Washington, D.C., gardens – Page 20

Vintage landscape: Van Ness Park

January 23, 2013April 13, 2016 Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

“Two people relaxing in Van Ness Park about 1880,” Washington, D.C., via D.C. Public Library Commons photostream on Flickr.

This park was not located in the present-day upper-northwest neighborhood known as Van Ness. The photo was taken in an area southwest of the White House near the corner of C and 18th Sts., N.W. — which was then known informally as “Van Ness Park.”

According to the Library’s notation on the photo, the building that can be seen in the middle of the far right side (above the man’s legs) is a “dependency of Van Ness Mansion.”

Van Ness House (Mansion) and its grounds were located on the block bordered by 17th and 18th Sts. and C St. and Constitution Ave. Built about 1816, the Greek Revival house was one of the finest in the city until the Civil War. But afterwards, it served as a “German beer garden, florist’s nursery, headquarters of the city streetcleaners, and in the end, for the Columbia Athletic Club,” according to the blog Lost Washington.

The college that became George Washington University bought the property in 1903 but later decided that its location was too unhealthy for campus facilities. At that time, the Potomac River and its marshes came up to B St., now Constitution Ave.

The State Department bought it in 1907, tore down the house, and built the Pan American Union (today OAS) Building.

I think the dependency in the photo is the old stable of the estate, which still exists at C and 18th Sts. If that’s so, the couple may be lounging in what is now Bolivar Park.

According to the blog DC Ghosts, the stables have a connection to a local ghost story in which six white horses “run wildly around the grounds” and then group together to walk to the P St. Bridge crossing to Georgetown and Oak Hill Cemetery. The full story is here.

It is good to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought.

— James Douglas, Down Shoe Lane

A look back

January 4, 2013April 13, 2016 Cindy at enclos*ure3 Comments

This blog in 2012:*

I posted 173 times and received 39,923 views from readers from 147 countries.

(I do, however, take WordPress’s “My Stats” with a grain of salt. A few mornings ago, it showed me with 10 views from 4 visitors in 6 countries. Maybe one viewer was on an airplane?)

Posts with the most views: “Enclosures of the kings” and “A garden in the Virunga hills” — both in February and both after enclos*ure was featured on WordPress’s “Freshly Pressed” and Fine Gardening’s “Garden Photo of the Day.”

Most viewed individual photos: Japanese Tea House (below)

Japanese tea house with mid-century garden chairs. — The Japanese tea house at Tudor Place with mid-century garden chairs.

and Tanner Springs Park (below)

A summer camp visit to Tanner Springs Park in Portland, Oregon. — A summer camp visits Tanner Springs Park in Portland, Oregon.

Thumbnails of both are featured on pages one and two of Google Image Search for those topics.

Search term bringing the most views to this blog: “Chateau Gaillard.” I have never posted about Chateau Gaillard.

Strangest search term bringing (2) views to this blog: “why would someone enclos [sic] a front porch and make their side entrance the main address.” Please, I would never do that.

Best blogging lesson learned: In a country where the power goes off several times a day, click on “save draft” constantly.

Most popular enclos*ure photo on Pinterest:

from “A visit to GOFTC.” “A pole is placed in the middle of the [compost] pile so it can slide in and out. If it is pulled out warm and damp, the pile is in good shape.”

Most annoying WordPress feature: a spellcheck that changes ‘enclos*ure’ to ‘enclose*ure.’ Also, quote marks are frequently facing the wrong direction — see just above.

My own favorite image this year: I really couldn’t pick one, but I did love the pouring teapot in the garden of the Sowathe Tea Factory last January (below).

Thank you all for visiting enclos*ure in 2012.

I leave you with this interesting quote:

People often ask us, in an amazed way, “how do you possibly garden together?”. . . [O]ne person’s strengths fill in for the other’s weaknesses. The human eye contains two kinds of receptors: rods respond to light or darkness; cones are sensitive to color and detail. Men’s eyes have more rods, a thousand times more sensitive to light than cones, so men wait for low light, often seeing better in the dark. With a plethora of cones, women may stumble in the dark but are better able to respond to the subtle blush of a rose. It doesn’t stop there. Men and women process the information that comes in through their eyes differently. Women store visual information on both sides of their brains, men on one side only: this give men better depth perception, but at the price of color recall, which is easier for women. Ten percent of men are functionally color blind, and almost none have the selective capacity of a woman’s eye, well trained.

— Nori and Sandra Pope, from Color by Design: Planting the Contemporary Garden

*according to my WordPress.com Annual Report and “My Stats.”

January reading

January 2, 2013April 13, 2016 Cindy at enclos*ure6 Comments

Happy 2013!

A silkscreen poster of the Illinois WPA Art Project (ca. 1936 – 1941), via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

On my nightstand for January reading:

Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City by Dan Pearson. His city garden is the best example of what I want for our Washington, D.C., garden when we return.

Illustrated History of Landscape Design by Elizabeth Boults and Chip Sullivan

The American Meadow Garden by John Greenlee and Beautiful N0-Mow Yards by Evelyn J. Hadden

The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meaning Through History by Spiro Kostof

Color by Design: Planting the Contemporary Garden by Nori and Sandra Pope

The New Perennial Garden by Noël Kingsbury

— none particularly new, but indications of my current interests.

I just finished re-reading Peter Martin’s The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia: From Jamestown to Jefferson. I recommend it — along with Barbara Wells Sarudy’s Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake, 1700 – 1805 — if you garden in the U.S. mid-Atlantic. Martin is particularly good on Mount Vernon and Monticello and on Jefferson’s changing enthusiasms and false starts. (Martin and Sarudy differ somewhat on the extent of the influence of the English landscape garden style in 18th century America.)

(I also love Fergus M. Bordewich’s Washington: The Making of the American Capital for landscape/city planning history.)

Right now I’m really taken with the Game of Thrones books (I know, I’m behind the trend; I’m in Rwanda.) I’m thinking of making the jump to an e-reader this month and then loading on the second book (aka Season Two) to watch in February. I also want Hillary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies soon (I had to re-read Wolf Hall last month first — it’s so good).

What are your plans for winter reading?

Vintage landscape: more snow in Washington, D.C.

December 26, 2012January 23, 2014 Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

“Woman and girl standing in icy square, Washington, D.C.,” 1889, by Uriah Hunt Painter, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Uriah Hunt Painter, 1837-1900, took a number of snapshot photographs of his neighborhood around Franklin Square and of downtown Washington using the first Kodak cameras. Painter was a businessman and retired newspaper reporter.

“[The p]hoto shows a woman and a young girl posing mid-square with bundles. The two may be Painter’s wife, Melinda Avery Painter, and older daughter, Eleanor, returning from a marketing trip. Or perhaps Painter took their portrait because the girl is holding another Kodak – exemplifying the growing corps of amateur photographers who took advantage of Eastman’s simple box camera.”

— from the LoC online catalog

Above: “Market scene, Washington, D.C., snow view,” 1889, by Uriah Hunt Painter. I don’t know which square is pictured in these photos.

Above: “Franklin Square, Washington, D.C., snow view,” 1989, by Uriah Hunt Painter.

Today’s quote

Pope’s famous lines, in his “Epistle to the Earl of Burlington,” on ‘the genius of the place,’ . . . surely evoke a conception of The Garden as an epiphany. For Pope, ‘the genius of the place’ does not refer, as it does for many later writers, to the ambiance or natural setting of a garden: rather, it is that which ‘Now breaks, or now directs, the intending lines’ and ‘Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.’ Palpable, here is a sense of The Garden as both a response to and an exemplification of something beyond the control and invention of human beings.

— David E. Cooper, from A Philosophy of Gardens
(Thanks to View from Federal Twist.)

Vintage landscape: snow in Washington

December 25, 2012 Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

The view at night, under snow, of the Post Office Building, Washington, D.C., 1911. Via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, photographer unknown.

Merry Christmas!