Strelitzia reginae or bird of paradise.
A walk around a Kigali nursery
Green Passion plant nursery — which I visited yesterday — has beautiful, healthy plants and knowledgable owners who speak French and English.
It’s located on Avenue du Lac Kivu in Kigali, Rwanda.
You can scroll through larger images by clicking on ‘Continue reading’ below.
Vintage landscape: spring rain
“Sidewalk in front of White House, Washington, D.C.,” early 1920s, by Harris & Ewing, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Whan that Aprill with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour. . .
— Geoffrey Chaucer, from “The General Prologue” of The Canterbury Tales
Translation: April showers bring May flowers.
Today is Whan that Aprille Day — a day to enjoy “alle langages that are yclept ‘old,’ or ‘middel,’ or ‘auncient,’ or ‘archaic,’ or, alas, even ‘dead.’” This is the idea of @LeVostreGC (or Chaucer Doth Tweet), who blogs at Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog.
The Sunday porch: Gothic Revival anyone?
Entrance porch of the Peter Neff Cottage, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio. Photo taken 1951 by Perry E. Borchers for an Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Another 1951 photo of the porch, also by Perry E. Borchers for the HABS (cropped by me).
The HABS report for this house said it “may be the finest example of Gothic Revival cottage style and wood detail in Ohio.” It was built about 1860 for Peter Neff, a co-inventor of the tintype and an alumnus and benefactor of Kenyon College.
All was not happy in this charming abode, however. Neff quarreled with nearby Kenyon over the bells of the campus’s Church of the Holy Spirit, “which he claimed had driven him to the brink of nervous collapse,” according to the Historic Campus Architecture Project.
“Place yourself and family in my location, about seven hundred feet distant,” he wrote in a 19-page open letter. “How would you like this ding dong every fifteen minutes? . . . [It is] machinery wearing out flesh and blood to those who have any nerves. It is too much bell-ringing . . . it is a sickening nuisance.”
Neff finally moved away from the campus and its bells in 1888.
The house is now named Clifford* Place and is the residence of the Dean of Students.
*The name of one of Neff’s daughters.
Life in gardens: Jackson, Mississippi
“View of a scene in Jackson, Mississippi,” c. 1869, probably taken by Elisaeus von Seutter.
Below are detail views.
This is another photo from the E. von Seutter Photograph Collection of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History — 35 stereocards and 48 photographs of Jackson after the Civil War assembled by the von Seutter family. Most were taken by Elisaeus and his son, Armine.
There are also more images of Ivy Cottage (from Tuesday’s post) after ‘Continue reading’ below.
Continue reading “Life in gardens: Jackson, Mississippi”
enclos*ure 