Flower Show, location unknown, between ca. 1915 and ca. 1920, Bain News Service, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Click on the image to enlarge it.
Category: garden design
Life in gardens: Knoxville, Tennessee
“Home of C.C. Dodson, Knoxville,” Tennessee, ca. 1899, via African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Dodson was a jeweler who owned a shop on West Vine Avenue in 1899. ‘Exuberant’ is the word I would use for his family’s front yard.
The photos collected by W.E.B. Du Bois for the 1900 Paris international exhibition particularly featured middle-class African Americans and their homes and institutions. “The photographs of affluent young African American men and women challenged the scientific ‘evidence’ and popular racist caricatures of the day that ridiculed and sought to diminish African American social and economic success,” according to the Library of Congress’s online catalogue.
In 2003, the Library of Congress published a book of 150 of the images, entitled A Small Nation of People. You can listen to a good NPR interview with its co-author, historian Deborah Willis, here.
Life in gardens: the cottage
“Three children and a white cat in the garden of a thatched house, Australia, ca. 1886, by Charles H. Kerry, via National Library of Australia Commons on flickr.
Los Angeles
Collegiate Institute, Los Angeles, California, ca. 1920, a hand-colored glass lantern slide, via Arthur Peck Photograph Collection, OSU Special Collections & Archives Commons on flickr.
Arthur Peck was a Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Oregon Agricultural College* from 1908 to 1948. This picture was part of his teaching library of 24 boxes of glass lantern slides — now in OSU’s archives.
I like the hose left out on the grass in this otherwise very neat picture. It would illustrate to a class the major problem in maintaining a lawn in Southern California.
Unfortunately, I can’t find anything about a “Collegiate Institute” in Los Angeles.
*The college later became Oregon State University (OSU).
Life in gardens: California
A repeat “Life in” from 2013. . .
I love this photo by Russell Lee, * of a May 1942 Turlock, California, backyard. (Unfortunately, it’s not very sharply focused.) The caption, possibly by the photographer, reads:
Housewife waters the lawn. All garden furniture and barbecue pit were made by her husband; about one out of every three houses in this town has such an arrangement in the backyard, and during the summer months people eat and spend many hours in their yards.
I particularly like the rolling sofa thing with the awning. Turlock is located in central California between Modesto and Merced. Continue reading “Life in gardens: California”
enclos*ure 
