Wallace and Dot Boyd, Fossie, and “Mother,” with “Uncle Phil” (standing) in a field of daisies. ca. 1900, one half of a stereographic portrait by an unknown photographer, via Library Company of Philadelphia Commons on flickr.
Category: plants
New York City
The finishing touch. . .
Schoolchildren’s victory gardens on 1st Avenue between 35th and 36th Streets, New York City, June 1944, by Edward Meyer for U.S. Office of War Information, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (all photos here).
The first taste.
The location was St. Gabriel’s Park at the time of the photos. It is now called St. Vartan Park.
Please click on any of the thumbnails below to see a few more pictures of this garden.
In a vase on Monday: 1888
Tea Room at the Crawfordsburn Inn, Crawfordsburn, County Down, ca. 1888, by R. Welch, via Public Record Office of Northern Ireland Commons on flickr.
I believe this is The Old Inn, built in 1614 and still in operation as a hotel and restaurant. The mail coach, on its way to the port of Donaghadee and passage to England, changed horses at the Inn. Among the travelers who stopped here were Swift, Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens, and Trollope.
I’m recovering from foot surgery at moment, so I haven’t been able to make my own arrangement for “In a vase on Monday,” hosted by Cathy at Rambling in the Garden. But I did want to share this wonderful photo in which the whole room is an arrangement. At first, I thought those were peacock feathers fanning out over the portrait of the Queen and on the right, but they are tall grasses. I would love to have lunch here.
Please click on the picture for a larger view.
The Sunday porch: Estero, Florida
“Tent house on Koreshan property in Estero, Florida,” 1895, via Koreshan Unity Collection, Florida Memory Commons on flickr (State Library and Archives of Florida).
The Koreshan Unity was a late 19th and early 20th century utopian community whose members believed in a god that was both male and female, as well as in reincarnation, celibacy, collectivism, equality of the sexes, and cellular cosmogony.* It was founded by Cyrus Teed in upstate New York in the 1870s, and later there were also followers in Chicago and San Francisco. In 1894, the community began moving to a donated 320-acre property in Estero, Florida. During the next decade, it purchased over 5,000 additional acres and began building a settlement that “included a sawmill, cement works, bakery, machine shop, general store, art gallery, symphony, theater troupe, plant nursery and more,” according to USA Today. Its population peaked at 250 residents between 1903 and 1908; the majority were well-educated middle-class women, seven of whom managed the day-to-day affairs of the commune.
When Teed died in 1908 — and his body was not resurrected as he had promised — the commune began to decline; there were 10 members left in 1948. The last Koreshans deeded the site of its village to the state of Florida in 1961. It is now a state park.
*”Among the most interesting beliefs of Koreshan Unity was the cellular cosmogony, or the hollow earth,” according to Florida Memory. “According to the cellular cosmogony, the earth was not a convex sphere but instead a hollow, concave cell containing the entire universe with the sun at its center and Earth’s populace living on the inside surface of the hollow cell.”
June flowers
Girl with wildflowers (cropped slightly by me), ca. 1900, photographer unidentified but possibly Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr., via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
enclos*ure 