Category: Washington, D.C., gardens

Vintage landscape: the benches

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“Roominghouse district, Washington,” a Kodachrome slide by Charles W. Cushman, mid-September 1940.*

In the two years leading up to the U.S. entering World War II, the population of Washington, D.C., went from 621,000 to over 1,000,000, according to journalist David Brinkley.

Most of the new arrivals were women, many of whom were hired “before they had even found a place to leave their bags.”  Thousands of townhouses were turned into roominghouses and several women shared each room.  (According to one of them, Enid Bubley,  it was “social suicide” to violate the morning schedule of eight minutes each in the bathroom.)

By 1941, Malcolm Cowley described the city this way:  “Washington in wartime is a combination of Moscow (for overcrowding), Paris (for its trees), Wichita (for its way of thinking), Nome (in the gold-rush days) and Hell (for its livability).”

So the two or three benches placed in each little yard above are significant. They were undoubtedly places of real reprieve from the crowded conditions inside the houses and the chaos of the city.

These gardens still have their wrought iron fences.  During the war, the metal was much needed, and many D.C. residents gave up their black railings for wooden pickets.

The photographer, Charles Cushman, was a talented amateur who traveled across the U.S. and other countries and took more than 14,500 Kodachrome slides from 1938 to 1969.  He bequeathed his images to Indiana University, his alma mater.

*Used with the permission of  the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection of the Indiana University Archives.  Please do not “pin” or re-blog without contacting them here.

Vintage landscape: Rabbit redux

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(Chapter the first, here.)

“Government experts test power of gas to keep weeds out of golf greens. Washington, D.C., Aug. 4[,1938].

“Attention golfers!! Your putting is bound to improve and your cussing cut down if the tests now being conducted by grass experts of the Department of Agriculture on the use of tear gas to keep weeds out of golf greens are successful. A.E. Rabbit, (left) grass specialist of the United States Golf Association with whom the Department of Agriculture is cooperating in making the tests, is pictured as he pours the gas into the soil while Stanley Graeff, Dept. of Agriculture, rakes it over. The gas treatment was developed by Dr. John Monteith of the Department of Agriculture.”

Photo and text in quotes by Harris & Ewing via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

A dachterrasse and Friday miscellany

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I recently discovered the beautiful German blog Gartenblick  (Garden View) by Dusseldorf photographer Sibylle Pietrek.

I particularly liked this post about her small, but really lovely, roof terrace (dachterrace).  I was impressed that the designer  — Karim Rashid — could achieve a real sense of an edge of a meadow (with a lounge chair) in so few square feet.

In her post, Sibylle writes that she uses the space for “early evening aperitif, photo shoots, painting, reading, and painting nails.” And to catch the long autumn afternoon sun.  What a nice refuge.

I’m starting to  think about the possibilities for the flat porch roof of our house back in D.C. . . .

All the above photos: ©Sibylle Pietrek, used here with permission.  Please check her blog before pinning or sharing.

Miscellany

Please check out Garden Rant’s review of October annuals at the Smithsonian Institution’s gardens.  Again, why are the S.I. gardens so wonderful and its neighbor, the White House, has this?

Have you seen the online Landscape Architect’s Guide to Washington, D.C., featuring write-ups by 20 L.A.s on 75 historic and contemporary landscapes?  I wish it were somewhat more opinionated (see above), but it’s useful for a visit to the Capital.

“The Global Garden,” the weekly series of the Los Angeles Times’s home and garden blog, explores “multicultural L.A. through the lens of its landscapes.”  Now it has created a library of its posts, here. In the last year, the series has looked at sugar cane, shiso, loquat, purslane, moringa, sweet lemon, ice cream bean, and more. It will continue to update the archive with new material.

I really like this garden by the firm Covachita in San Pedro, Mexico (I believe it’s their studio).  It effectively combines edgy modern urban with antique farm.

The “Urban Jungle” columns by Patterson Clark in The Washington Post are always so interesting, especially this recent one about milkweed (Asclepias syriaca — the light pink one).  If yours left pods and white fluff all over your garden in September, consider how — during World War II — you (or your enterprising child) could have been paid about 15¢ a bushel for them.  The Japanese occupation of Java had cut off supplies of kapok — a fiber (then) needed to fill life vests.

ADDENDUM: I clicked on ‘publish’ and then found one more. I have to admit I love this sort of thing.

A-s-c-l-e-p-i-a—

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I walked by the White House a few weeks ago to look through the fence at the famous vegetable garden. Then I took a further look around and realized that all of the ornamental beds and pots on public view, on all sides of the house, were planted out in red wax begonias.

Just wax begonias combined with dusty miller.

And I thought, “seriously?”

Yes, this — just this, all around.

I know they’re tough and look neat and give reliable color and my feet were hurting from too much walking, but how dull.

The kitchen garden looked fine and huge kudos, but next year, would it not also be educational for D.C. schoolchildren to learn to spell ‘Asclepias tuberosa‘ — as they tuck them in around the fountains with maybe some native switchgrass and goldenrod* — or even the family to which it belongs, ‘Apocynaceae‘ (formerly thought to be ‘Asclepiadaceae‘), and its subfamily, ‘Asclepiadoideae.’

Or maybe just the word ‘perennial,’ which I have to let spellcheck fix every time I write it.

Why do we have wax begonias at the White House, while the British Museum currently has this?  (“North American Landscape:  Kew at the British Museum”)

* and even some scarlet rose mallow (Hibiscus c-o-c-c-i-n-e-u-s), which was planted at the Old Executive Office Building and looked great. (Addendum:  I’m now thinking it could have been this.)