Our garden in June

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Today is Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day, hosted by Carol at May Dreams Gardens. I don’t have a lot of flowers, but I am enjoying some orange hawkweed, which I hope will pop up in more places in the long grass this summer and next year.

Tomorrow is Garden Bloggers’ Foliage Follow Up, hosted by Pam at Digging. If grass counts as “foliage,” this is my contribution as well.

You can read more about our backyard in Stuttgart, Germany, here.

To scroll through larger versions of the pictures, click on ‘Continue reading’ below and then on any thumbnail in the gallery.

In a field by the river
my love and I did stand.  .  .  .
She bid me take life easy,
as the grass grows on the weirs. . .

— W. B. Yeats, from “Down by the Salley Gardens“

 

The Sunday porch: Struan

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Struan, Arden, North Carolina, via Library of CongressGrape 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.

Struan, Arden, North Carolina, cropped, via Library of CongressDetail 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.

The approach

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The approach, Chasley, Alabama, an infrared by C. Highsmith, 2010, Library of CongressAn old cabin on the plantation of Chasley, Monroe County, Alabama, May 2010, an infrared photo by Carol M. Highsmith, via The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Vintage landscape: Birdsnest, Virginia

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Bird's Nest Tavern, FBJohston, 1930s, Library of Congress “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“

Life in gardens: daisy field

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Summer, Preus Museum“Sommer,” between 1910 and 1933, by Inga Breder, via Preus Museum Commons on flickr.

Inga Breder, was born in Bodø, Norway, in 1855.  As an adult she lived in Oslo (then Kristiania) and became an amateur photographer, competing in and judging competitions.