During the last week of September, I took a walk around the Heirloom Garden of the Museum of American History and was filled — once again — with admiration for the Smithsonian Institution’s horticulture division.
The garden — huge, raised planters, all the way around the building — contains a mix of open-pollinated plants cultivated in America prior to 1950. The perennials and annuals are anchored by crape myrtles and a variety of shrubs.
The space is very large, open, and — at the south entrance — crowded with tourists. Still, the beautiful long borders, which were being allowed to fade with fall naturally, offered a surprisingly intimate and even soulful experience.
One would have thought, (so cunningly the rude
And scorned partes were mingled with the fine,)
That Nature had for wantonesse ensude
Art, and that Art at Nature did repine;
So striving each th’ other to undermine,
Each did the others work more beautify;
So diff’ring both in wills agreed in fine:
So all agreed through sweete diversity,
This gardin to adorne with all variety.
This is an example of how nice an urban ‘hellstrip’ can be. It’s just to the west of the Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution. I took this photo in the last few days of September.
I think they are all American native plants. I see a fine grass I can’t identify (just visible in the top photo), goldenrod (‘Fireworks’?), amsonia (I think), and the seedheads of purple coneflower.
I like the arrangement of squares of a single species, one after another, rather than all of the plants in one long mix. It goes well with the surrounding architecture.
Sometimes I save a weed if its leaves
are spread fern-like, hand-like,
or if it grows with a certain impertinence.
I let the goldenrod stay and the wild asters.
I save the violets in spring. People who kill violets
Is this not a picture of fun? Two buckets full of loppers, pruners, saws, and even a couple of machetes.
Our recent visit to Washington, D.C., coincided with a September Saturday “Weeding Day” at Dumbarton Oaks Park, sponsored by the Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy. I have wanted to volunteer for one of these days for a couple of years — ever since learning about the group’s efforts to restore this Beatrix Farrand masterpiece, which is located behind the more famous Dumbarton Oaks Gardens.
Owned by the National Park Service since 1940, the park has suffered from invasive exotic plants and water runoff.
The morning started with Ann Aldrich, the Conservancy’s Program Director, making sure we knew how to recognize poison ivy. Then we all doused our exposed skin in Tecnu, a soap that mitigates the effects of exposure.
We learned that poison ivy was not one of the weeds we would be pulling — it is native to the area and an important source of (protein) food for birds.
(Good) poison ivy surrounded by (bad) porcelain berry, English ivy, Japanese stilt grass, and liriope.
We were clearing a meadow area just above the stone pump house (no. 2), on the right in the drawing below.
Below is a picture of the area before we started. . .
And below is what it looked like after we finished (about 3 1/2 hours later). We probably would have cleared out more above the old log, but there was a bees’ nest on the other side.
Ann has spent many a weekend this summer leading garden enthusiasts, college students, and D.C. schoolchildren in “weed warrior-ing.” There is so much to do, and I am so impressed with the group’s ambitious commitment to this lovely place.
As I was leaving, I stopped to admire the Arts and Crafts-style stonework of the dams that Farrand installed all along the little stream that runs through the park.
The Conservancy was just about to have a contractor make repairs to this area when the government shutdown put a halt to even volunteer efforts. (The Conservancy supports and is supervised by the National Park Service.) I hope the work is underway now. Earlier this year, the group was able to place compost filter socks (below) near the Lovers’ Lane entrance to the park.
They are preventing further damage from the water runoff that comes shooting down the small asphalt road that runs along Dumbarton Oaks Gardens.
I had a great time and I will definitely do it again when we move back to Washington (the park is an easy walk from our house). If you live in the D.C. area and would like to help, click here and ask to be put on the Conservancy’s mailing list.
Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy is also holding a fundraiser on November 7, 6:30 p.m., at The Josephine Butler Parks Center. Author Richard Guy Wilson will speak on “Edith Wharton at Home: Life on the Mount.” (Wharton was Farrand’s aunt.) Tickets are $35; click here for more information.
* Farrand actually specified porcelain berry vine to be grown over her arbors, which just makes me shudder.
Walking along the Book Hill section of Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, I crossed the street to take a few pictures of this arrangement. It wins my own “best in mums and sweet potato vines” award. (There’s a little English ivy in there too.)
It’s appropriately in front of an antiques shop that sells mid-century modern furniture.
I also liked this planter made from old roof tiles at Marston-Luce a few doors down.
And I love the frog.
It takes a calendar one damp day to declare fall,
weeks of dying mums to second the motion.
Seven Washington, D.C., rowhouses in 1939, by David Myers, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The neighborhood is not given, although it looks like Capitol Hill to me.
In his book, The American Porch, Michael Dolan attempts to trace the European, African, and Asian origins of our many kinds of porches. The front stoop — several steps and a small landing — came from the Dutch.
Down the coast [from New England], in Nieuw Amsterdam, a different entry was proliferating. Made of stone or brick, the stoep — Dutch for “step” — was a roofless link between doorway and street. Though municipal tradition required a building’s occupants to maintain the stoep, the Dutch deemed it public territory. However, in Nieuw Amsterdam, the stoop acquired a private connotation: “. . . before each door there was an elevation, to which you could ascend by some steps from the street,” an observer wrote. “It resembled a small balcony, and had some benches on both sides on which the people sat in the evening, in order to enjoy the fresh air, and have the pleasure of viewing those who passed it.”
The stoops above lack benches, but the owner of the first one has brought down a chair, and two doors down there is a park bench in the tiny garden. You can see a similar arrangement here.
I’m taking a break from blogging for a couple more weeks (except for “The Sunday porch”), but I’ll be back for GB Bloom Day in October.
enclos*ure