriendly, the Land of Uprightness is beautiful and saves my soul alive. The Land of Uprightness is the fir grove behind the house. I call it that because the firs are all so exceedingly tall and slender and straight. There is a pool in it, veiled with ferns, with a big grey boulder beside it. It is reached by a little, winding, capricious path so narrow that only one can walk in it. When I’m tired or lonely or angry or too ambitious I go there and sit for a few minutes. Nobody can keep an upset mind looking at those slender, crossed tips against the sky. I go there to study on fine evenings, though Aunt Ruth is suspicious and thinks it is just another manifestation of my slyness. Soon it will be dark too early to study there and I’ll be so sorry. Somehow, my books have a meaning there they never have anywhere else. EC. ch. 7

“There are so many dear, green corners in the Land of Uprightness, full of the aroma of sun-steeped ferns, and grassy, open spaces where pale asters feather the grass, swaying gently towards each other when the Wind Woman runs among them. And just to the left of my window there is a group of tall old firs that look, in moonlight or twilight, like a group of witches weaving spells of sorcery. When I first saw them, one windy night against the red sunset, with the reflection of my candle, like a weird, signal flame, suspended in the air among their boughs, the flash came–for the first time in Shrewsbury–and I felt so happy that nothing else mattered. I have written a poem about them. EC. ch. 7

I climbed the steep little wooded hill in the Land of Uprightness to-night and had an exultation on its crest. There’s always something satisfying in climbing to the top of a hill. There was a fine tang of frost in the air, the view over Shrewsbury Harbour was very wonderful, and the woods all about me were expecting something to happen soon–at least that is the only way I can describe the effect they had on me.

EC. ch. 7