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Category: garden design
Vintage landscape: perspective
Belmont, Falmouth, Virginia, late 1920s.
All photos by Frances Benjamin Johnston via the Carnegie Survey of the South, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Click the pictures to enlarge.
Wormoloe Plantation, Savannah, Georgia, 1939 or 1944.
York Hall, Yorktown, Virginia, ca. 1930s.
Wakefield, Westmoreland County, Virginia, 1931.
Redesdale, Richmond, Virginia, 1926 or 27.
Sherrill Inn, Hickory Nut Gap, North Carolina, 1938.
Gardiner Booth, Alexandria, Virginia, 1930s.
Reveille House, Richmond, Virginia, 1936.
Still a strange pageant . . .
While researching Dr. Seuss the other day, I realized why this acacia tree on our street had so grabbed my attention back in November.
Go, Dog. Go! by P.D. Eastman was one of my favorite books as a child; I was always surprised by the dog party at the end. [Click here for the image.]
During one of my landscape design classes, another student recalled a lecture by a famous landscape artist (I think it was Martha Schartz) who said that the garden we really want is the one that reflects the places we knew before the age of five. I don’t know how accurate her paraphrase was, but the idea is something to think about. And the landscapes of our early years will have to include those we saw night after night in storybooks.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant. . . .
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.
– Czeslaw Milosz, from “And Yet the Books“
(Almost) Wordless Wednesday: le cortil
In which I discover a new word and an old garden
Curtilage –a piece of ground (as a yard or courtyard) within the fence surrounding a house. Origin: Middle English, from Anglo-French curtillage, from curtil garden, curtilage, from curt court. First known use: 14th century. — Merriam-Webster Dictionary
A bit more: a cortil was ‘little yard’ in Old French: cort + il (diminutive suffix). A ‘cortile’ (in English, in architecture) is an internal courtyard of a palazzo.
As a legal term, curtilage means the land immediately surrounding a residence that “harbors the intimate activity associated with the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of life.” In U.S. law, it is important for dealing with cases involving burglary, self defense, and unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment.
I came across the word while reading the website of Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson’s second home and getaway (I remembered something about it after Apartment Therapy posted a slideshow of presidential retreats). Its curtilage originally included an octagonal house (possibly the first in America), orchards, ornamental and vegetable gardens, and slave quarters. It was surrounded by a ‘snake’ or ‘worm’ stacked-rail fence, as well as fields of tobacco and wheat.
Because little visual evidence of Jefferson’s plantings remain, the 61-acre area is being reconstructed through archeology and research of his papers. Letters do indicate that a sunken garden behind the house contained “lilacs, Althaeas, g[u]elder roses, Roses, and clianthus.”
At Poplar Forest, Jefferson was working from a concept of “an ornamental villa retreat within an isolated agricultural setting.” He was thinking of ancient Roman villas, as they were reinterpreted in the 16th century by Andrea Palladio.
The estate is located in Forest, Virginia, near Lynchburg.
The top photo was taken as part of a 1985 Historic American Buildings Survey.
enclos*ure 