Vintage landscape: Villa Doria Pamphili

Italian villaVilla Doria-Pamphili and parterre in the Monteverde section of Rome, Italy, in the summer of 1925. Photo by Frances Benjamin Johnston via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Today, the 17th c. Villa Doria Pamphili is part of the largest landscaped public park in Rome.

Click the photo for a better view. I like the fountain at the bottom on the left.

Life in gardens: bridal voyage

Bridal couple, Library of Congress

“Bridal pair starting on life’s voyage,” 1876, by Mrs. A. B. Mason, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The Sunday porch: interiors

More well-furnished porches in Queensland, Australia. . .

5 Queensland porch interior, late 19th c., StateLibraryQueensland“Verandah at The Hollow, near Mackay, Queensland, about 1875,” photographer unidentified (all photos here), via State Library of Queensland Commons on flickr (all photos here).

I love the office setup on this very deep porch with an adjoining fernery or bush-house. There is also a sewing machine on the table between the two women.

These photos are not very clear, but you can click any thumbnail in the gallery below to scroll through larger versions.  There are four additional pictures there too.

7 Queensland porch interior, late 19th c., StateLibraryQueensland“Unidentified family on the verandah of a Cairns residence, ca. 1895.”

What a beautiful plant collection.

2 Queensland porch interior, late 19th c., StateLibraryQueensland“Furniture on the verandah of a Queenslander home, ca. 1925,” photographer unidentified.

The white chairs on the left with the extended armrests are “squatter’s chairs,” typical to Queensland porches. There are two more examples here.

Additional links:
Gracemere Homestead 1940 photo,  RockhamptonGracemere Homestead in 2001, GracemereHomestead history

W.C. Hume short biography, Brisbane, squatter’s chair

The KingsfordsCairns

Life in gardens: Detroit, Michigan

Detroit wall, 1941, J. Vachon, Library of CongressBlack children standing in front of a half-mile concrete wall  in northwest Detroit. It was built in 1941 to separate their neighborhood from a white housing development going up on the other side.

The photo was taken in August 1941 by John Vachon for U.S. Farm Security Administration and is via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The 1930s and 1940s were times of great growth for the city of Detroit and the inner-suburbs. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), founded in 1934, pushed the idea of home ownership as an accessible goal for the average working class. . . .

[However], the FHA’s policies of mandated racial homogeneity in housing developments and redlining made it difficult for African Americans to become home owners. . . . Between 1930 and 1950, three out of five homes purchased in the United States were financed by FHA, yet less than two percent of the FHA loans were made to non-white home buyers. . . .

Public or private housing being hard to come by in the city, some African Americans were able to purchase land lots around the Wyoming Avenue and 8 Mile intersection with hopes of eventually building houses. . . . When the FHA was approached by a developer wanting to build an all-white subdivision west of the site, funding was refused because the area was too risky for investment. In a compromise with the FHA, the developer erected the wall that was to divide the “slum” from his new construction project.

— “The Detroit Wall,” Wikipedia

Life in gardens: summer moonlight

Under the moon, Library of Congress“Yūgao dana nōryō zu” (cooling beneath an evening glory canopy), 1880s, a woodcut print by Yoshitoshi Taiso, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The image “shows a couple in the country with a child and a teapot, sitting on a mat beneath a trellis covered with yūgao vines, enjoying the full moon,” according to the Library’s online catalogue.