Category: culture and history

January reading

Cindy at enclos*ure6 Comments

Happy 2013!

January WPA posterA silkscreen poster of  the Illinois WPA Art Project (ca. 1936 – 1941), via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

On my nightstand for January reading:

Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City by Dan Pearson.  His city garden is the best example of what I want for our Washington, D.C., garden when we return.

Illustrated History of Landscape Design by Elizabeth Boults and Chip Sullivan

The American Meadow Garden by John Greenlee and Beautiful N0-Mow Yards by Evelyn J. Hadden

The City Shaped:  Urban Patterns and Meaning Through History by Spiro Kostof

Color by Design:  Planting the Contemporary Garden by Nori and Sandra Pope

The New Perennial Garden by Noël Kingsbury

— none particularly new, but indications of my current interests.

I just finished re-reading Peter Martin’s The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia:  From Jamestown to Jefferson.  I recommend it — along with Barbara Wells Sarudy’s Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake, 1700 – 1805 — if you garden in the U.S. mid-Atlantic.  Martin is particularly good on Mount Vernon and Monticello and on Jefferson’s changing enthusiasms and false starts.  (Martin and Sarudy differ somewhat on the extent of the influence of the English landscape garden style in 18th century America.)

(I also love Fergus M. Bordewich’s Washington: The Making of the American Capital for landscape/city planning history.)

Right now I’m really taken with the Game of Thrones books (I know, I’m behind the trend; I’m in Rwanda.)  I’m thinking of making the jump to an e-reader this month and then loading on the second book (aka Season Two) to watch in February.  I also want Hillary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies soon (I had to re-read Wolf Hall last month first — it’s so good).

What are your plans for winter reading?

Cities of the Dead, New Orleans

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And so, about this tomb of mine. . .

New Orleans cemetery, 2007, by C. Highsmith

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.

Necropolis de Colon, Havana

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Necropolis de Colon, Havana, by C. Highsmith, 2010

“Necropolis de Colon, Havana, Cuba,” 2010, by Carol Highsmith, via the Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Necropolis de Colon, Havana, by C. Highsmith, 2010.

The Cementerio de Cristóbal Colón [Christopher Columbus] was founded in 1876. The 140-acre cemetery is located in the Vedado neighbourhood of Havana, Cuba, and holds more than 500 family vaults, mausoleums, and chapels.

Carol M. Highsmith is a contemporary photographer who has specialized in documenting architecture and landscape — high and low — in all 50 American states.  Her influences are Frances Benjamin Johnston and Dorothea Lange. You can read more about her life here.

Highsmith is donating her life’s work — more than 100,000 images — copyright-free to the Library of Congress. Many of her images are printed in the distinctive black and white style shown here.

A garden should make you feel you’ve entered privileged space – a place not just set apart but reverberant – and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.

— Michael Pollan

Vintage landscape: more snow in Washington, D.C.

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Hunt photo of snowy Washington

“Woman and girl standing in icy square, Washington, D.C.,” 1889, by Uriah Hunt Painter, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Uriah Hunt Painter, 1837-1900, took a number of snapshot photographs of his neighborhood around Franklin Square and of downtown Washington using the first Kodak cameras.  Painter was a businessman and retired newspaper reporter.

“[The p]hoto shows a woman and a young girl posing mid-square with bundles. The two may be Painter’s wife, Melinda Avery Painter, and older daughter, Eleanor, returning from a marketing trip. Or perhaps Painter took their portrait because the girl is holding another Kodak – exemplifying the growing corps of amateur photographers who took advantage of Eastman’s simple box camera.”

— from the LoC online catalog

Washington market, 1989

Above: “Market scene, Washington, D.C., snow view,” 1889, by Uriah Hunt Painter. I don’t know which square is pictured in these photos.

Franklin Square, 1989

Above: “Franklin Square, Washington, D.C., snow view,” 1989, by Uriah Hunt Painter.

Today’s quote

Pope’s famous lines, in his “Epistle to the Earl of Burlington,” on ‘the genius of the place,’ . . . surely evoke a conception of The Garden as an epiphany. For Pope, ‘the genius of the place’ does not refer, as it does for many later writers, to the ambiance or natural setting of a garden: rather, it is that which ‘Now breaks, or now directs, the intending lines’ and ‘Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.’ Palpable, here is a sense of The Garden as both a response to and an exemplification of something beyond the control and invention of human beings.

— David E. Cooper, from A Philosophy of Gardens
(Thanks to View from Federal Twist.)

 

Vintage landscape: snow in Washington

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View from Post Office Building, 1911, Wash.D.C.

The view at night, under snow, of the Post Office Building, Washington, D.C., 1911. Via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, photographer unknown.

Merry Christmas!