Schloss Nymphenburg, Munich, May 7, 2016.
English daisies across the lawn.
Wordless Wednesday: axes
Category: life in gardens
Life in gardens: violets
Mary Heldon, between 1900 and 1920, Friars Point, Mississippi, by Milton McFarland Painter, Sr., via Mississippi Department of Archives and History.* Mary was also pictured in this garden photo by Painter.
I had not thought of violets late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet
In wistful April days. . .— Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, from “Sonnet“
*Photo cropped slightly by me.
The Sunday porch: Usborne, Ontario
John Cottel‘s Home, Usborne Township, Ontario, ca. 1910, via Huron County Museum & Historic Gaol Commons on flickr.
John Cottel, presumably to the right of the door, was born in England in 1836. His wife was Margaret Turnbull, and they had four daughters, three of whom may be in the photo. There is a much wider view of the house and farm here.
Life in gardens: May Day
I’m a little worried that fire is going to become involved here.
The photo, “May pole dance at Miami University May Day celebration 1914 ,” is by Frank Snyder, via Frank Snyder Photograph Collection, Miami University Libraries (Oxford, Ohio) Commons on flickr.
The Maypole Dance was a common rite of spring at colleges from the late nineteenth century through the 1950s. Historian David Glassberg argues that the celebration was created (or resurrected) by turn-of-the-century progressives who bemoaned America’s lack of wholesome traditions. They believed that Puritanism had severed this country’s ties to the culture of Elizabethan England—a belief supported by a reading of Hawthorne’s short story, “The May-Pole of Merrymount.”
— Tynes Cowan, from BSC Folklore (Birmingham-Southern College)
Here in the Swabian part of Germany, many towns and villages will be celebrating the first of May like this.
On a terrace
Also from France, by Eugène Trutat . . .
“Portrait de famille sur une terrasse,” 1901, via Bibliothèque de Toulouse Commons on flickr.
enclos*ure 