Category: North American gardens

Oxford Street

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Magnolias in Rochester, New York, undated, via  Arthur Peck Collection, OSU Special Collections & Archives Commons on flickr.

Since the late 19th century, Oxford Street in the city’s Park Avenue neighborhood has attracted visitors in May for its display of blooming magnolia trees. There is another vintage picture of the trees here.

Arthur Peck was a Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Oregon Agricultural College* from 1908 to 1948. This picture was part of his teaching library of 24 boxes of glass lantern slides — now in OSU’s archives.

*The college later became Oregon State University (OSU).

Englewood, New Jersey

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“Beechgate,” Englewood, New Jersey, 1918, a hand-colored glass lantern slide by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Some mid-week prettiness. . . . The four-acre garden was designed by Anna Gilman Hill about 1911.

Hill and her husband also owned “Grey Gardens,” the East Hampton estate later famously inhabited by Edith Bouvier Beale and “Little Edie.” She was Director of the Garden Club of America for six years in the 1920s, and, in 1938, she wrote a book about her gardening life, called Forty Years of Gardening. You can read it online here.

The Sunday porch: Williamsboro, N.C.

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 “Blooming Hope” (also called “Cedar Walk”), Williamsboro, North Carolina, 1938, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

I like the way the vines are a little blurry from a sudden gust of wind.

The home may have been built as early as the 1750s by a Hutchins (or possibly Robert) Burton, who called it “Blooming Hope.” He may have operated a boarding school there. It also seems to have served as an academy for young ladies later in the early 1800s, run by the Rev. Henry Patillo. At some point in its first 100 years, there was a suicide in the house (either Burton or Patillo’s son), and it acquired a reputation as haunted. It was torn down in 1967.

The Sunday porch: Beverly Hills

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nypl.digitalcollections-Beverly Hills
“The Veranda, The Hotel at Beverly Hills, California,” ca. 1889 – ca. 1931, a postcard by the Detroit Publishing Company, via New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Uptown garden

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“Artist’s uptown residence,” New York City, ca. 1860, via Robert Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views, New York Public Library.

Detail from above image.

Upper Manhattan at this time was rapidly transforming from country to city — as villages and small farms became blocks of middle-class rowhouses. This backyard, with its neat latticed sitting area and then large cabbage garden, seems to encapsulate the change.

Detail.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the name of the artist or the address. Is he one of the two men in top hats sitting by the door, or was she standing in front of them, balancing a small boy on the fence — or maybe taking the picture?