IF YOU GO . . . For a complete schedule of summer events, write Office of Vacation Travel, PO Box 856, Concord, N.H. 03301 or telephone (603) 271-2666.

THE ISLES OF SHOALS -- Our trip to these stark, isolated islands off the coast of New Hampshire wasn't full of creature comforts, or even lovely scenery, but it was stirring in a strange way. We felt close to the natural world, and to a place that has retained both its isolation and its sense of mystery.

These islands off the coast of New Hampshire, once a summering spot for artists and writers, now lure naturalists.

Gone -- lost to fire in 1914 -- is Appledore House, which once was graced by the literati of another era including writer Nathaniel Hawthorne and poets Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowell. Now, near that same spot stands the Shoals Marine Laboratory, operated jointly by Cornell University and the University of New Hampshire, where my husband and I spent a memorable summer weekend.

The excursion was one of many to areas of natural interest that the Massachusetts Audubon Society sponsors to help raise operational funds. Arrangements are made through Cornell at (607) 254-2900.

I don't know what we expected, but what we found managed to keep surprising us.

Before we came, I only knew these islands as the setting for Victorian poet Celia Thaxter's garden, which inspired her famous little book, ``An Island Garden,'' illustrated by her friend Childe Hassam's much more famous impressionist paintings.

Thaxter died months after publication of her book in 1894. Gardens seldom outlive their owners, though Thaxter's relatives who ran the Appledore House next to her cottage tried to keep it up. Even then, I suppose, it was a tourist attraction.

But everything went in the fire, and for a long time after that Thaxter's cottage and garden survived only in Hassam's paintings, which have acquired a mystique that has propelled their selling prices into the millions of dollars.

A cross between sunny Renoirs and the guileless children's book illustrations of the Victorian era, Hassam's paintings look very pretty.

The Isles of Shoals do not.

The nine small islands (eight at high tide) are rocky, barren and well-suited to the earthy names like Smuttynose and Hog Island stuck on them by transient fishermen in the 1600s when this was the center of the international cod trade.

All commercial access to the islands is by boat from Portsmouth, N.H., where the Isles of Shoals Steamship Company runs island cruises and whale-watching expeditions out of Barker Wharf. For shedules and more information call (603) 431-5500.

Our trip included a stopover and walking tour of historic Star Island, which is owned by the Star Island Corp., a non-profit operation affiliated with the Unitarian Church and the United Church of Christ. It maintains the Hotel Oceanic, a large Victorian-era edifice, for religious and educational conferences. It remains largely unchanged and is almost a museum of the 19th-century summer life when the upper-classes fled the city for this and other seaside retreats.

``Stepping ashore on any of these islands is like almost stepping back in time 50 to 100 years,'' said John Hunnewell, captain of the Thomas Laighton, which provides the islands' ferry service. ``Last year, we carried 73,000 people, both whale watchers and island bound.''

Star island is as clean, simple and windy as the laundry we saw hanging on the line behind the hotel.

No one, however, would accuse our next destination, Appledore (originally Hog Island), with being clean. We were greeted by thousands of nesting herring and great black-backed gulls who had coated the rocks with their calling cards. This is the place where Alfred Hitchcock should have filmed ``The Birds.''

The huge gull colony is a 20th-century phenomenon. Throughout the Victorian era, the birds had been hunted to provide feathers for women's hats, and residents destroyed eggs to keep the population down and the island scenic.

But in the 20th-century, changing fashions and federal protection led to a seagull population explosion. The increase in human garbage also helped.

These birds moved in when the island's old fishing and tourism industries died. For many years, nearby Duck Island was used as a target range for Naval smoke bombs, which the noisy birds didn't seem to mind. Now, during spring and summer, seagulls young and old are the dominant life force on Appledore. The birds are particularly aggressive because they are protecting their young, and when you meet a feathered family strolling on one of the paths between the island's plentiful poison ivy, you learn to give way.

After a few hours sleep in the Marine Lab's bunker-like dormitory, we awoke at 3 a.m. to the shrieking and crying of these sea-going roosters as the first rosy fingers of dawn sent them wheeling, hungry, for the garbage dumps of the mainland on the far horizon.

The island's scrubby vegetation of alders and poison ivy was also uninviting -- at first. But soon we were amazed by the biomass of birdlife hidden more quietly in the island shrubbery. Rare terns, double crested cormorants and ibis also have nesting colonies here. Long avenues of mist nets made of very fine light-weight skeins set along the underbrush yielded a bounty of warblers and other migrants for examination and banding.

A long-time volunteer (whose name I forget, but whose angst I remember) let my husband and I handle the birds after he carefully extracated their tiny struggling wings from the almost invisible netting. He showed us how to weigh them in exchange for an opportunity to voice his despair at what he called a harrowing nose-dive in the warbler population. He blamed insecticides, predatory cowbirds, and deforestation of the warbler's wintering areas in Central America.

But we first-time visitors, thrilled to be handling these living jewels of the forest, tuned out the volunteer's misery, as we weighed the birds, upside-down in a cone of white paper, on a postage scale before each release.

Surprisingly, the marine laboratory proved to be a center for creativity that probably equaled in intensity that of Appledore House in its heyday. The modern artists in residence were students in a marine life illustration program who produced anatomically correct (yet aesthetic) drawings of the coast's fish and other marine life, working in some cases with subjects housed in tanks for reference. For anyone looking to decorate a home with watercolors of hermit crabs and acquatic insects, this was the place to be, for all the artwork was for sale.

By the second day, we realized we were having a good time exploring this odd place with its layers of nature and art waiting for us to scan. But the island also offered us a historic layer that mingled archeology and history with misty legend. Ghost stories, pirate stories, tales of shipwreck and treasure touch these islands like a soft ocean fog, adding to the sense of being separated in time as well as distance from the mainland.

One of the marine center's staff mesmerized us with a late-night telling of a 1973 island murder. He had made a study of the killing of two sisters by an itinerant German fisherman named Wagner who had worked for the family and rowed out from the mainland looking for their gold. The controversey over his hanging directly resulted to the banning of capital punishment in Maine. Known locally as ``the moonlight murders on Smuttynose,'' the tale was recounted with a sense of urgent detail that made us feel we were hearing gossip about neighbors.

And what of Celia Thaxter's famous garden? It has been reborn. In 1978, field station director John Kingsbury started to restore it using the original plans with the help of a gardening volunteer, Virginia Chisholm, who has made countless small boat trips from her home on the mainland with flats of seedlings over the years.

The work it demands is immense, filled as it is with the labor-intensive annuals that were popular 100 years ago: crimson flax, gilia, sweetpeas, larkspurs, wallflowers, mignonette, nasturtiums, and, most of all, poppies.

In 1988, Houghton Mifflin reissued ``An Island Garden,'' to great success, and this increased interest in visiting the little garden. Garden tours, including the boat trip out, are arranged, through Cornell, every Wednesday during the summer.

And what does it look like?

It is tiny.

The ocean view it affords is the same as in the famous paintings, but the garden itself seems to have shrunk. The house is gone, and where it stood is a sad emptiness. Without the definition of the cottage's welcoming gate, shady front steps and vine-covered porch, the flower beds look adrift and fragile, like boats without a mooring.

And yet this was always a poignant garden, the protest of one native islander against long, wind-whipped winters, a contrast more extreme than most of us can imagine today in our cocoons of comfort.

Published 05/05/96 in the Boston Suday Globe's Travel Section