“Good enough Farm House in Hood River, [Oregon]: View from front yard,” undated, via Arthur Peck Photograph Collection, OSU Special Collections and Archives Commons on flickr.
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.
It is not clear whether “good enough” was his critical evaluation or the name of the farm.
We were in the really pretty city center of Ulm on Saturday morning, walking around the farmers’ market* in the light snow. Many of the stands were completely covered in clear plastic against the cold. This one was full of tulips and forced cherry blossoms, and I would have loved to buy several bouquets, but they wouldn’t have been practical in our Ibis hotel room, which was comfortable but teeny.
So I wasn’t able to make a flower arrangement this week for “In a vase on Monday,”‘ but to see what other garden bloggers have created today, please visit host Cathy at Rambling in the Garden.
*On the plaza in front of the Ulm Münster (church), which has the tallest church steeple in the world.
“Dar Beïda [white house] garden in the Bou Jeloud Palace, Fez, Morocco,” January 1913, by Stéphane Passet, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Départment of Hauts-de-Seine.
I believe the image above was taken in what is now called the Jnane Sbil Garden — created as a royal garden in the 18th century and open to the public since the 19th. It was restored between 2006 and 2011.
This autochrome is one of about 72,000 that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker, between 1909 and 1931. Kahn sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to 50 countries “to fix, once and for all, aspects, practices, and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is no longer ‘a matter of time.'”* The resulting collection is called Archives de la Planète and now resides in its own museum at Kahn’s old suburban estate at Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris. Since June 2016, the archive has also been available for viewing online here.
*words of Albert Kahn, 1912. Also, the above photo (A 879) is © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.
Buying flowers at 64 Avenue Hoche, Paris, ca. 1924, by Auguste Léon, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine.
This autochrome is one of about 72,000 that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker, between 1909 and 1931. Kahn sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to 50 countries “to fix, once and for all, aspects, practices, and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is no longer ‘a matter of time.'”* The resulting collection is called Archives de la Planète and now resides in its own museum at Kahn’s old suburban estate at Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris. Since June 2016, the archive has also been available for viewing online here.
I wasn’t able to make a flower arrangement this week for “In a vase on Monday,”‘ but to see what other garden bloggers have created today, please visit host Cathy at Rambling in the Garden.
*words of Albert Kahn, 1912. Also, the above photo (A 69 599 X) is © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.
A repeat “Vintage” from 2012. . .
I love this 1902 photograph of the Upper Garden at George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon. It’s so high Colonial Revival.
Early American Gardens has a post this week, “Mount Vernon after George Washington’s death,” with images from the 19th century. While looking at them I remembered the picture above and the two below.
Above is a hand-colored slide from a 1929 aerial photo, part of the lantern slides collection of Frances Benjamin Johnston. The Upper Garden is on the right side.
And here is a general view (c.1910 – 1920) of the the Upper Garden by the Detroit Publishing Co. All three images above via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The 20th century photos are pretty, but they don’t accurately represent the Upper Garden of Washington’s time. In the late 19th century, restorers thought that the boxwood parterres (many filled with hybrid tea roses) were original to Washington’s time, but research in the 1980s found that they were actually planted in the 1860s or 70s (although they may have been rooted from Washington’s boxwood).
The garden was substantially re-worked in 1985, but such is the romantic power of a boxwood hedge that the mid-19th century bushes were largely “kept in place by their own mythology and the mythology they supported of Washington as American royalty,” according to The History Blog, here.
But by the early 2000s, those boxwoods were dying, so the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which owns the estate, decided to make an extensive (six-year) archaeological dig on the site. This culminated in a “new” (1780s) design in 2011. The area now holds large open beds of vegetables and flowers. They are bordered by low boxwood hedges and centered by a 10′ wide gravel walkway.
You can read about the restoration in this Washington Post article, here. And I really recommend watching this very interesting 30-minute C-Span video about the research and archaeology that informed it.
(There’s more about the garden in 2017 here.)
enclos*ure 