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Bloom Day in May: Mugongo

May 15, 2014April 11, 2016 Cindy at enclos*ure9 Comments

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My parents were visiting us last week, and we took an overnight trip to the north of Rwanda. We made a stop at Mugongo, the former home and plantation of long-time American resident Roz Carr, who founded Imbabazi Orphanage in 1994, reworking her old farm buildings.

You can read about Roz’s life in Rwanda, from 1949 to 2006, here.

The long English-style flower borders looked particularly colorful as we near the end of the rainy season. Among the many plants blooming were calla lilies, hybrid tea roses, crocosmias, cannas, calendulas, fuchsias, violets, ageratum, hydrangeas, borage, sedum, Santa Barbara and Shasta daisies, azaleas, irises, dahlias, begonias, and day lilies.

It is a credit to Roz’s good strong design and to the continuing dedication of the gardeners she trained that the garden is still so beautiful, almost eight years after her death.

Click here for more information about the Imbabazi Foundation and how to visit the Mugongo garden.

You can scroll through more (and larger) photos by clicking on ‘Continue reading’ below and then on any of the thumbnail images.

Thanks to Carol of May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day (the 15th day of every month). Continue reading “Bloom Day in May: Mugongo” →

The Sunday porch (on Monday)

May 12, 2014April 11, 2016 Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

Today, I’m repeating a porch from August 2012, but it is a nice one. (We were traveling this weekend.)

“Cottages at Maplewood [Waseca, Minnesota],” c.1880-c.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 on any image to enlarge it.)

Above: Maplewood’s pavilion for Chautaquas. From the 1870s to 1920s, the Chautaqua movement brought speakers and companies of musicians, dancers, and actors to camps like Maplewood for up to a week at a time.

The Waseca Historical Society still hosts a Chautaqua at Maplewood Park every July.

To read about a similar sort of summer cabin living, which also continues today, see this 2012 New York Times article, here.

Above: the view of Clear Lake from Maplewood.

*All photos here: c.1880 – c.1899, by Detroit Publishing Co., via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The Sunday porch: Lincoln, Vermont

May 4, 2014January 10, 2016 Cindy at enclos*ure6 Comments

“Front porch. Lincoln, Vermont,” July 1940, by Louise Rosskam, via the FSA/OWI Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The porch as a farm woman’s summertime mission control room. . .

Her broom (and 4H posters) are on the wall, and more cleaning and gardening tools are behind the chair. She has stacks of magazines (and TIME in hand). Her potted plants are doing well. Above them are fishing poles and a kite.

The cat dozes above the steps — I think the scrub board behind the broken screen is there to keep him out of the house.

The wash tub is setting on a shelf built across the angle where the two sides of the porch meet. This puzzled me until I realized that it must be there to catch rainwater from the roof.

The photographer, Louise Rosskam (1910-2003), was “one of the elusive pioneers of what has been called the golden age of documentary photography,” according to the Library of Congress.

Like many of her photos, this image was attributed for many years to her husband Edwin, who was also a photographer. At the time it was taken — as part of a series on rural Vermont — he was working as an editor for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) of the U.S. government.

Her first professional photography work had been in the mid 1930s for the Philadelphia Record. The paper would only actually hire Edwin, so he recouped her wages by including them on his expense vouchers under “gas and oil.”

The couple then produced documentary photo books on San Francisco and Washington, D.C. (but only Edwin’s name appeared on the covers). After 1939, when Edwin went to work for the FSA, Louise began to take freelance photographs. In the 40s, they both worked for Standard Oil Company.

Near the end of her life, Louise began to write to institutions like the Library of Congress correcting the credit given to Edwin for her own photos. There’s an interesting interview with her from 2000 here.

Vintage landscape: New Orleans

May 3, 2014May 3, 2014 Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

“Doorway and courtyard of the Ursuline Convent, New Orleans,” between 1920 and 1926, by Arnold Genthe, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The Old Ursuline Convent was completed in 1753 in a French Colonial style. It may be one of the oldest buildings in the Mississippi Valley. It was a convent only until the 1820s, however, when the nuns turned it over to the Bishop of New Orleans and moved to a larger place in Treme.

At the time of this photo, the building was a rectory for the adjoining church of St. Mary’s, the home parish for the area’s many Italian immigrants. Today, it is part of the Catholic Cultural Heritage Center of the Archdiocese of New Orleans.