“House, small, hipped roof, New Roads vic., Point Coupee Parish, Louisiana,” 1938, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
On some days, this is my dream garden.
Just cut a path through the gate, up to the front steps . . .
and plant a fig tree at the end of the porch.
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, from “Inversnaid“
“Children beside a Christmas tree,” ca. 1910s, via Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office Commons on flickr.
I think this snapshot may have been taken by a child — the focus is as much on the toy horse and the cat as on the other children and the tree.
“Cut Christmas trees [at the] market in front of Barclay Street Station, New York, N.Y.,” between 1885 and 1895, by Detroit Publishing Company, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The station was part of the IRT Ninth Avenue elevated railway line and was located at Barclay and Greenwich Streets, north of today’s Six World Trade Center. It closed with the rest of the line in 1940.
O
fury-
bedecked!
O glitter-torn!
Let the wild wind erect
bonbonbonanzas; junipers affect
frostyfreeze turbans; iciclestuff adorn. . .— George Starbuck, from “Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas tree“
Whenever we have visited Portland, Oregon — as we did this October –I have made a point of spending some time in the Ira Keller Fountain Park.
The fountain was designed by Angela Danadjieva and Lawrence Halprin in 1968, as part of the Portland Open Space Sequence.
“This new type of people’s park, where nature is abstracted with a geometric naturalism, was based on Halprin’s studies of the High Sierra’s spring cascades,” according to The Cultural Landscape Foundation.
At the time of the park’s opening in 1970, New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable said it “may be one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance,” and she compared it to the Piazza Navona and the Trevi Fountain.
. . . At the forest’s
edge, where the child sleeps, the waters gather—
as if a hand were reaching for the curtain
to drop across the glowing, lit tableau.— Eleanor Wilner, from “Reading the Bible Backward“
“Entrance to the cemetery at Peñasco, New Mexico (along the High Road to Taos), July 1940, by Russell Lee, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Lee and his wife, Jean, spent two weeks in Chamisal and Peñasco documenting the lives of the towns’ Hispanic small farmers and ranchers. The area was settled by Spanish colonists in the late 18th century.
Hark, hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings…
— William Shakespeare, from Cymbeline
enclos*ure 