Staghorn ferns ornament the narrow porch of the Lands and Works Office, Brisbane, Queensland, 1904, photographer unidentified, via State Library of Queensland.
(Click on the image for a better view.)
I believe the ferns are Platycerium superbum, which are native to Australia.
“Dudes in a covered wagon garden seat,” Quarter Circle U Ranch, Birney, Montana, August 1941, by Marion Post Wolcott for the U.S. Farm Security Administration.
Both photos are via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Wolcott had been charged with photographing the recovery of the western cattle industry. The Quarter Circle U ranch in Birney, Montana, like many others in the region, had begun entertaining dudes in the 1920s to augment ranch income, and so she photographed that side of the modern ranch business as well as cattle raising. The ranch scattered its grounds with covered wagon love seats designed for trysting young couples, many of whom purchased western wear as part of their Montana adventure.
— Mary Murphy, from “Romancing the West: Photographs by Marion Post Wolcott”
World War I victory garden in a formal setting, location unknown,* ca. 1917 – ca. 1920, by Harris & Ewing, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The photo seems to have been taken for the National War Garden Commission, also known as the National Emergency Food Garden Commission.
The organization was created in early 1917 by Charles Lathrop Pack. It sponsored a campaign of pamphlets, posters, and press releases aimed at “arous[ing] the patriots of America to the importance of putting all idle land to work, to teach them how to do it, and to educate them to conserve by canning and drying all food that they could not use while fresh.”
Like it or not, what you do with the land around your house tells the world what sort of citizen you are.
*Harris & Ewing was located in Washington, D.C.
“Sitting on the Porch,” a postcard from ca. 1900, location and photographer unknown, via Miami University Libraries Commons on flickr.
(Click on the photo for a better look.)
The Bowden Postcard Collection of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, holds over 480,000 postcards from nearly everywhere in the early 20th century world.
This image is not very seasonal, I must admit. Here in Stuttgart, we woke up this morning to a light covering of snow.
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill. . .And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we feltAt what we saw. . . .
— Wallace Stevens, from “A Postcard from the Volcano“
The Botanical Garden of the University of Hohenheim — once the 18th century “English Garden” of Hohenheim Palace — in Stuttgart, on November 1.
Click on any thumbnail in the gallery below.
enclos*ure 