A garden plot in a communal garden, Town of Locke, Sacramento County, Ca. Photo by Jet Lowe, April 1984, part of a Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) of the town, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Locke, California, is a small, rural Chinese ghetto on the Sacramento River. It was developed in the early 20th century to serve Chungshan Chinese laborers who worked in the fruit orchards and vegetable fields in California’s Delta region. Today, virtually all Chinese communities in America are urban enclaves. By contrast, Locke has remained an unincorporated village since its founding in 1915. For this reason, it is unique within the United States as the only extant rural Chinese community still occupied by Chinese people.
Today, the population of Locke is 70 to 80 people, about 10 of whom are of Chinese descent.
View from an upstairs window of the house. All photos via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
This was Grey Gardens in 1914 — long before it was made famous by the 1975 documentary.
The walled garden section of the four-acre estate in East Hampton, N.Y., was designed by Anna Gilman Hill and landscape architect Ruth Bramley Dean.
Anna and her husband, Robert Carmer Hill, had purchased the property in 1913. They sold it to Phelan and Edith Bouvier Beale (whose daughter was Little Edie) in 1927.
The northeast gate to the walled garden.
Hill imported the concrete walls from Spain. She took the name for the house and garden from its environment.
It was truly a gray [sic] garden. The soft gray of the dunes, cement walls and sea mists gave us our color scheme as well as our name… nepeta, stachys, and pinks… clipped bunches of santolina, lavender and rosemary made gray mounds here and there. Only flowers in pale colors were allowed inside the walls, yet the effect was far from insipid….I close my eyes and sense again the scent of those wild roses, the caress of the hot sun on our backs as we sauntered to and fro from our bath and lazy mornings on the beach.
Beyond the property is the Atlantic Ocean. The walled garden was 70′ x 40′.
A plan of the garden, artist unknown.
The estate (now two acres) has been owned by Ben Bradlee (formerly editor-in-chief of The Washington Post) and Sally Quinn since 1979. They have restored both the house and garden.
Now the land between the walled garden and the ocean is filled with newer houses and gardens, and there is a very tall hedge just behind the far wall and the pergola.
The northeast gate.The original photograph before hand coloring.The bench inside the northeast gate.Looking west to pergola.Birdbath on west wall.Pergola and tool house gate.East gate to the tool house.The garden tool house.Sunroom in the house overlooking the walled garden.
The open doorway in the photo above lined up with the pergola. It seems that, at the time of this photo, there was an opening in the garden wall between the house and pergola. But I can’t tell if the opening was there before or after the time of the other photographs.
Tant que mai n’est au 28, l’hiver n’est pas cuit.
Until May 28, winter is not cooked.
— French saying, via Paris côté jardin
École du Breuil, Paris 12e, photo by Alain Delavie.
“Sit down, it’s spring!”
This is the message of a charming chair at the Ecole du Breuil in Paris. The photo is by Alain Delavie* from his blog Paris côté jardin (Paris garden side).
However, in his post on May 26, Delavie noted that the temperature was “hardly conducive to lazing in the shade of a tree … more to a jacket and mulled wine.” Indeed, Paris had record cold weather for the end of May. Today, the temperature will be around 14°C or 57°F — pretty chilly.
Paris côté jardin is a wonderful resource for gardeners preparing to visit (or even luckier, live in) Paris or the Ile-de-France. Delavie is the editor of Rustica Hebdo magazine and editorial advisor to www.rustica.fr. Equally impressive, he is a member of the European Network of Master Composters.
(The blog is in French, but there is a Google Translate button.)
The Breuil School is run by the city of Paris and is located on 23 hectares in the Bois de Vincennes. It was founded in 1867 by Baron Haussmann and Alphonse Du Breuil to provide the Paris and Seine region with properly trained gardeners. Today, its mission is to train gardeners, technicians, and managers for the city of Paris “on the subject of plants in the urban space.”
The school enrolls 300 students at a time: 200 in the classroom and 100 in apprenticeships. Its grounds and facilities include an arboretum, heritage orchard, greenhouse, many plant collections, and library.
As gardeners, surely we have done our duty once we have registered our disapproval at the general arrangement of the universe, with complaints of special sharpness directed toward the clumsiness — indeed, sloth — with which wind and rains are scheduled. It is all that can be expected of us. The rest is the full responsibility of the heavens and need not, therefore, concern us. It does seem to me odd, nevertheless, that this “Nature,” which is supposed to be so wonderful, so rarely lets anything come to full perfection. It is all designed on the frog in the well principle, two hops forward and one backward until a certain level is reached, then the whole thing collapses. That is all anybody needs to know about nature.
A garden plot in a communal garden, Town of Locke, Sacramento County, Ca. Photo by Jet Lowe, April 1984, part of a Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) of the town, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
