Category: life in gardens

Vintage landscape: Rabbit redux

Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

(Chapter the first, here.)

“Government experts test power of gas to keep weeds out of golf greens. Washington, D.C., Aug. 4[,1938].

“Attention golfers!! Your putting is bound to improve and your cussing cut down if the tests now being conducted by grass experts of the Department of Agriculture on the use of tear gas to keep weeds out of golf greens are successful. A.E. Rabbit, (left) grass specialist of the United States Golf Association with whom the Department of Agriculture is cooperating in making the tests, is pictured as he pours the gas into the soil while Stanley Graeff, Dept. of Agriculture, rakes it over. The gas treatment was developed by Dr. John Monteith of the Department of Agriculture.”

Photo and text in quotes by Harris & Ewing via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Vintage landscape: supper in the grove

Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

“Table in picnic grove set for St. Thomas church supper near Bardstown, Kentucky,” August 1940, by Marion Post Wolcott via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Going green in 1938

Cindy at enclos*ure3 Comments

“Golf course grass now dyed green for nervous putters. Washington, D.C., Aug. 5 [1938].

“Nervous golfers who have complained that some insecticides used on greens turned the grass brown, thus creating a mental hazard which spoiled their game, have no excuse now. Experts of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, working with the United States Golf Association, have combined an insecticide with a green [dye], which, when sprayed does not harm healthy grass but improves both the color of uneven greens and the tempers of the golfers who blame their putting on the uneven color of the greens. The new dye is being used on football gridirons and baseball fields.

“A.E. Rabbit, grass specialist of the United States Golf Association, is pictured spraying the new dye on an experimental green at the Department of Agriculture.”

First of all:  Mr. Rabbit, a grass specialist?!  And he’s very nattily dressed to be out spraying colored poison.

Here’s a link to a brief history of pesticides, and here’s a link to “How Green is Golf?” by John Barton, which ran in the May 2008 Golf Digest and features a variety of voices from golf course superintendent to environmental activist.

There’s also this.

The further adventures of Mr. R. here.

Photo and text in quotes via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Vintage landscape: flowers and cabbages

Cindy at enclos*ure1 Comment

“A cottage & garden, Alaska,” ca. 1909-1920. By National Photo Company, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

A similar photo of this cottage was labeled “a sourdough’s home.” The word ‘sourdough’ was slang in Alaska for an oldtimer, probably from the Klondike gold rush.  You can click on the image to enlarge it.

                        O cabbage gardens
summer’s elegy
                        sunset survived
— Susan Howe, from “Cabbage Gardens”

You know there’s a story here

Cindy at enclos*ure1 Comment


“Mrs. Harriman [Florence Jaffrey] does [not] burn fences behind her. Washington, D.C. May 27 [,1927].

“In leaving for her new post as American Minister to Norway, Mrs J. Borden Harriman is not burning but leaving her fences behind her. The last time Mrs. Harriman was away from her Capitol home for any length of time she found a load of dirt from the excavation for the new home of the late Raymond T. Baker dumped on her front lawn upon her return. She sued for $23,000 but the case was settled out of court. This time she has had a high fence constructed around her property to prevent a recurrence of the same thing.”

Mrs. Harriman’s complaint said “that on the 22d of April, 1931, the defendants, ‘with force and arms, did break and enter into and upon the said ground of the plaintiff, and trod down, trampled upon, consumed, destroyed, and spoiled the grass, herbage, shrubbery, ornamental trees, then and there growing and being of great value,’ etc.”

Perhaps the fence should be even higher.

Photo by Harris & Ewing; both it and text in quotes via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.  Mrs. Harriman’s home was at the intersection of Ridge and Reservoir Roads — I believe in the Pallisades neighborhood (although I haven’t found a Ridge Road that intersects with Reservoir).

Love your neighbor; yet don’t pull down your hedge.
— Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack

Thanks to the blog Living in Kigali for including enclos*ure in their list of “Super Fabulous Rwanda-Related Websites.”