garden design – Page 10

The Sunday porch: Boston

February 4, 2018February 6, 2018 Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

An unusual front stoop on Bennington Street in East Boston, near Logan Airport, next to the elevated East Boston Expressway, May 1973, by Michael Philip Manheim for DOCUMERICA, via The U.S. National Archives Commons on flickr.

I think the site of these houses is now the end of the Vienna Street exit from the expressway.

DOCUMERICA was a 1970s photography program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Manheim recorded the disruption to the lives of East Boston residents due to the expansion of Logan Airport.

There are more of his photos here.

Cortland, New York

February 2, 2018February 1, 2018 Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

“Cast-iron fountain piece originally from Milan, Italy [ca. 1890], on the lawn of a house in Cortland, New York,” September 1940, by Jack Delano, via (and here) Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Little Bendigo

February 1, 2018 Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

“Woman and children in home garden, Little Bendigo, Ballarat, Victoria, 1876,” by unknown photographer, via The Biggest Family Album in Australia, Museums Victoria Collections on flickr.

Harriet, Caroline, and Harriet Mary Whitaker are shown in front of their home on Lofven Street. (A photo of their neighbors is here.)

Little Bendigo was the site of a small gold rush in the 1860s. It took inspiration from Bendigo, Victoria, an important gold mining boomtown of the 1850s. In 1881, the town’s name became Nerrina.

Senlis, France

December 26, 2017March 8, 2018 Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

Grounds of the château of Captain René-François Fenwick, Senlis, France, December 26, 1914, by Auguste Léon, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine.

The house itself had been largely destroyed in a WWI battle about four months before the photo was taken (another image here). Fenwick was a captain of the 31st Regiment of the Dragons who fell in combat in July 1918 (“an example of energy and good humor under fire”).

The autochrome above is one of about seventy-two thousand that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker, between 1909 and 1931. Kahn sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to fifty countries “to fix, once and for all, aspects, practices, and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is no longer ‘a matter of time.'”* The resulting collection is called Archives de la Planète and now resides in its own museum at Kahn’s old suburban estate at Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris. Since June 2016, the archive has also been available for viewing online here.

*words of Albert Kahn, 1912. Also, the above photo (A 4 757) is © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.