“Group of women having a tea party in Queensland, Australia,” ca. 1887, photographer unknown, via State Library of Queensland.
Beautiful Platycerium or staghorn ferns on the wall and columns. These could be Platycerium superbum, which are native to Australia. The one on the left seems to be supporting another plant — maybe a coleus.
How quiet it is, how silent,
like an afternoon in Pompeii.— Louise Glück, from “A Summer Garden“
The patio at Vroman’s Bookstore, 60 E. Colorado Street, Pasadena, California, Spring 1923, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Vroman’s Bookstore was founded in 1894 by Adam Clark Vroman and is still a Pasadena cultural institution, with three locations in the city.
However, the little patio above, with its fig tree and fountain, no longer exists. Vroman’s moved to 695 E. Colorado Street in 1929.
Johnston used this image in her garden and historic house lectures.
Stongfjorden, Norway, ca. 1910, by Paul Stang, via Fylkesarkivet i (County Archives of) Sogn og Fjordane Commons on flickr.
I love the striped curtains — and those here.
Today is Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day, hosted by Carol at May Dreams Gardens. I don’t have a lot of flowers, but I am enjoying some orange hawkweed, which I hope will pop up in more places in the long grass this summer and next year.
Tomorrow is Garden Bloggers’ Foliage Follow Up, hosted by Pam at Digging. If grass counts as “foliage,” this is my contribution as well.
You can read more about our backyard in Stuttgart, Germany, here.
To scroll through larger versions of the pictures, click on ‘Continue reading’ below and then on any thumbnail in the gallery.
In a field by the river
my love and I did stand. . . .
She bid me take life easy,
as the grass grows on the weirs. . .— W. B. Yeats, from “Down by the Salley Gardens“
Grape vines over the porch of an old outbuilding at Struan, Arden, North Carolina, 1938, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Detail of the above; note the potted plants on the old ladder.
By the time Johnston photographed the old plantation of Struan for her Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South, the property had been a school for boys, Christ School, for 38 years.
enclos*ure 