Hello and Welcome!
Essays on botanical history, Celtic mythology, and adoption themes follow in this space.
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. This story grew from those ideas: thresholds, inheritance, secrets, locked and opened gates, and the living architecture of place. I’m excited to be sharing these landscape gardens and stories that live in the myths.
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. An estate that’s more than a backdrop. Cedar groves hold ancient memory. Herb quadrants follow a medieval cipher. 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, in certain cases, deliberately 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.
Stella, in search of her origins in Book One, moves through enchanted gardens and threshold spaces. In Book Two, secrets that the Estate has concealed, cipher and herbaria, 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.
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
