“‘Lob’s Wood,’ . . . Perintown (Milford), Ohio. Woodland daffodils,” ca. 1920, a hand-colored lantern slide by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The 97-acre property pictured above was purchased in 1898 by Carl H. Krippendorf, a Cincinnati businessman who had spent childhood summers in the surrounding area. He wanted to save the woodland from being turned into a tobacco field.
Krippendorf soon built a house there for his new wife, Mary Greene, and began planting daffodils and other bulbs. They originally called the land Karlsruhe, meaning “Karl’s place of peace” in German. After World War I, the name was changed to Lob’s Wood.
In 1919, during “Daffodil Days at the Krippendorf Farm at Perintown,” $2,700* was raised for war-devastated France. In one afternoon, they sold 15,000 cut daffodils.
Carl became a friend and correspondent of the garden writer Elizabeth Lawrence. She wrote about his garden in The Little Bulbs and Lob’s Wood.
The Krippendorfs lived on the property (eventually 175 acres) for 64 years. Today the house and woods are part of the Cincinnati Nature Center.
What explains poetry is that life is hard
But better than the alternatives,
The no and the nothing. Look at this light
And color, a splash of brilliant yellow
Punctuating an emerald text. . .
— Alicia Ostriker, from “Daffodils“
*about $34,000 today.
A view from the summer house at Oatlands, Loudoun County, Virginia, in the 1930s, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
enclos*ure 