Category: culture and history

Just because. . .

Cindy at enclos*ure9 Comments

I’ve been working full-time in the garden this week instead of working on new posts.

And because we’re thinking about a London vacation.  Any ideas?  I haven’t been there in about 15 years.

Photo by Kevan Davis under CC license, via flickr.

This is the grave of John Tradescant the elder (c. 1570s – 1638) and of John Tradescant the younger (1608-1662) and his young son (and two wives).  Naturalists, botanists, gardeners — they introduced American plants to the (then) wider world.

The grave is at the Garden Museum at St. Mary’s at Lambeth (London).  The epitaph by John Aubrey reads, in part,

Transplanted now themselves, sleep here & when
Angels shall with their trumpets waken men,
And fire shall purge the world, these three shall rise
And change this Garden for a Paradise.

Whalebone fence in Alaska

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“View along whalebone fence — Cemetery, Point Hope, North Slope Borough, Alaska”

“General view — Cemetery”

Photos taken by Jet Lowe in 1991 for the book Buildings of Alaska and then donated to the Historic American Buildings Survey or HABS (here and here). Via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Today’s Washington Post has a story about how the way of life in Point Hope and other communities in the Alaskan Arctic is being transformed by climate change, here.

Vintage landscape: Alabama porch and yard

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“Typical farmhouse, spring housecleaning, homemade quilts and bedding in sun. Coffee County, Alabama.” Photo taken April 1939 by Marion Post Wolcott.

Via Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black and White Negatives Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Lake Kivu fishing boats

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While we were in the southwest of Rwanda last week, we stopped at a small cove in Cyangugu to visit the Safe T Stop project, which helps members of the local fishing and fish-selling communities organize to prevent HIV-AIDS.

Safe T Stop is supported by PEPFAR through USAID.

The project has sponsored a brightly painted traditional fishing boat. When the fisherman see it on the water, they know they can get condoms and health information.

Rwandan fishing boats are actually three connected boats. The nets hang in the spaces between them.

The boat’s builders re-used parts of old tires.

Organizing to fight HIV-AIDS has helped the communities organize to improve their businesses as well. They showed us cages for farming tilipia and a new commercial refrigerator.

The Rwandan boats always remind me of cranes coming in for a landing.  The hills in the distance are in the DR Congo.

Vintage landscape: Maplewood cottages

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“Cottages at Maplewood [Waseca, Minnesota],” ca. 1880-1899. By Detroit Publishing Co., via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Maplewood Park on Clear Lake was a national vacation attraction at the end of the nineteenth century. Click the image to enlarge it.

For another sort of summer cabin living, see today’s New York Times, here.