Women in the garden in Japan, late 19th to early 20th century, via Photographs of Japan Collection, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, The New York Public Library.
Category: landscape
Life in gardens: bay trees
Placing potted bay trees on the east wing terrace, White House, Washington, D.C., between 1910 and 1917, by Harris & Ewing, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (both photos).
East terrace, White House, 1923, by National Photo Company.
Vintage landscape: Louisville, Kentucky
Colonnade, Central Park, Louisville, Kentucky, between 1900 and 1910, Detroit Publishing Co., via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The park’s 17 acres were owned by the Dupont family in the 1870s, yet open for public use as “Dupont Square.” In 1883, the space — temporarily “roofed in” — was used to demonstrate Thomas Edison’s light bulb.
In 1904, the Duponts sold the land to the city, and Frederick Law Olmsted, who was already working in Louisville, designed a large open-air shelter and colonnade for the park’s high point. The colonnade still exists and is undergoing restoration.
The Sunday porch: recorded
“Mrs. Alberta Kimball, Mrs. Minnie Smith, and Mrs. Emily Elizabeth Fulks, at the home of Mrs. Fulks, Prairie Lea,* Texas,” September 1940, by Ruby Terrill Lomax, via Lomax Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The three women were folk musicians. Alone or in duets, they sang songs like “Swedes Blessing,” “There was a Wealthy Merchant,” “Way Out West in Texas,” “Barbara Allen,” and “The Gypsy’s Warning.” Unfortunately, I can’t find an online recording of them. They look delightful in these pictures, however, particularly in those flowered dresses.
These are four snapshots from four hundred made during the sound recording expeditions of the Lomax family. From 1934 to around 1950, John Avery Lomax, Ruby Terrill Lomax, and Alan Lomax traveled the southern United States and the Bahamas collecting folk music and folklore for the Library of Congress.
There’s a previous “Sunday porch” from the Lomax Collection here.
Our world, so worn and weary,
Needs music, pure and strong,
To hush the jangle and discords
Of sorrow, pain, and wrong.
*These photos were labeled with the location as Prairie Lea or Prairie Lea R.F.D., but also as Stanton, Texas. Prairie Lea and Stanton are in different parts of Texas, and I have been unable to find out which town is correct. The labels on the sound recordings the women made say “Prairie Lea” — which certainly sounds like a place in a folk song.
Life in gardens: two boys
“Two boys sitting in a garden,” Orange, New Jersey, ca. 1860, cropped from a stereoscopic view, via Robert Dennis Collection of the New York Public Library.
The boys look a little as if they were sharing a secret joke.
They may have just been working in a garden plot of their own; there’s a cultivated space with a low rustic border on the lower right side. The boy on the right — with lilacs in his hat — is sitting in a small wheelbarrow, and there’s a child-size shovel or spade beside him. The other boy has a bunch of lilacs in his hand.
Lilacs, . . .
You are brighter than apples,
Sweeter than tulips,
You are the great flood of our souls
Bursting above the leaf-shapes of our hearts,
You are the smell of all Summers,
The love of wives and children,
The recollection of gardens of little children . . .— Amy Lowell, from “Lilacs“
enclos*ure 