Anne wearing flowers on her hat to church

Anne Shirley had been at Green Gables for only a fortnight when she faced her first Sunday school. Marilla Cuthbert, suffering from a sick headache, could not accompany her and instructed Anne to call for Mrs. Rachel Lynde. Anne set out irreproachably, wearing the stiff black-and-white checkered sateen dress Marilla had made—plain, sensible, and without a single puffed sleeve. Her hat was a little, flat, glossy new sailor, the extreme plainness of which had much disappointed Anne, who had permitted herself secret visions of ribbon and flowers.

The Flower-Wreathed Hat

Before Anne reached the main road, she was confronted with a golden frenzy of wind-stirred buttercups and a glory of wild roses. Promptly and liberally, she garlanded her hat with a heavy wreath of them. Whatever other people might have thought of the result, it satisfied Anne, and she tripped gaily down the road, holding her ruddy head with its decoration of pink and yellow very proudly. When she reached Mrs. Lynde's house, that lady was gone, so Anne proceeded onward to the church alone. In the porch she found a crowd of little girls, all more or less gaily attired in whites and blues and pinks, and all staring with curious eyes at this stranger in their midst with her extraordinary head adornment. Avonlea little girls had already heard queer stories about Anne—Mrs. Lynde said she had an awful temper; Jerry Buote, the hired boy at Green Gables, said she talked all the time to herself or to the trees and flowers like a crazy girl. They looked at her and whispered to each other behind their quarterlies. Nobody made any friendly advances.

The Aftermath and Marilla's Rebuke

It was not until the following Friday that Marilla heard the story of the flower-wreathed hat. She came home from Mrs. Lynde's and called Anne to account. "Anne, Mrs. Rachel says you went to church last Sunday with your hat rigged out ridiculous with roses and buttercups. What on earth put you up to such a caper? A pretty-looking object you must have been!" Anne, with tears welling into her eyes, explained that she thought the roses and buttercups were so sweet and pretty they would look lovely on her hat, and that lots of the little girls had artificial flowers on their hats. Marilla was not mollified. "Becoming fiddlesticks! It was putting flowers on your hat at all, no matter what color they were, that was ridiculous. You are the most aggravating child!" Anne protested that she did not see why it was any more ridiculous to wear flowers on your hat than on your dress, pointing out that lots of little girls there had bouquets pinned on their dresses. Marilla was not to be drawn from the safe concrete into dubious paths of the abstract. She told Anne never to let her catch her at such a trick again, and reported that Mrs. Lynde said she thought she would sink through the floor when she came in all rigged out like that, and that people talked about it something dreadful.

Anne's Response and the Deeper Conflict

Anne, overwhelmed with remorse, offered to be sent back to the asylum, declaring that she would most likely go into consumption, as she was so thin. Marilla, vexed at herself for having made the child cry, assured her she did not want to send her back. But the incident revealed a fundamental tension: Anne's instinct to beautify and personalize, to bring the natural world into her own adornment, clashed directly with Avonlea's standards of decorum. For Anne, the flowers were an extension of the joy she felt in the world—the same impulse that led her to name the Avenue "the White Way of Delight" and Barry's pond "the Lake of Shining Waters." For Marilla and Mrs. Lynde, they were a ridiculous and embarrassing breach of propriety. The episode also foreshadowed Anne's ongoing struggle to reconcile her vivid imagination with the expectations of a community that valued plainness and conformity. It was a small act of rebellion, born not of malice but of a deep-seated need for beauty and self-expression, and it marked one of the early lessons in Anne's long education in the social codes of Avonlea.