Dryads

Dryads are imagined woodland beings through which Anne Shirley gives expression to her closeness to trees and forests. In the novel, they belong to the language of make-believe rather than appearing as supernatural creatures: Anne pictures herself living among trees, and woodland play briefly gives that fancy a bodily form before the ground and her companions’ practical concerns interrupt it.

Anne’s Woodland Imagination

On a September drive through the hills of Prince Edward Island, Anne and Diana Barry travel along a road winding among woods, fields, ferns, and a brook. The landscape prompts Anne to imagine that the scent of dying fir might have a place even in heaven. She considers making a cushion filled with fir needles so that naps might bring dreams of being a dryad or wood-nymph. Yet her fantasy does not erase her ordinary life: she is content, she says, to be Anne Shirley, the Avonlea schoolma’am, travelling with a friend on a pleasant day.

Anne later explains that imagining herself as a dryad suits her woodland walks especially well. Although she also invents grander identities when daydreaming alone at night, she prefers to picture herself living in an old pine or hiding beneath a leaf when she is among the trees. A white birch she has kissed becomes, in her fancy, her sister. The comparison makes kinship with the natural world feel intimate and immediate, even as Anne recognizes that she is a girl and the birch is a tree.

Make-Believe Meets the Ground

The woodland fantasy briefly becomes a group activity when Anne and Jane Andrews find a clear pool in a glade. Anne drops her basket and invites Jane to dance around it like wood-nymphs. The attempt fails because the ground is boggy and Jane’s rubbers come off; Jane judges that footwear makes the role impossible. The scene sets Anne’s imaginative invitation against the physical conditions of the place. The pool and its ring of young birches invite transformation, but mud and shoes remain stubbornly real.

Nature Beyond the Fantasy

The woods that prompt Anne’s daydreams are part of a natural world with more than an imaginative function. Anne is distressed by a prolonged dry spell: she sees the fields as suffering, worries about her garden, and reports that scorched pastures leave James A. Harrison’s cows with little to eat. Later, the May 23 hailstorm lays a deep carpet of hailstones and destroys blossoms, branches, crops, and many of the young trees planted by the Avonlea Improvers. These events do not make the imagined Dryads literal. Instead, they place Anne’s woodland affinity beside nature’s material vulnerability and the damage that weather can do.

A garden offers another grounded form of human attachment to the natural world. Diana recounts how Jordan Gray made a garden for Hester Gray, who loved its flowers and spent much of her time there; near the end of her life, she died in the garden beneath roses he had gathered. The episode is not a dryad story, but it echoes the idea that a human life can be deeply bound to a particular place among trees and flowers. Against such concrete attachments, Anne’s Dryads remain a poetic invention: a way of imagining companionship with the woods, not a claim that the trees are inhabited by spirits.