My Bloom Day tulips from Wednesday have faded into orchid-like shapes this morning.
And shall we not part at the end of day,
With a sigh, a smile?— Ernest Dowson, from “April Love“
The Sunday porch: Pasadena
So thou dost riot through the glad spring days. . .*
“Gold of Ophir roses, Pasadena[, California,]” ca. 1902, a photochrom by Detroit Photographic Co., via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The climber Gold of Ophir — also known as Fortune’s Double Yellow and Beauty of Glazenwood — moved to southern California with the settlers and flourished there.
“I remember great heaps of them in every backyard, blazing like moons on fire, yellow, gold, pink. . .,” wrote M. K. Fisher in her introduction to Growing Good Roses by Rayford C. Reddell.
* from “Gold of Ophir Roses” by Grace Atherton Dennen, editor/publisher of The Lyric West
Vintage landscape: courtyard pattern
I’ve making patchwork pillows in shades of blue this week. The mosaic arrangement on this courtyard wall would be a good one to copy in fabric.
“Vnutri dvora Tilli︠a︡-Kari. Detalʹ na pravoĭ storoni︠e︡. Samarkand (Inside Tillia-Kari courtyard. Detail on right side.), between 1905 and 1915, by Sergeĭ Mikhaĭlovich Prokudin-Gorskiĭ, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (also the photo below).
In the center of Samarkand is the Registan complex, consisting of three madrasah (religious schools). The third of these, the Tillia Kari Madrasah, was built in 1646–60 on the site of a former caravansarai. Its basic plan is formed by a rectangular courtyard, bounded by arcades that contain rooms for scholars. Although much damaged, the facades show profuse ceramic decoration in geometric and botanical motifs, as well as panels with Perso-Arabic inscriptions above the door of each cell. Seen here is a detail of a cell facade inside the courtyard, with the walls covered in a geometric pattern of small glazed tiles and a fragment of an inscription panel above the door.
— from the image’s page on World Digital Library, a project of the Library of Congress.
“Vid s Tilli︠a︡-Kari na Samarkand (View of Samarkand from Tillia-Kari).”
Sergeĭ Prokudin-Gorskii made early color photographic surveys of the Russian Empire in the decade before World War I and the Russian revolution. He left Russia in 1918, eventually settling in Paris. The Library of Congress purchased his collection of 2,607 images from his sons in 1948. There are more vintage photos of Tillia Kari here.
Not Delft or delphinium, not Wedgewood. . .
But way on down in the moonless
octave below midnight, honey,
way down where you can’t tell cerulean
from teal.— Lynn Powell, from “Kind of Blue
Bloom Day in April: tulips
A previous occupant of our house left us three or four clumps of orange-red and dark pink tulips. I’m enjoying the colors in our kitchen window and in the living room.
To see what’s blooming today for other garden bloggers, visit Carol at May Dreams Gardens.
Vintage landscape: boxwood drive
Driveway, Castle Hill, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1926, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The original house on the plantation of Castle Hill was built in 1764 by Dr. Thomas Walker and his wife Mildred. Walker was a friend of Peter Jefferson and later guardian to his son,Thomas.
At the time of this photo, the property was owned by his descendant, Amélie Louise Rives Troubetzkoy, a novelist married to a Russian prince who eventually ran somewhat short of funds.
By the fall of 1938, when future novelist Louis Auchincloss, then a law student at the University of Virginia, came to have tea with the aging princess, he found her living in “romantic, impoverished isolation in a decaying manor house.” To get to the house, he had to find his way through a double row of aromatic box hedges that rose up three stories high and were so enormous that his bulky Pontiac could barely pass through. The awe-inspiring hedges even became the subject of one of Amélie’s poems, which she wrote in middle age. She ends the poem with “Hedges of Box,/Hedges of Magic./…Behind your barrier of glad enchantment/I have rediscovered reality.” The reality Amélie envisioned had herself within the encircling wall of boxwood, still a young beauty of twenty-one, seated on the back of a unicorn.
— Donna M. Lucey, from “The Temptress of Castle Hill,” Garden and Gun
Today, the estate is still privately owned. Its remaining 1,203 acres (from the original 15,000) have been permanently protected against development by a conservation easement with The Nature Conservancy.
enclos*ure 