Hello, I’m glad you’re here. My interest in Irish and Celtic mythology, folk and fae lore deepened as I researched Through the Yew Hedge. First, it was W.B. Yeats, and I devoured his collection of fairy and folk tales. Enraptured by his poem, The Stolen Child, I pulled epigraphs. On to the Irish foundational myth cycle and the Tuatha de Dannen swept me away. Most recently, I found a Welsh scholar online, Dr. Gwilym Morus-Baird, and his CelticSource classes. I love the music of the language and deep poetic resonance, the praise and transformation poetry of Taliesin, the renowned Welsh Bard. Dr. Morus-Baird’s, Taliesin Origin, and the Welsh folk and fairy stories of the The Mabinogion Lady Charlotte Guest's translation (1812-1895)

I’m not an expert herbalist, but my history in horticulture draws me to botanical lore and imagery.

Note: I do caution readers to seek expert advice in administering or ingesting herbs.

The Story at Hand: This story may resonate with those with severed lineage and heritage, whether by adoption or other displacement, a well-known Welsh folktale of herbal healing.

The Latin for healing, Sanatio, fits the overall theme of The Garden & the Gate: Protection, Recovery, Restoration, and Preservation; both novellas’ shapes and the adoptee’s experience: Sanatio, healing and restoration.

The Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach
Lady of the Lake / The Myddfai Physicians passage from Through The Iron Gate, scene with Helen and Stella.

When the hawthorn was in blossom, and the garden was slipping out of winter, Helen and I were sitting in the Rosemere on a February evening. The Franklin stove, ticking with heat, drew the damp from the plaster walls, while we sipped tea on the worn, cobalt blue velvet sofa. Helen found herself remembering the Folklore of the Estate: the story she had recited at twilight in the Medieval Garden on Midsummer, on what felt like eons ago. She shook her head, recalling the Pierce lecture and what it did to open her eyes to the complex, even nefarious version of “The Three Who Remained.”

But she relaxed into the moment with the fond memory of her fireside stories with me in the living room of the Tudor Manor. “I recall another legend, about the Myddfai tradition. I showed you the copy of the 1861 translation that Elizabeth kept in the Hidden Library, The Physicians of Myddfai, translated from the Red Book of Hergest.” Helen scattered wisdom like seeds, trusting some would take root. “Do you remember? It’s the fourteenth-century Welsh manuscript, bound in red, of poetry, prose, history, and the medical practices of Rhiwallon and his sons, the Physicians of Myddfai; their ancient herbal remedies and healing arts.”

Helen recited by heart, her cadence expressive, as with each storytelling.

“In the shadow of the Black Mountains of Wales lies a lake called Llyn y Fan Fach, where mist clings to dark waters and the boundary between worlds grows thin.

“Here, in the time of the old kings, lived a farmer’s son who tended his cattle on the mountain slopes. One Bealtaine morning, as he watched his herd drink from the lake’s edge, the waters began to shimmer with an inner light. From their depths rose a woman of such beauty that she seemed woven from moonlight and morning mist. Her hair fell like silver water, and in her hands she carried herbs that glowed with their own luminescence.”

Helen told of the farmer’s son offering the lady rough barley bread and his hand in marriage. The Lady refused both the hard bread and his proposal. The next day, he offered unbaked dough, which she refused. On the third day, he brought his mother’s perfectly baked bread, and the Lady accepted both his gift and his proposal of marriage.

“‘I will live with you in the world above,’ said the Lady of the Lake, ‘and I will teach you secrets known only to my people. But know this: if you strike me three times without cause, I must return to my realm, and all I have given I will take back.’

“She bore him three sons, and to them she taught the healing arts of her people; which plants held fever-breaking powers, how to read the language written in leaf and root, and the proper times for gathering when the moon blessed their potency. She showed them gardens that existed in both worlds, plots where fairy flowers grew alongside earthly herbs.

‘Each plant holds a key,’ the fae mother told her sons as they walked among the healing beds. ‘But the key unlocks different doors depending on the need of the one who seeks healing. A wise physician reads not just the herb, but the person who requires it. Read the patient, not the symptom.’”

I had seen the words in Elizabeth’s cipher. I had read them in Ann Fairchild’s Blue Book, translated into kitchen remedies for the sight.

Helen continued: “The legend says he struck her, and although the nature of the blow, whether accidental or an innocent tap, is not known, upon the third blow, she returned to the lake. She brought her fairy cattle dowry with her and disappeared. Nonetheless, her healing wisdom remained.

Her three sons were the first Physicians of Myddfai, and their fame spread through Wales and beyond. Kings summoned them to court. Their descendants tended the sick with healing arts learned from their fairy mother. They created gardens that bridged two worlds. Five hundred remedies are recorded by monks at the monastery of Strata Florida, preserved through centuries of use, and translated in the nineteenth century.

Elizabeth Silverton brought the Welsh physicians’ tradition with her to this country with her plan to design the Monastery Garden, adhering to their principles. The concentric circles and the quadrants. The placement of healing herbs by sympathy rather than taxonomy. The reflecting pools, positioned where the boundary between seeing and being seen grows thin.

The Red Book’s ancient remedies and Elizabeth’s Victorian cipher both encode the knowledge that healing requires reading the whole person, and that the green world offers a wider view of medicine.”

She paused. The stove had settled to embers.

“Yet, Elizabeth still participated in a system of selective healing. That tended some and abandoned others. That read the patient, as the Lady taught, but only when the patient arrived with certain resources. The Lady of the Lake gave her knowledge freely. To her sons. To their descendants. To anyone who sought healing. She placed no conditions on who could receive it. Whereas, the Physicians treated anyone who came to them. The tradition was open. Elizabeth built the garden according to the Myddfai principles, then let the fae decide who could partake of the healing. The knowledge was used, and it was rationed.”

The fire had gone to ash. The cedar scent pressed in through the old walls. The physicians of the lake kept no single book, but many leaves written in differing hands. They held that plants remember the waters from which they rise. Therefore, the distiller must use water drawn near the place of growth, lest the spirit of the herb wander. Fire, vessel, water, and plant must stand in the right relation. When these four are joined with patience, the plant yields not only medicine, but memory.

Attributed to the Physicians of Myddfai

Thanks for being here. Until next time.

© 2026 Mary Ellen Gambutti All Rights Reserved

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Sarah’s Journal, August 1st
In the Medieval Monastery Garden, the herbs have passed June’s tender awakening and the urgent fullness of midsummer. By now, I’ve moved through culinary beds with intention, pinched the parsley weekly from spring through early summer (the flat-leaf and the curled), harvested cilantro leaves before the plant bolts, tipped dill fronds while they were tender. Chives are continuous. Sorrel in the shaded corner, and the soft new growth of mint clipped before it hardened into midsummer’s fibrous stalks. Now the work transforms.

The airy, parasol blooms of dill, fennel, cilantro, and parsley signal the time to snip, dry, and preserve, and were this a culinary garden, I would. But in these curated herb beds, I let the stems of umbelliferous plants stand. The platform-like flower heads attract beneficial insects such as ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, parasitic wasps, and tiny native bees that suppress plant pests. Larvae of the swallowtail butterfly climb the parsley stalks. It’s a small act of triage, a choice that divides the garden’s purpose. Some umbels I harvest for their seed, coriander, dill, and caraway for the kitchen and next year’s sowing. I leave others for the pollinators who arrive like benediction.

This is Lughnasadh, the Celtic tradition of the first harvest. At this moment, the plants are shifting toward their deeper purpose. Feverfew opens its tiny daisy flowers. Mugwort stands tall, moving toward seed. Purple thyme and sage parade for bees. These are the plants Elizabeth marked for drying, distillation, and further purpose. Welsh physicians called betony the master herb, suitable for nearly every ailment of the nerves and the head. Eternal and practical, plantain, from which every wound remedy begins.

Every handful of herbs cut for drying, every basket of berries marks the passing of another season. The wealth of harvest and impermanence walk together, reminding us that nothing disappears, but transforms. The garden now stands between fullness and farewell. It is neither the exuberance of June nor the quiet sleep of winter.

It is a threshold, where we may linger.

Beyond the Medieval quadrant, in the meadow, drifts of purple New England asters. Elderberries are purpling, ripening in a few weeks; they’ll be heavy enough to harvest. Margaret and Charles will cook them down for syrups, jam, and cordial. Elizabeth once concentrated them further.

We notice the subtle turnings as the garden offers back what we have entrusted to it. The harvest is both to gather and to let go. Blossoms become fruit. Flowers become seed. Fallen leaves become rich soil and next year’s growth. No endings in the garden; only changes.

Thank you for reading!

© 2026 Mary Ellen Gambutti All Rights Reserved

Welcome!
The Garden and The Gate explores the Elizabeth Silverton’s New England Estate: the landscape, histories, and living architecture that shape both novellas:
Through the Yew Hedge and Through the Iron Gate.

As a former garden designer, I’ve always believed landscapes carry memory. Here, I’ll share the botanical knowledge, mythological threads, and horticultural foundations woven through these books. Some posts will focus on specific plants or garden spaces. Others will approach the threshold between history and myth. We adopted or otherwise displaced people understand how institutions shape (and often seal) the stories we rightfully inherit. I hope such passages will resonate.

Although both books can stand alone, Book One provides rich backdrop of the Silverton world and its characters to enhance your experience of Book Two.

I invite you to Rosemere …

Through the Iron Gate: The Rosemere Records

PROLOGUE
This is the Iron Gate I have known since infancy, since Sarah Caldwell carried me through it, and over the Red Arch bridge to campus to show off her adopted baby.

I remember Grandma Helen’s warm hand as I toddled through the Gate onto the Cedar Lane sidewalk. Charles Hawthorn has always tied the unruly rose onto this brick pier.

Over twenty years ago, on an icy morning, Sarah was here to tour the Medieval Garden with James when the latch stuck. As she shouldered into the iron scrollwork, the rose bloomed black on thorny, bare canes.
The plaque on the iron gate read: Please Close Tightly

Today, under this dark autumn sky, long canes oscillate against moving storm clouds. Persistent black rose hips cling. Lifting the latch, I lean into the ancient iron of the place of crossing. The languid complaint of the hinges reminds me that, for those who pass through with patience, the garden passes through them. Ellen’s memory carries me.

Rosmarinus officinalis. Boundary marker, threshold plant. “Plant at entry points where protection is required, but passage must remain possible. The scent steadies tremors in those who cross.”

Excerpt from CHAPTER 1
The Blue Book

I turned fifteen that September, nearly a year since Ellen left me for the second time. Late Autumn light slanted into the Keeper’s Cottage front windows, gilding the weathered oak dining table. Charles unfolded one extra leaf and added three chairs to the Hawthorns’ usual three. I helped Margaret open and smooth her antique linen tablecloth, and lay her best stoneware and stainless steel ware while she lit candles in pewter holders. Fragrant beeswax flames danced over the rustic centerpiece of fall’s final flowers in the blue glass jars Margaret cherished.

I had stopped by the Guest Cottage on the way to my birthday gathering. The morning glory vine cascaded over the porch rails, its blue flowers defying the late September chill. The black rose stem we had found on Ellen’s pillow, a token of her passing the previous Samhain, now held dark hips on long, vigorous canes. Charles had rooted the stem in a pot by the door of my mother’s temporary dwelling. He had brushed frost from that single, surviving bloom. After one season, the black rose now trailed across the railing. James hadn’t yet moved into the Guest Cottage and would be home in the Keeper’s Cottage after his day in the Archives.

Sarah and Helen met me at the Keeper’s Cottage, my second home. Mom was carrying the spice layer cake Helen baked in the Manor’s trusty AGA oven. Margaret was ready with fifteen candles, and she sifted powdered sugar over the top of the fragrant, dark cake.

Ellen’s absence filled the room. At my fourteenth birthday party at the Hawthorn’s home, she had placed a gift on the sideboard and said, “Birthdays matter in our family.” Our family. The words filled my heart. They meant more now, weighed down by the loss of the Fairchilds I knew only from Ellen’s heritage stories.

Cedra had been less visible since the Third Council last Winter Solstice. Estate magic seemed to have waned with as her presence decreased. When I asked after Selwyn and Eleris, Cedra waved away my inquiry: Other duties, other realms. She was either unconcerned or masking trouble. I might catch a glimpse of my Dryad Mentor wearing overalls in the Apothecary Garden, or in the Greenhouse, dressed the Abbess in her brown robe and hood to propagated herbs and roses.

In Elizabeth Silverton’s brick-walled rose garden, Cedra protected her hands and arms with long gloves against the thorny hybrids. She sedately pruned and clipped; wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat to shield her face and silver braids. In her long, blue chambray dress covered by a canvas work apron, she bore a strong resemblance to the Foundress in the old photograph Helen had found in the Archives. then rested on the rustic cedar bench before retreating into the cedar groves.

End of Excerpt, thanks for reading. Until next time!

Through the Yew Hedge

Through the Iron Gate

The Silverton Estate Duology

©2026 Mary Ellen Gambutti All Rights Reserved

Welcome, Readers ~
Here you are, in The Garden and the Gate, the essay series in which we explore the botanical history, traditions, adoption themes, Estate lore, and a glimpse of the Celtic traditions that have found their way into the stories, and selected excerpts from Book Two.

Please wander back to Behind the Hedge for excerpts from Book One, the characters, craft, and more.

A Bit About Book Two

The Garden remembers. The quadrants’ herb rows are well-groomed, but Elizabeth’s private cottage, Rosemere, sealed after her death, has been left to the rough New England winters. The front garden, presses wildly against the locked, century-old shutters. Charles and Cedra have dutifully continued to prune the rare roses in the walled cottage garden, all except the black roses, rampant on the copper downspouts. They seem to linger as if waiting for Elizabeth to return.

When the Silverton Foundation divests two residential cottages on the Estate grounds, Rosemere and the Guest Cottage, Sarah and Helen Caldwell buy Rosemere. Inside, the sallow autumn evening light does not overturn Book One. It deepens it into the darker territory of institutional secrecy.

The Iron Gate has always been there, at the edge of what the Estate shows willingly and what it keeps to itself. In Book Two it is an entrance to a history that was never meant to surface. The records are real. The questions remain: Who was assisted, who was not, and why?
The Rosemere Records were designed to both conceal and reveal.

Much more ahead. See you around the Estate.
Mel and Islay

©Mary Ellen Gambutti 2026. All Rights Reserved.

Long after I searched for my natural mother, I encountered the phrase, fog of adoption. Our reunion brought us new roles, but not clarity. I saw in her no regret, she was thrilled I cared to look for her. Proud how I turned out. But in her face, was the fog of effort. She was trying to remember. “Did you hold me?” I asked. She say she could not. The fog was hard at work. She’d always wondered…

After the thoroughness of her forty-year absence, the year we had together fell short. The cruel rupture; the imprint of relinquishment, caused irreparable loss. The disorientation. Displacement. The fog of adoption is a literal metaphor: the sealing of birth and adoption records ensures obscurity, denies our origins, and erases our ancestry. It covers the mirror, against the traits and tendencies that tell us who we are.

The metaphor found its way into a piece of my prose poetry, Haibun: Mirrors of Loss. Stella’s voice resonates in Through the Yew Hedge, distilling the fog of adoption into a single image.

Haibun: Mirrors of Loss
I can talk about how my mother surrendered me. Although a newborn, I knew. It mattered. She held me for nine months and in her arms for a brief hello. When I learned Sarah was not my first mother, I asked, “Will you leave me, too?” I worried, “Who will take care of me?” I dreaded a final separation. Ultimate loss: loss of self. I must have caused this pain of separation. Unwanted. Unworthy. With no one person to see in the mirror — no likeness. When I found my birth mother, I felt the wow of reunion, recovery, and self-realization. My fears abated in the knowing; maybe her fears did, too. Lessened, never lost.

Haiku
A sheer scrim ripples
over a girl’s image —
waking to now.

The fog of adoption and the mythic mists of the Celtic Otherworld obscure reality like a veil. In Celtic tradition, thin places are locations where the boundaries between the visible and invisible worlds are permeable. Mist-hung lakeshores. The Yew Hedge. Places where the hidden presses close to the surface. Stella’s Mentor, Cedra, has deep understanding of the inherited trait of mirror-walking, and of the power of memory in the ancient Cedar Groves.

Celtic seers used reflective surfaces to glimpse beyond ordinary sight, perhaps with water in a dark bowl, or in the still, mirroring surface of a sacred well at dawn. The practice, scrying, required safe training and the right conditions. This is the mythic tradition behind Stella’s mirror-sight, where her wound is a gift to be developed under Cedra’s protection. She offers training and safe passage through the permeable mists of Stella’s lost heritage.

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Islay Corwin

Mary Ellen Gambutti writes memoir and personal essays as herself, and lyrical fiction as Islay Corwin, author of the Silverton Estate duology.

Mary Ellen Gambutti

Thank you!

© Mary Ellen Gambutti All Rights Reserved

Elizabeth’s Design

Elizabeth Silverton, a British Victorian scholar, medievalist, and botanist, acquired acreage adjacent to the New England university she and her brother founded. Her vision was to preserve the land as a botanical refuge, providing a restful and restorative environment to her community. She would continue to study and practice the ancient Celtic healing traditions. An imposing, three-tiered iron fountain with a reflection pool commanded the central axis. In each of four raised beds, she planted apothecary herbs in disciplined rows, old as medieval times. An imported obelisk and a finely wrought arbor and bench marked solstice lines, astronomical alignments echoing ancient healers’ scripts.

Brick and stone walls bordered three sides of the enclosed garden, supporting espaliered fruit trees and vines. A feathery yew hedge, tall and of the deepest green, edged the fourth side, with a heavy cedar board gate fitted within the hedge. The gate was a less formidable version of a medieval British gate, though its leather strap hinges and iron bolts gave it that appearance. It swung outward; its threshold allowing safe egress from the inner sanctuary to the wide lawn. Past enchanted perennial borders, toward the Cedar Grove portal, and to the path into the forest dwelling of the three fae — the beings who had guided Elizabeth’s hand in the garden’s design, as, perhaps, they had for the Welsh Physicians of Myddfai, thirteenth-century gardeners and healers. All thin spaces.

Indeed, the three healers had inspired Elizabeth’s healing practice and her design of the Silverton Estate Garden in New England. The Physicians of Myddfai classified plants by their physical and emotional effects, in harmony with nature and humanity. In the Physicians’ quadrant garden design, calming herbs grew separately from herbs grown to strengthen the heart, and from herbs for mental clarity. The arrangement was intrinsic to the healing experience, in a place where different ways of knowing, empirical and intuitive, both documented and lived, were brought into dialogue.

An Adoptee’s Perspective

Stella’s mirror-sight, her ability to perceive ripples and presences in water and glass that no one else could see, was the story’s magical expression of heightened sensitivity. Real-world adoptees often report hypervigilance and attunement to what is unspoken, possible survival adaptations from newborn-maternal severance and displacement.

When Sarah encountered Stella frozen before the hallway mirror at age eight, the pediatrician called it a disorder to be managed medically. But Margaret Hawthorn, the Estate Keeper, Charles’s wife, brewed tea from the garden’s innermost circle to calm the adopted child. In time, those closest to Stella learned to accept her perceptual differences as part of who she was. Her fae mentor, Cedra, taught her to steady herself in mirrors, dewdrops, and cedar-ice reflections. Stella thrived within the garden’s honesty, in the spaces that protected her through seasons and life stages. Sarah curated and nurtured, and Stella grew in the botanical sanctuary that was Elizabeth’s legacy.

Author’s Note: Though long retired from horticulture, my work in small gardens and on large estates, I relate to the garden as a sanctuary. I learned over many years that landscapes hold deep time and memory, when planting perennials by stone walls built by hands generations earlier, and fashioning new walls from the same local fieldstone. When wondering whether a decades-old tree was born by seed dispersal, planted by a settler, or nurtured with knife and deft hand in a graft. Beyond human design, gardens are life itself: cycles of growth, dormancy, and renewal, beauty and decay found side by side.
— Mary Ellen

The Garden and the Gate is an essay series that explores botanical traditions and lore, Celtic myth, and themes of adoption. Mary Ellen writes memoir and personal essays as herself, and lyrical fiction as Islay Corwin, author of the Silverton Estate duology.

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Thank you for reading and for your support.
The Duology is widely available in e-book:

Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic
Through the Iron Gate: The Rosemere Records
Amazon

©Mary Ellen Gambutti. All Rights Reserved.

Friends,

When I found my biological family, I realized that things had happened to me before I had words or memories for them. Intrinsic moments were unrecorded or forgotten.

Did those things even happen? How real or meaningful were those occurrences to me? What is the truth of one’s origin when there is no original story to tell?

Many people are troubled by these questions. Adoptees live with them in a particular way, because of how our origins are recorded, sealed, and rewritten by law. Because the story of where we came from was taken from us before we were old enough to ask for it.

The Record

I never questioned the circumstances or location of my birth. What I knew of my origins came from my adoptive parents, the Catholic agency, and the state of South Carolina. Everything else was thin. A thinness that speaks volumes in myth, mystery, and magic.

My baptismal certificate had served as valid identification until I attempted to obtain a new passport at age forty. I was astonished to learn that South Carolina law denied me access to my original birth certificate; the document I needed, as a married adult, to prove who I was. Until then, I had accepted the legal suppositions handed to me: the vocabulary of a church document that doubled as a state record, and the myths it carried.

The amended birth certificate displayed the names of the parents who raised me. Not my origins. My adoptive mother mailed me the adoption papers when I asked for them. “I don’t know why you would want these,” she wrote. I did not know, then, how to explain to her why I wanted them. I didn’t have the language, even at age forty, to affirm my ownership. Because the record of my own beginning belonged to me, regardless of who the law said could hold it.

What I did want to know was: Would she be alive? Two years of calls and letters before my first mother and I reunited.

At the age of seventy, I finally held an uncertified copy of my original birth certificate. South Carolina still has restrictions.

The Doubleness

Many adoptees’ lives are shaped by a strange duality: belonging and not belonging; being someone’s daughter while also outside the familial circle. A kind of illegitimacy.

One mother is lost. Another offers the silver platter of adoption, with its uneasy privileges and obligations.

Adoptee’s Riddle of Belonging

A formula of lies obliterated my origins
and gave me a chance for a better life.
What life might I have had?
Removed from the powerless,
given to those who had
what I needed to live,
but who weren’t mine.
Where were mine, the lost ones?
All are left behind in a riddle of unbelonging.
— Mary Ellen Gambutti

This sense of duality is not a disorder. It is not ingratitude. It is the accurate perception of a reality that most adoption language doesn’t name directly: that you can be genuinely loved and genuinely severed at the same time. That belonging and loss are not opposites. That the record of your origin can be rewritten by law without the origin itself being changed.

Before Words

Life writing honors what can be documented. Yet beneath the evidence lies an earlier layer of experience that precedes the record.

When an infant is separated from her mother in the first hours of life, the event does not live in time but in the newborn’s nervous system’s wordless archive. The body remembers the displacement. The dissociation. The earliest impressions are formed in the womb, and in the first moments after birth. Before language. Not in memory. And they may last a lifetime, as trauma clinicians have long observed.

Many adoptees recognize a heightened sensitivity: a quick response to emotional undercurrents, an ability to read the room, a hypervigilance that began before they had words for what they were watching for. Survival adaptations? Primal wounding, intuition, extra-sensory awareness. A kind of deja vu, perhaps? The separated, abandoned newborn waits and watches, adjusting to loss before she understands it.

Recovery becomes complicated if you cannot remember what happened. You cannot document what precedes the record. You cannot grieve, in the ordinary sense, a loss that occurred before you knew. But this is the grief of the disenfranchised. There is no reason to grieve, or to be ungrateful, you are told. Preservation becomes all the more urgent.

If the record was sealed, and the body’s knowledge precedes language, what can be recovered? What must be preserved if not in document, nor in testimony? What can hold what the archive cannot?

The story can change.

The Language

I did not set out to write magical realism, though I was intrigued by the form. I would be approaching fiction for the first time, which was daunting given the relative ease I had cultivated in writing personal narrative. The process of memoir, the stir of memory and emotion, the discipline of evidence, had brought me closer to understanding my own truth than I had expected.

Memoir allows the evidence to stand: the military family transfers, the bases and separations, the impermanence, the tensions and transitions, the discipline. The baptismal certificate. The amended birth certificate. The adoption papers in their envelope from the Rock Hill law firm.

But something essential lay beyond literal description.

I needed a language strong enough to hold the contradictions of adoption. A language in which both love and harm are real simultaneously. A language that doesn’t resolve the tension between severance and belonging but instead allows both to exist, intact and true, without requiring a verdict.

Magical realism gave me the language. It offered an escape from the difficulty of adoption’s realities. But it works because it widens the frame. It allows truths to exist that resist the narrow limits of literal description. Because it can hold what the nervous system holds; the pre-verbal, the pre-memory, the knowledge that preceded language, and render it visible while honoring its validity.

In my fiction, written under the pen name Islay Corwin, the central character carries mirror-sight: the ability to see through reflections and across thresholds. The inherited trait opens a conversation about adoptee heritage and reflects the effects of newborn separation. The child senses the world, perceives ruptured identity, and without choice, moves between worlds.

The adoptee at the center of the story carries three names. One was taken from her. One was given to her. One she ultimately claims for herself. Adoptees require little explanation of this. Severance disrupts the self. Only patching the wound of loss, the meeting between Stella and her first mother is tender, yet awkward. After all, they have become strangers. Their bond was broken by the first mother, whose circumstances shaped an impossible decision.

Recovery and Preservation

There are no simple answers, although adoption discourse often presses for them.

Was it a rescue, or was it a rupture?
Are you grateful? Angry?
Do you belong to this family, or to another?

Of course, the answer is yes.

The work of recovery, if possible, is not to choose between these truths. It is learning to hold them simultaneously: grateful and grieving, belonging and having been severed, to love the family that raised you and to mourn the family you lost. This is to be Ruth Ann and Stella and Questa all at once, without resolving the contradiction, but instead finding integration in acceptance, without transforming the dilemma into something tidy.

Preservation insists that the full record exists, not just the amended birth certificate, not just the baptismal card with its official vocabulary, but the body’s knowledge, the pre-verbal experience. Insisting that these things happened. That they mattered. That their absence from the adoption records does not erase those early experiences.

In the end, the language that came closest was the one that allowed for finding magic in the mundane. Some truths are too large for the literal.

This essay grew from an earlier piece published in Roots & Branches. It has been substantially expanded to include the Recovery and Preservation framework that organizes
The Garden and the Gate.
Thank you for reading. I appreciate comments and re-stacks in support of my work.

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Mary Ellen Gambutti writes memoir and personal essays as herself, and lyrical fiction as Islay Corwin, author of the Silverton Estate duology. Protection, Recovery, Restoration, and Preservation is the organizing principle of The Garden and the Gate.

The Duology is widely available in e-book:

Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic
Through the Iron Gate: The Rosemere Records
Amazon

A note to readers: The Garden and the Gate is now open. Several essays, including this one, are free to all subscribers. In Behind the Hedge, you’ll find a number of excerpts from Book One of the Duology. Future essays in this section, exploring the botanical traditions, Celtic mythology, Welsh healing practices, and adoption themes that ground the Silverton Estate duology, will be available to paid subscribers.

If you’d like to support this work and access all features of Roots & Branches, including the full Recovery and Preservation essay series, you can upgrade your subscription here:

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© Mary Ellen Gambutti All Rights Reserved

My personal essays and this novella series are influenced by adoption, and my belief that all the occurrences around my adoption profoundly affected my physical and emotional make-up. I’m not a therapist or an expert. Except for my work in Allied Health and Horticulture, I am largely self-educated. Since a brain hemorrhage at age fifty-eight, I have focused on reading and writing. My speech and cognition was impaired, and I was determined to return to language skills.

At seventy-four, I’ve grown content with my progress in that regard. And there’s the continual displacement of self. The damaging guilt which is the legacy of my natural mother. So, ethics comes up, as does severance, secrecy, silence.
And words.

Hiraeth
This beautiful word, borrowed from across an ocean counts toward recovery. A Welsh word with no precise English equivalent; not quite homesickness, not quite longing, and not quite grief. And it is all of these at once, and something more.

It is the sense of a home you cannot return to: a home that lives in a dim memory of what once belonged to you, or was part of your very being. That is it, I think, it is the feeling of what is in your essence. Except, there is no “there.” And where I belonged, I cannot say.

Homesickness implies a home you know and have left. Longing is too gentle. It suggests something sweet at its center, a wish that could be satisfied if the wished-for thing arrived. But hiraeth offers only non-fulfillment.

For the adopted, the displaced, this home is a place in the heart that existed before the rupture, or because of it. It is not the “no place like home” feeling. Not a fond memory. An adoptee separated at birth was removed, or abandoned, before a home, and after the comfort of the womb. That loss precedes memory, precedes language; it lives in the nervous system. It is atmospheric. Present but unsourced. Real but unlocatable.

English is a language of precision and accumulation. It borrows freely, builds compounds, invents technical terms. But for certain interior experiences, the ones that live beneath articulation, in the body’s oldest knowing it reaches its limits. Hiraeth holds all of this without resolving it. It recedes when we reach toward it, the way we humans, insatiable as we are, recede from ourselves.

The feeling is not tranquility or serenity. It’s anxious. Uncertain.

Home That Preceded Memory

I didn’t know my origin story until I was in mid-life. What I grew up with was not a memory of loss but something more like its shadow: a persistent sense of incompleteness, of being apart from others, of standing in a room where most of the furniture was present but something essential was missing. No one would or could tell me more than what I had now was my adoptive parents’ protection, with all its forms, conditions, and restrictions. The one who left me behind would stay nameless, formless, a non-entity. Any others who might have been were gone with the furniture.

This is what hiraeth names for me and for the adoptees I’ve spoken with. Not grief for a specific person or place we remember, but disenfranchised grief . Grief for the mother’s body, her scent, the voice I heard from her womb. It’s not all in my imagination. It’s in my body. Researchers of early attachment have slowly caught up to what adoptees know in the body: separation in infancy leaves traces. The infant does not remember, but the infant has imprinted. Hiraeth names that foundation. That inheritance.

Why a Welsh Word Works

I write fiction rooted in the Welsh healing tradition, and the mythology of the Physicians of Myddfai, in the landscape of the borderlands where Welsh and Irish currents have mingled for fifteen hundred years. This is not accidental.

The Welsh tradition understands something about what endures. About what the land remembers when the records are lost. About what the body carries when the documents are sealed. About the relationship between healing and knowing, between recovery and what cannot be recovered.

The water remembers what you give it to carry.

This line appears in my second novella, attributed to the Physicians of Myddfai. It is my attempt to say, in fictional form, what hiraeth says in a single word: that what is lost does not disappear. It is held in the land, the water, and in the body. In the nervous system’s wordless archive. In the ache that is without source, but ancient and real.

Hiraeth. Maybe you know the feeling.

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Mary Ellen Gambutti writes memoir and personal essays as herself, and lyrical fiction as Islay Corwin, author of the Silverton Estate duology You can purchase in e-book format here.
Thank you!

https://books2read.com/ThroughtheYewHedge
https://books2read.com/IronGate

Adoptees may yearn for the memory of what was lost. The ancestry, the past that came before us. The safety before the severing. We grieve before the returning. Or that we cannot return unless we have the key.

There was a time when I tended a formidable garden. I didn’t have language for this garden of mirrors, but I now express it as a void. My garden was absence. Loss. Bewilderment. My garden was identity confusion. In it, mirrors returned my gaze, offering reflection without recognition. Unanswered questions grew like weeds.

Long after I searched for my natural mother, I encountered the phrase, fog of adoption. Our reunion brought us new roles, but not clarity. I saw in her no regret, she was thrilled I cared to look for her. Proud how I turned out. But in her face, was the fog of effort. She was trying to remember. “Did you hold me?” I asked. She say she could not. The fog was hard at work. She’d always wondered…

After the thoroughness of her forty-year absence, the year we had together fell short. The cruel rupture; the imprint of relinquishment, caused irreparable loss. The disorientation. Displacement. The fog of adoption is a literal metaphor: the sealing of birth and adoption records ensures obscurity, denies our origins, and erases our ancestry. It covers the mirror, against the traits and tendencies that tell us who we are.

The metaphor found its way into a piece of my prose poetry, Haibun: Mirrors of Loss, first published in HumanKind Literary Journal. Stella’s voice now resonates in Through the Yew Hedge, distilling the fog of adoption into a single image.

Haibun: Mirrors of Loss

I can talk about how my mother surrendered me. Although a newborn, I knew. It mattered. She held me for nine months and in her arms for a brief hello. When I learned Sarah was not my first mother, I asked, “Will you leave me, too?” I worried, “Who will take care of me?” I dreaded a final separation. Ultimate loss: loss of self. I must have caused this pain of separation. Unwanted. Unworthy. With no one person to see in the mirror — no likeness. When I found my birth mother, I felt the wow of reunion, recovery, and self-realization. My fears abated in the knowing; maybe her fears did, too. Lessened, never lost.

Haiku
A sheer scrim ripples
over a girl’s image —
waking to now.

The fog of adoption and the mythic mists of the Celtic Otherworld obscure reality like a veil. In Celtic tradition, thin places are locations where the boundaries between the visible and invisible worlds are permeable. Mist-hung lakeshores. The Yew Hedge. Places where the hidden presses close to the surface. Stella’s Mentor, Cedra, has deep understanding of the inherted trait of mirror-walking, and of the power of memory in the ancient Cedar Groves.

Celtic seers used reflective surfaces to glimpse beyond ordinary sight, perhaps with water in a dark bowl, or in the still, mirroring surface of a sacred well at dawn. The practice, scrying, required safe training and the right conditions. This is the mythic tradition behind Stella’s mirror-sight, where her wound is a gift to be developed under Cedra’s protection. She offers training and safe passage through the permeable mists of Stella’s lost heritage.

© Mary Ellen Gambutti

Islay Corwin

Mary Ellen Gambutti writes memoir and personal essays as herself, and lyrical fiction as Islay Corwin, author of the Silverton Estate duology.

Mary Ellen Gambutti

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Welcome!

As a writer and a former garden designer, I’ve always felt the memory of old landscapes. Paths invite, redirect, and sometimes warn us away. Those ideas took root in the Silverton Estate duology with thresholds, inheritance, secrets, locked and opened gates, and the living architecture of place. I’m glad to be sharing these gardens and stories.

Gothic Botanical Fiction & Dark Academia

Both novellas are set on the grounds, in the gardens, and within the dwellings of an historic New England estate that is more than a backdrop.

Cedar groves hold ancient memory. Herb quadrants follow a medieval design. The iron fountain marks solstice lines. Roses root themselves where grief has been.

The shadow of Silverton University runs through both books: scholarly characters who document, classify, and conceal. A Medieval Studies College. Hidden archives in Tudor basement vaults. An abandoned cottage sealed for a century, its botanical records intact, its secrets undisturbed.

In Book One, Stella moves through enchanted gardens and threshold spaces in search of her origins. In Book Two, the secrets the Estate has concealed come into the light: cipher and herbaria, the inherited silence of institutions, what they preserve and what they bury.

Gothic fiction rooted in the soil. Dark academia, scholarly, with dirt under their nails.

What You’ll Find Here

The Garden and the Gate explores the botanical traditions, Celtic mythology, Welsh healing practices, and adoption themes that ground both novels. Some essays go deep into the fiction’s roots, like those about the Physicians of Myddfai, the therapeutic design of Elizabeth Silverton’s medieval monastery garden, and the significance of cedar groves as threshold spaces. Others follow the Recovery and Preservation theme outward into adoptee experience, the language of severance and reunion, and recovery and preservation of what institutional records erase.

Welcome to the garden. Mind the gate.

Mary Ellen Gambutti writes memoir and personal essays as herself, and lyrical fiction as Islay Corwin, author of the Silverton Estate duology.

Islay Corwin

The Silverton Estate Series, written by Islay Corwin.
(pen name of Mary Ellen Gambutti.)

Widely available in e-book format.

Book 1. Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic
Book 2. Through the Iron Gate: The Rosemere Records

© Mary Ellen Gambutti 2026

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The Yew Hedge is the mysterious threshold where origins blur and ancestral memories live just beyond reach. The Medieval Garden, where cultivated quadrants meet wild cedar groves, is Stella’s place of integration. Two landscapes exist in relation to each other: the rational, ordered rows of herbs representing her adopted life, and the Cedar Forest Fae, her otherworldly guardians, who know her fae origins. Wholeness isn’t in choosing one over the other. For the gardener who tends the rows and paths, it comes in walking between them.

From The Estate’s Arteries — Book One Introduction

“… James produced a sketch of the original blueprints from his pocket to show Sarah and Helen, their three umbrellas joined against the drizzle. “According to these plans, seven main waterways are running beneath the medieval garden, with thirty-two secondary veins branching off through the quadrants and perennial beds.”

I stood at the Medieval Garden corner with James, Sarah, and Helen, imagining their conversation onto the page. I thought of the adopted daughter I will always be, and of my reunion with my first mother. Adoptees search for missing pieces, for fragments. We anticipate that healing arrives as an answer: a record found, a truth uncovered, our story completed. As the Estate’s Arteries suggest, wholeness is not a static destination. It is the permeability between worlds, the courage to let the water of one’s history flow between the stones of one’s present. Beneath the visible paths, there is a current. Motion.

The life that might have been,
the story that is told,
the story that was withheld:
what it means to be adopted.
—MelG

Three things a healer must hold:
the root that is hidden,
the water that remembers,
and the wound that does not speak.
— a Welsh Triad, interpreted

The Work of Integration

In the tradition of the thirteenth-century Physicians of Myddfai, healing was a relational act between the visible and the invisible; herbal therapy went hand in hand with their cultural tradition of the unseen world. Our empirical life is what can be seen and accounted for: our legal names, adoptive families, the culture we inhabit.

Our biological origins and ancestral inheritance often remain mythical, spectral. Adoptees are tasked with living with our unknown histories, bridging disparate worlds to achieve wholeness, integrating our lived experience with the “otherworld” of life “pre-adoption” to form a cohesive identity, assembling the “puzzle pieces” we hear of so often. Many of us take up writing to seek our truths, finding metaphors when oral traditions have been fractured. To allow our stories a present life.

Integration is the recognition that we are the medium through which these stories flow. We are in the garden corner, where the archivist’s facts and the folklorist’s myths finally meet, carrying a heritage that may sustain the entire estate of the self.

Three Ways of Knowing
Sanatio is the Latin word for healing and restoration. The Physicians of Myddfai understood healing through three interwoven ways of knowing:

Revelation — knowledge received rather than discovered, carried across unseen thresholds. Stella, the half-fae adoptee.

Observation — the natural world studied with care, patterns learned through attention and time. Sarah, the scientist.

Virtue — the ethics of the healer, and the participation of the patient, shaping what knowledge can become. Helen, the keeper of the story, understands that how knowledge is held matters as much as what is known.

What appears ornamental, such as a certain tilt of the head, an affinity for the garden, may be an inherited trait. Like Elizabeth’s hidden irrigation network, connections with what has been severed. To restore what was severed, perhaps we allow an undercurrent; the confluence of more than one truth. A circulation. A permeability. A relation. Not resolved, but woven.

Ruth Ann. Stella. Questa.

Mary Ellen Gambutti writes memoir and personal essays as herself, and lyrical fiction as Islay Corwin, author of the Silverton Estate duology. You can purchase in e-book format here.
Thank you.

https://books2read.com/ThroughtheYewHedge
https://books2read.com/IronGate