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vicarious life they found in books to the reality around them. For all of them, one of life’s greatest joys would remain the family together in the shiplike parsonage; and one of life’s greatest fears, being shut out of that joy. “The family feeling and our love for each other is so strong,” Vincent wrote years later, “thatthe heart is uplifted and the eye turns to God and prays, ‘Do not let me stray too far from them, not
too
long, O Lord.’ ”
    Not surprisingly, one of the most important books the young Vincent van Gogh was given to read was
Der schweizerische Robinson
(
The Swiss Family Robinson
), the story of a parson’s family shipwrecked on an uninhabited tropical island and forced to rely entirely on each other to survive in a hostile world.
    ANNA VAN GOGH responded to the ordeal of her new life on the heath by imposing on her family, as zealously as on herself, the rigors of normality.
    Every day, mother, father, children, and governess walked for an hour in and around the town, an area that included gardens and fields as well as the dusty streetscape. Anna believed these walks not only improved her family’s health (their “color and brightness”), but also rejuvenated their spirits. The daily ritual both displayed the family’s bourgeois status—working people could never take an hour off in the daylight—and stamped the family unit with the imprimatur of glorious Nature.
    Anna planted a garden. Family gardens had been a Dutch institution for centuries, thanks both to the fecundity of the soil and the exemption from feudal taxes that the products of these gardens enjoyed. For the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, who lived far beyond subsistence, flower gardens became a mark of leisure and plenty. The rich built country houses, the middle class lavished attention on tiny city plots, the poor planted window boxes and pots. In 1845, Alphonse Karr’s
A Tour Round My Garden
touched the Dutch love affair with gardens to the heartstrings of Victorian sentimentality and instantly became a favorite of families like the Carbentuses and the Van Goghs. (“Love among flowers is not selfish,” Karr instructed; “they are happy in loving and blooming.”) For the rest of her life, Anna believed that “working in the garden and seeing the flowers grow” was essential to both health and happiness.
    The garden in Zundert, which lay behind the barn, was large by Anna’s city standards. Long and narrow, like the parsonage, it was neatly enclosed by a beech hedge and sloped gently downhill toward the fields of rye and wheat beyond. She carefully divided it into sections, putting flowers nearest the house. Eventually, flowers crowded out the more proletarian vegetables, which were banished to a plot adjacent to the nearby cemetery, where the parsonage grew crops, mowed hay, and cultivated trees for market. True to Victorian taste, Anna preferred delicate, small-bloomed flowers—marigolds, mignonettes, geraniums, golden rain—arranged in multicolored profusion. She maintained that scent was more important than color, but favored red and yellow. Beyond the flowerbeds lay rows of blackberry and raspberry bushes and fruit trees—apple, pear, plum, and peach—that dotted the garden with color in spring.
    Cramped in the dark parsonage throughout the long winter, Anna’s young family monitored every nuance of season and celebrated spring’s first starling or daisy like freed prisoners. From that moment on, the family’s center of gravity moved to the garden. Dorus studied and wrote sermons there. Anna read under a shade awning. The children played games in the harvested crops and built castles in the paths of fine Zundert sand. Every member of the Van Gogh family shared responsibility for the garden’s cultivation. Dorus tended the trees and vines (grape and ivy); Anna, the flowers; and each child was given his or her own small plot to plant and harvest.
    Inspired by Karr’s elaborate plant and insect