Category: garden design

The sprinkler

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Dorothy and Shirley Hick playing with a sprinkler in their back garden, Northcote, Melbourne, Australia, 1949, by Emily Hick, via Museums Victoria Collections (under CC license).

The photo was archived as part of Melbourne’s Biggest Family Album in 2006.

Dorothy remembers on hot days they would put the sprinkler on and play, as there were no swimming pools. They wore “horrible knitted woollen bathers, they soaked up the water and got heavy and baggy.” The ladder against the tree was to pick apricots “which were so ripe and juicy the juice would run down your chin.”

— Museums Victoria online catalogue

You can click on the image for a better view.

Ferntree Gully

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A forester’s cottage, Ferntree Gully, Dandenong Ranges, Victoria, Australia, ca. 1900, a glass lantern slide by Archibald James Campbell, via Museums Victoria Collections.

I like the two log pillars at the bottom of the steps, each topped by a potted plant.

During the 19th century, the forests of the Dandenong mountains were a major source of timber for Melbourne.

A curious scene

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“Women and a child in a garden,” Tarn-et-Garonne, France, between 1880 and 1910, by Eugène Trutat, via Bibliothèque de Toulouse Commons on flickr.

Is the lady with the garden hose threatening the little girl with a shower if she doesn’t sit still for the photographer? An empty threat, almost certainly, since water would ruin those hats. (The young woman in the center does seem to be shrinking back a bit though.)

In France

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“In a courtyard, somewhere in France (undated),” a photo postcard by an unknown photographer, via pellethepoet on flickr (under CC license). You can click on the image for a larger view.

The flower seller, Chartres

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Le marché aux fleurs, Chartres, France, August 19, 1922, by Auguste Léon, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine.

One of my favorite blogs, It’s About Time by garden historian Barbara Wells Sarudy, is currently posting a series on paintings of flower sellers by American artists. Check it out here.

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 photos (A 33804 S) are © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.