A window at the Tower of London, September 2012.
Wordless Wednesday: in London
A window at the Tower of London, September 2012.
Category: architecture
Just another day in paradise
What if we just let it all go?
Just cut paths through the brush and then beautifully paved them?
Pushed out a few garden rooms with low walls and columns built of local stone?
Mowed the grass only in those small spaces? Gardened (sometimes) with a machete, not hoes and shovels?
That’s what I kept thinking during our overnight stay at the Virunga Safari Lodge in northern Rwanda a couple of weeks ago.
The hotel consists of a main dining/lounge building and eight very private cabins.
A central path through the hotel grounds runs along the top of a hill, and the cabins are sited on both sides on a level below.
In the brush, wild natives and naturalized exotics grow together in a jumble. They were noisy with birds and insects.
As we took a walk through the neighboring community, I realized that the light-touch landscaping of the hotel grounds created, in a sense, the least artificial environment in the area. Rwanda’s country land is highly cultivated — almost every square foot is part of a vegetable garden or field or wooded plot for timber. A steep slope is rarely an obstacle.
At the end of a relaxing stay, we had lunch at a table overlooking Lake Burera and its little islands. Then we were off on the 2-hour drive back to Kigali.
It’s sad to leave Eden.
To scroll through larger versions of these images (and several more), click ‘Continue reading’ below and then on any thumbnail in the gallery.
To see more photos of Virunga Safari Lodge from a brief visit last year, click here.
Vintage landscape: bush-houses in Australia
I recently came across these photos of an Australian vernacular garden structure: the bush-house.
Bush-houses (also called shade-houses or ferneries) were built to protect tropical plants from the sun. By the late 1800s, many Australian gardeners were as enthusiastic about amassing and displaying these plants as Victorian hothouse collectors in Great Britain and North America.
The bush-house was modeled on the English glassed-in greenhouse or conservatory, but built with less costly, local materials.
In a 2003 article for Queensland Review, “Tropicalia: Gardens with Tropical Attitude,” Jeannie Sim wrote that, by the end of the 19th century, a number of international exhibitions in Australia were showing off “high-quality examples of tropicalian gardening” in bush-houses.
“The most extraordinary of these kinds of structures,” she wrote, “[was] arguably the one built in 1897 for the Queensland Colonial and Indian Exhibition in Brisbane. . . . Covering the walls and pillars of the bush-house were more than 3000 staghorn, bird’s nest and elkhorn ferns collected from the Blackall Range . . . . The exhibition guide [noted that] . . . Queenslanders ‘could gain a more vivid idea than ever before of the unequalled luxuriance of their scrubs.’ These horticultural displays marked both local pride and individuality, and promoted the use of native plants and bush-houses in gardens.”
According to Sim, many of the plants cared for and protected in the bush-houses were also displayed in popular verandah gardening. “The verandah was the public showcase for the gardener’s bush-house skills.”
Judging from these photos, bush-houses seem to have been frequently constructed of panels of wood or bamboo lath set at decorative angles.
It also appears that many bush- or shade-houses were used as cool(er) places to entertain and relax.
All of these photos are via the Commons Flickr photostream of the State Library of Queensland, Australia.
To scroll through larger versions of the pictures, click on ‘Continue reading’ below and then on any of the thumbnails in the gallery.
Continue reading “Vintage landscape: bush-houses in Australia”
Vintage landscape: all our joy
Crude seeing’s all our joy. . .*
Mount Ephraim, Chincoteague Bay Vicinity, Worcester County, Maryland. Photo taken 1940, by D. H. Smith for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
*by John Frederick Nims, from “Blind Joy.”
Cities of the Dead, New Orleans
And so, about this tomb of mine. . .
Another beautiful photo by Carol M. Highsmith: “Cities of the Dead Cemetery tombs, New Orleans, Louisiana,” 2007, via the Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
This tomb is in the Masonic Cemetery in Mid-City.
enclos*ure 