garden design – Page 76

The Sunday porch: postcard

November 22, 2015April 11, 2016 Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

“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 felt

At what we saw. . . .

— Wallace Stevens, from “A Postcard from the Volcano“

Wordless Wednesday: local color

November 4, 2015August 20, 2017 Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

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.

The Hohenheim Palace botanical gardens, November 1, 2015, by enclos*ure

Pale yellow and ivory leaves of Orixa japonica in the background on the left.

Astilboides tabularis.

A Saturday porch: The Firs

October 31, 2015April 11, 2016 Cindy at enclos*ure4 Comments

A Halloween porch. . .

This was the front porch of “The Firs” in New Baltimore, Michigan, between 1901 and 1910.* At that time, it was a summer boarding house.

Although the ladies above look calm enough, throughout the 20th century — and up until the house was torn down in 2005 — many residents, visitors, and trespassers reported weird phenomena there.

Lights flickered, dishes flew off the table, strange voices were heard, and invisible fingers stroked girls’ hair. Ghostly figures were sometimes seen — particularly those of a young woman, an older man, and a child playing in the yard — or so ’twas said.

The residence was first known as Hatheway House, for Gilbert Hatheway, a businessman who built it about 1860.

When he died in 1871, the house went to his son, James S. H. P. Hatheway. James had one daughter, Mabel, who died in March of 1881.

Mabel was only twenty at the time of her demise and had married a man from another town just three months earlier. Local legend has her being killed from a fall down the Hatheway House stairs.

One account of the alleged incident notes that her father, irritable from chronic pain, was also unhappy with her choice of husband; another brings up an older cousin with anger management issues. In at least one version of Mabel’s slight history, she is mentally ill.

6 The Firs, ca. 1900, Library of Congress — A slightly spooky allée in front of the porch.

In the late 1800s, the Hatheway family moved out of the house, and it became The Firs.

About the same time, or perhaps later during the WWI years, the west side of the building was turned into a small hospital, run by Dr. Virginia French. It was never a home for the insane, although that was the creepier story often passed down.

I haven’t been able to find out what happened to the property later in the 20th century, except that it seems to have been empty by the late 1990s, if not well before — perhaps because of its reputation as a haunted house.

Naturally, teenagers found it a fun place to explore at night and vandalize. In August 2005, much to the neighbors’ relief by one account, the house was demolished. However, there continue to be reports of strange lights and noises in the ruins of the basement.

2 The Firs, ca. 1900, Library of Congress — A fairly cheerful side garden.

You can scroll through more (and larger) images of The Firs by clicking on ‘Continue reading’ below and then on any thumbnail in the gallery.

*Photos by Detroit Publishing Co., via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

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The Sunday porch: Newport, R.I.

October 11, 2015July 19, 2017 Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

Porch at the residence of Margaret Brugiere, Wakehurst, in Newport, Rhode Island, August 6, 1958, by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc., via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The house was built in 1887 by James J. Van Alen as an exact replica of 16th century Wakehurst Place in West Sussex, England.

Margaret, or “Daisy,” Brugiere was Van Alen’s daughter-in-law (widowed and remarried), and she kept the place going in a high style until her death in 1969.

At some point, the family must have wanted the comforts of an American porch and created one with awning. Its interior style seems inspired by Naples — both the city in Italy and the one in Florida.

The property exists today as the student center for Salve Regina University.

La Vallée Suisse, Paris

October 7, 2015March 8, 2018 Cindy at enclos*ure1 Comment

The plants have taken over. The gardener has gone home.
— Gregory Ross, from Hidden Parks of Paris

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The verdant, sunken Garden of the Swiss Valley is a true “hidden garden” of Paris. Unless you know to look for the little green gate just past the very large and silly memorial, “The Dream of the Poet,” on Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt, you will walk right by it on your way to the Seine.

But if you do know to stop and then enter the gate, you’ll descend over a dozen faux bois steps to a “stone” arch (also constructed of concrete, as are all the other stones in the garden).

Stepping through the archway, you’ll cross an artificial pond fed by the Seine (and reputedly inhabited by carp) and look down the single path of the long narrow space. Mature trees, shrubs, and perennials cover and obscure the valley walls; some dip into the water, including a 100-year-old weeping beech.

Elaine Sciolino, writing in the The New York Times, called this garden “a tiny stage-set.” With its fake rock and old-fashioned common garden plants,* it is not really “naturalistic,” yet is like a little wilderness — its arrangement seemingly having moved beyond planting design and maintenance.

When I visited it one morning in early September, a slight haze of dust and seasonal decay hung in the air. The only other person there was a homeless man sound asleep on one of the benches, and I tried not to bother him as I walked back and forth taking pictures.

At one end of the path, a faux bois pedestrian footbridge crosses overhead. At the other, green doors signal the entrance to a Climespace plant, which — 30 meters further underground — cools the surrounding buildings with circulating chilled water.

The Swiss Valley is one of the many garden spaces along the Champs-Élysées credited to Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, an engineer who directed the construction of many Haussmann-era parks. Whether he actually designed it seems lost to history (on the internet, at least). I have read that the Valley was created for the Exposition Universelle of 1900, but perhaps it was the 1889 World’s Fair, as Alphand died in 1891. How Switzerland or a Swiss exhibit comes into it is also not really clear.

The little park is now called the Garden of New France because of nearby Place du Canada. At least half its 1.7 acres are above the valley garden, level with the street — an ordinary assortment of shrubs, grass, and gravel paths.

You can click on ‘Continue reading’ below to scroll through more (and larger) images.

*Including maple trees, bamboo, wavy leaf silktassel, Mexican orange, viburnum, nandina, lilac, jasmine, white hibiscus, ferns, ivy, roses, daylilies, smooth hydrangea, smokebush, Japanese anemones, and Persicaria ‘Red Dragon’.

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