The Sunday porch: The Appletrees

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“The Appletrees,” Henry Eugene and Eva Johnston Coe house, Southampton (on Long Island), New York, 1914, by Frances Benjamin Johnston,* via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The porch of this 19th century “cottage” is actually an arbor — covered, I believe, in grape vines.  The flower-filled boxwood parterre immediately surrounding the house ends rather abruptly in country fields and woods.

I haven’t been able to discover much about the property and its owners:  Mrs. Coe co-authored a book on American embroidery samplers, and Mr. Coe was evidently considered an arbiter of social acceptance for the wealthy Southampton of his time. He signified who was in and who was out by issuing (or not) invitations to his annual dinner at The Appletrees (or The Apple Trees).

I could not find out whether the house still exists.

This hand-colored glass lantern slide was used by Johnston in her  garden and historic house lectures.


*Photographed when Frances Benjamin Johnston and Mattie Edwards Hewitt worked together.

ADDENDUM, October 2018: A kind reader who lives in Southampton just wrote to me and confirmed that the Coe house no longer exists.

“The last time I was on the property was in the 1960’s. It was a beautiful house and had wonderful out buildings, one of which was a large 2 story barn which was located near the property line that abutted the Catholic Church to the south. The horses were stabled below and the men were housed above.”

Tuinhuis garden

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The tuinhuis or ‘garden house’ (shown in the fifth slide above)  is a small cafe on the grounds of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

The surrounding garden was a very pretty place to rest after a long ramble around parts of the city center and the Museumplein, during a one-day travel stopover last week.

About half the area is composed of wide gravel paths around a simple boxwood parterre — which is filled with cottage annuals like variegated nasturtium and lime green flowering tobacco.

On the other side, white marble (I think) outlines the narrow planting beds.  Currently, you can see a free exhibition of Calder sculptures in the garden, as well.

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Vondelpark sandbox

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I really like this elegant sandbox/labyrinth arrangement in a corner of Amsterdam’s Vondelpark (spotted during a recent 24-hour stopover in the city).

I think the hedges are hornbeam supported from within by wires and posts.

There’s a brief history of the sandbox here, in the blog Playscapes.

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Life in gardens: Kew tea house

Kew Garden tea hse burned, LoC“Tea House, Kew Gardens,* burned by suffragettes,” February 1913, by Bain News Service, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Twelve days earlier, Kew’s orchid house had been attacked, although much less seriously: a window was broken and some specimens were destroyed.

There was £900 of damage to the tea house building.  Unfortunately, the owners — two women — had only insured it for £500.

Olive Wharry and Lilian Lenton, of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), were arrested on the night of the attack and later sentenced to 18 months each in Holloway prison. Both were released early after going on hunger strikes.

WSPU members also used acid to burn the words “votes for women” into the greens of golf courses.


*Located 10 miles west of central London, U.K.