The Garden Of The Gulf

A History of Prince Edward Island

A Sweeping History of Prince Edward Island

Prince Edward Island is the smallest province in Canada and, in many ways, the most itself. Bounded by the Gulf of St. Lawrence on all sides, shaped by red soil and cold water and the particular stubbornness of people who choose to stay somewhere difficult and beautiful, it has resisted easy summary for four centuries. Daniel Hardy's The Garden of the Gulf is the history this singular place deserves.

Beginning with the Mi'kmaq people who knew the island as Epekwitk — lying in the water — and moving through French settlement, the trauma of the Acadian Deportation, the great migrations of Scots and Irish, and the reluctant bargain of Confederation, Hardy traces the long arc of Island life with the authority of a scholar and the narrative drive of a born storyteller. He is equally at home in the potato fields and the legislature, at the lobster wharves and the Charlottetown Conference, in the kitchen parties and the bitter battles over whether to build a bridge to the mainland.

This is a history alive to complexity — to the injustices that shadow the pastoral beauty, to the tensions between tradition and change, to the question that every generation of Islanders has had to answer fresh: what does it mean to belong to a place this small and this fierce?

The Garden of the Gulf is, finally, a love letter written with clear eyes — to an island that has always inspired exactly that.