“Kindergarten Picnic, Tokyo,” Japan, ca. 1915, via OSU Special Collections & Archives Commons on flickr.
The image is from a collection of visual instruction lantern slides.
Category: Asian gardens
The flower seller: Amritsar
Selling flowers to Sikh pilgrims at the Golden Temple, Amritsar, India, January 15, 1914, by Stéphane Passet, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine.
This autochrome is one of about seventy-two thousand that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker who was committed to the ideal of universal peace and who believed that “knowledge of foreign cultures encourages respect and peaceful relations between nations.”* He was also acutely aware that the 20th century was going to bring rapid material change to the world.
Accordingly, from 1909 to 1931, Kahn sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to 50 countries “to fix, once and for all, aspects, practices, and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is no longer ‘a matter of time.’”† The resulting collection is called Archives de la Planète and now resides in its own museum at Kahn’s old suburban estate at Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris. Since June 2016, the archive has also been available for viewing online here.
*Collections Albert-Kahn website. Also, the above photo (A 4 214) is © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.
†words of Albert Kahn, 1912.
Tokyo, Japan
A garden corner of a residence (possibly of the Kitashirakawa family), Tokyo, Japan, 1926-1927, by Roger Dumas, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine.
This autochrome is one of about seventy-two thousand that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker and pacifist, between 1909 and 1931. Kahn sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to fifty countries “to fix, once and for all, aspects, practices, and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is no longer ‘a matter of time.'”* The resulting collection is called Archives de la Planète and now resides in its own museum at Kahn’s old suburban estate at Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris. Since June 2016, the archive has also been available for viewing online here.
*words of Albert Kahn, 1912. Also, the above photo (70 965 XS) is © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.
The flower sellers: Japan
Hanauri (flower vendor), Tokyo, Japan, between ca. 1840 and 1866, a woodcut print attributed to Matsumoto Kōzan, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
A chrysanthemum seller in Japan, ca. 1890, photographer unknown, via Photographic Heritage on flickr (under CC license).
Primrose box
Sakurasō (primrose: Primula sieboldii or P. japonica), ca. 1810, a woodcut print by Kubo Shunman, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Another way to display primroses. This also makes me think of photographer Sibylle Pietrek’s boxed flowers here.
To see how many garden bloggers have arranged flowers today, please take a look at “In a vase on Monday,” hosted by Cathy at Rambling in the Garden.
Also, the blog It’s About Time, is currently running a series of posts of paintings, “Arranging Flowers in 19C & Early 20C America.”
enclos*ure 
