L.M. Montgomery was a product of the heritage and context of her times, and her writings about Prince Edward Island reflect her background and values. For her, the Island was a physical and emotional space, and like Anne, she was fierce in her love for it. Even before Montgomery wrote Anne, the Island sought to attract tourists to its “garden” shores.

Where the Mi’kmaq had adapted skillfully to their environment, the European settlers of the 18th and 19th centuries bent that environment to their will. In Montgomery’s time, four ethnic groups, Scots, Irish, English, and Acadian, accounted for some 95% of PEI’s population. Their cultural baggage, customs, values, priorities, and experiences dictated the human geography of Anne’s Island. In rural PEI, especially, the different ethnic and religious groups tended to mingle without really mixing.

Montgomery’s fictional Avonlea and Island are informed by her experience and coloured by her particular perspective, then translated by her writerly genius. Scholars often refer to Cavendish (Avonlea) as a village, but, really, it was a patchwork of farms laid out along the red clay roads. The realities of transportation meant that most people worked, worshipped, courted, schooled, socialized, lived, and died within a few miles of home.

What can we learn about nature and landscape from reading Anne of Green Gables? How did people in villages like Avonlea see and shape the lands and waters around them? Montgomery may have idealized the small-scale, family-owned, mixed farm of 19-century Prince Edward Island, but her images and stories have valuable environmental lessons for our time.

Montgomery’s Macneill grandparents’ house in Cavendish, where she grew from babyhood to adulthood, was much more than simply a place to live; it was vital to her imagination and sense of self. Every feature of the house and surrounding grounds was dear and inspired the passion for houses and homes in her fiction.

The setting and some features of what is now called Green Gables Heritage Place were acknowledged inspirations for Montgomery’s fictional Green Gables; her real “Lover’s Lane” was even located there. The resemblance between the original farm and the one in the novel has become stronger and more insistent over time, as tourism has reshaped Cavendish.

The beauty of Cavendish and its environs inspired much of Montgomery’s fiction and helped draw tourists to the area in her lifetime—and continues to do so today. There are other sites dotted around Cavendish that pay tribute to Montgomery and her legacy, rooted in this “little triangular peninsula jutting out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.”