“Lady Elisabeth’s Rose Garden, Lacock [Abbey], England,” early 1840s, by William Henry Fox Talbot, via Museum of Photographic Arts Commons on flickr (both photos).
Lady Elizabeth Fox-Strangways Feilding was the photographer’s mother.
Talbot was one of the early fathers of photography. He developed the paper negative and the process of permanently fixing photos on chemically treated paper.
This is the body of light. . . .
— Ronald Johnson, from “BEAM 30: The Garden“
Children costumed as flowers or insects for an event of the Wild Flower Preservation Society, Illinois Chapter, probably in a Chicago park, ca. 1920, hand-colored glass lantern slides by an unknown photographer, via The Field Museum Library Commons on flickr (all images here).
The Wild Flower Preservation Society of America was founded in 1902 with money given to the New York Botanical Garden by Olivia E. and Caroline Phelps Stokes. The funds were to be used for the protection of native plants.
The Society dissolved in 1933, but much of its work was taken up by the Garden Club of America and by another Wild Flower Preservation Society, founded in 1925 in Washington, D.C. (which seems no longer to exist).
Above and below: Mayapples.
Above: a bee.
Click here to see several more of the slides.
Farmhouse porch with plants in painted lard buckets, Morehead, Kentucky, 1940, by Marion Post Wolcott for U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
I wish we could see the colors of the painted* containers.
Two special supports were built along the front of the porch to display the plants. (There’s a third view of the house here.)
*Here, here, and here are examples of 1930s interior paint color combinations.
“Early Double Tulip: Van de Hoeff,” Alberta, Canada, ca. 1930, hand-colored glass lantern slide by William Copeland McCalla, via Provincial Archives of Alberta Commons on flickr (all images here).
“Fritillaria Pudica Spreng – Yellow or Mission Bell.”
The photographer, William McCalla, was interested in botany and photography from an early age. He studied at Cornell University in the early 1890s and later worked in western Canada as a farmer, librarian, and Natural History teacher. While teaching from 1925 to 1938, he made over 1,000 lantern slides of plants and animals as visual aids.
The slides were donated to the Archives by his son and granddaughter in 1982 and 2007.
“Cross-section of poppy capsule.”
“How Violets scatter their seeds: capsule open: [capsule] empty.”
“Trillium sessile: Californicum wats.”
“Gladiolus Star of Bethlehem.”
“Mountain Ash.”
“Phlox Drummondii.”
You can see more of McCalla’s beautiful flower portraits here.
“Epilobium angustifolium discharging seeds,” Alberta, Canada, ca. 1930, glass lantern slide by William Copeland McCalla, via Provincial Archives of Alberta Commons on flickr.
The plant is now named Chamerion angustifolium. In Canada, it is commonly known as fireweed because it is quick to colonize damp sites made open by fires.
The photographer, William McCalla, was a farmer, librarian, and Natural History teacher. As visual aids for his classes and lectures, he made over 1,000 lantern slides of plants and animals. They were donated to the Archives by his son and granddaughter in 1982 and 2007. I will have more of McCalla’s flower portraits tomorrow.
follower of the fourth-oldest dream—
the landscape burning and burning.— C. Dale Young, from “Fireweed“
enclos*ure 