Category: culture and history

Vintage landscape: boxwood drive

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Boxwood hedge, by F.B. Johnston, Library of CongressDriveway, Castle Hill, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1926, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The original house on the plantation of Castle Hill was built in 1764 by Dr. Thomas Walker and his wife Mildred.  Walker was a friend of Peter Jefferson and later guardian to his son,Thomas.

At the time of this photo, the property was owned by his descendant, Amélie Louise Rives Troubetzkoy, a novelist married to a Russian prince who eventually ran somewhat short of funds.

By the fall of 1938, when future novelist Louis Auchincloss, then a law student at the University of Virginia, came to have tea with the aging princess, he found her living in “romantic, impoverished isolation in a decaying manor house.” To get to the house, he had to find his way through a double row of aromatic box hedges that rose up three stories high and were so enormous that his bulky Pontiac could barely pass through. The awe-inspiring hedges even became the subject of one of Amélie’s poems, which she wrote in middle age. She ends the poem with “Hedges of Box,/Hedges of Magic./…Behind your barrier of glad enchantment/I have rediscovered reality.” The reality Amélie envisioned had herself within the encircling wall of boxwood, still a young beauty of twenty-one, seated on the back of a unicorn.

— Donna M. Lucey, from “The Temptress of Castle Hill,” Garden and Gun

Today, the estate is still privately owned.  Its remaining 1,203 acres (from the original 15,000) have been permanently protected against development by a conservation easement with The Nature Conservancy.

The Sunday porch: Trondheim, Norway

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The Sunday porch/enclos*ure: Norwegian hotel, ca. 1900, Library of CongressFossestuen Hotel, Trondhjem, Norway, between ca. 1890 and ca. 1900, a photochrom by Detroit Publishing Co., via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Click on the photo to get a better look at the building’s green roof and outdoor restaurant seating divided by planters and latticework.

 Nestled in the mountains near the lower tier of the Lienfoss waterfalls, the Fossestuen Hotel drew many foreigners to this picturesque region of Norway. Built in 1892, the hotel was actually a restaurant that served dinner and refreshments to tourists. The building reflects the traditional wooden architecture of Norway, with the sod roof a source of insulation against the harsh winter cold.

— from the image’s page on World Digital Library, a project of the Library of Congress.

Vintage landscape: Edo blossoms

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Cherry blossoms in Japan, Library of Congress“Higurashi no sato jiin no rinsen” (Temple Gardens, Nippori), 1857, a woodblock print by Andō Hiroshige, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The view is from Ueno Hill of Shūsō-in, one of three Buddhist temple gardens known as Hanamidera or Flower-viewing Temples. This print is one of fifty in an album of Edo (present day Tokyo) by Hiroshige.

Detail of print above.
Detail of print above.

There’s a nice essay on cherishing the brief beauty of the cherry blossoms by Diane Durston in today’s Washington Post, here.

Detail of print above.
Detail of print above.
The cherry trees in our neighborhood here in Stuttgart have just begun to bloom this week.

Life in gardens: colored eggs

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chicken fed food color, Library of Congress“Possible now to color yolks of eggs “red, white and blue” by feeding hens different feeds,” April 7, 1939, by Harris & Ewing, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Washington, D.C., April 7. . . . Charles A. Denton, Junior Chemist, poultry nutrition laboratory of the National Agriculture Research Center, Beltsville, Maryland, feeding a hen a certain food to produce a definite colored yolk.

— from the original Harris & Ewing caption

Blue eggs and ham?

More photos of the Department of Agriculture in action in the 1930s here and here.

. . . Yesterday the egg so fresh
it felt hot in his hand and he pressed it
to his ear. . . .
riveted to the secret of birds
caught up inside his fist. . . .

— Naomi Shihab Nye, from “Boy and Egg“

The Sunday porch: French Legation

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The front porch of the French Legation to the Republic of Texas, Austin, Texas, 1934, by Louis C. Page, Jr., via Historic American Building Survey (HABS), Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

This house — now the French Legation Museum — is the oldest extant building in Austin.  It was constructed between 1839 and 1841 for Monsieur Jean Pierre Isidore Alphonse Dubois, a secretary at the French Legation in Washington, D.C., who was sent to Texas to investigate the benefits of establishing relations with the new Republic of Texas.

On Dubois’s advice, Texas was soon recognized as a sovereign nation by France and he himself was appointed as the King’s chargé d’affaires.  Unfortunately — and probably before he could ever occupy his house — he became involved in a number of political, financial, and personal controversies, culminating in the so-called “Pig War.” When the Republic’s capital moved to Houston in 1841, Dubois left for New Orleans, only occasionally returning to Texas.

The style of the house is a blend of vernacular Greek revival and Mississippi Valley French. It may have been designed by carpenter Thomas William Ward, who had previously worked in Louisiana.

At the time of the 1934 photos above, the house was owned and occupied by Miss Lillie Robertson, whose father had purchased it in 1848.  After Lillie’s death, the property was sold to the State of Texas in 1945.  It was then put into the custody of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas.  They restored it and opened it to the public in 1956.

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The same views in 1961, by Jack E. Boucher, also via HABS, Library of Congress.

By 1961, the Legation house was surrounded by a formal arrangement of boxwood hedges — perhaps having taken a lesson from  M. Dubois, the son of a tax collector,  who styled himself Count de Saligny after he arrived in Texas.

Today, the museum looks much the same.  Its surrounding park is 2 1/2 acres and is open to the public. Its wide gravel paths are sometimes used for games of pétanque. From the front porch, visitors can see the Texas Capitol Building and downtown Austin.