“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.
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.
“Old Birds’ Nest Tavern, Marionville vic., Northampton County, [on the Eastern Shore of] Virginia,” ca. 1930s, by Frances Benjamin Johnson, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. (Marionville was also known as Birdsnest.)
Beautiful summer meadow around the house. . .
Johnston’s notes on the photograph call the building a “sailors’ tavern.” It was probably one half to two miles from the creeks and marshes of Hog Island Bay on the Atlantic Ocean, maybe closer.
Her notes also say that it was “the first three story house in the country [county?].”
According to a 1927 economic and social survey of Northampton County, “[f]rom the low room in the middle of this building originated the name of ‘Bird’s Nest’.”
Unfortunately, I can’t find anything to indicate that it has survived to the present day.
When the world turns completely upside down
You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore
Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town, . . .
We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.— Elinor Wylie, from “Wild Peaches“
enclos*ure 