Essays on the botanical traditions, mythology, and themes of adoption that ground the duology, the world of the Silverton Estate, and all that grows beneath the story.
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.
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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