In Wharton's 1924 novella False Dawn, the “Halston Raycie house overlooked a lawn sloping to the Sound.” It seems to promise what Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester call, in The Meaning of Gardens (1990), an “idealized order of nature and culture”:

In the very next sentence, the narrator swiftly undoes the blissful pastoral mood—melding a noble idea, a tranquil place and a less alienated mode of human labor—with the mention of a notorious traitor: “The house, remodeled and enlarged by Mr. Raycie on his marriage, had played a part in the Revolutionary war as the settler's cottage where Benedict Arnold had had his headquarters.” The country house is not haunted by Arnold's ghost in any trite sense. However, the pointed reference casts a long shadow over the scrupulous evocation of the estate.

As False Dawn implies, not all cultivated sites are serene green enclaves that point to biblical “gardens enclosed” in Wharton's oeuvre. These localities can be charged with foreboding and paranormal auras that unsettle the characters that seek to dwell in, or preside over, them. Some gardens, like Aunt Elizabeth's mansion in A Backward Glance, even inspire Gothic “terror.” For critic Fred Botting, the “staples of the Gothic, are clearly identifiable in early Gothic texts,” since the “tradition draws on medieval romances, supernatural, Faustian and fairy tales, Renaissance drama, sentimental, picaresque and confessional narratives as well as the ruins, tombs and nocturnal speculations that fascinated Graveyard poets.” My final chapter will focus entirely on depictions of “ruins” in Wharton's oeuvre, and what Gothic elements seem to be woven into the very bricks and mortar of these crumbling structures.

Here I am more concerned with how Wharton's narrators evoke what we might term “Gothic gardens,” using verbal strategies that both register and subvert the vivid, even lurid paraphernalia of earlier “supernatural romance.” Wharton is especially adroit in selecting and stressing particular facets of the visible, concrete terrain—the unembellished, unremarked, borderless qualities of green spaces, bringing to mind poet Ian Hamilton Finlay's thesis that “certain gardens are described as retreats when they really are attacks.