We’re off to Rwanda at the end of this week, so enclos*ure will be on a little break — I hope not for too long.
Please check in with me from time to time. I’ll also be watching for any new comments and checking my Blotanical page.
Thanks to everyone who’s been following this blog since I started in June. I really appreciate your interest. I look forward to being back with you soon.
Is anything more poignant than an old graveyard?
Mt. Zion Cemetery is tucked behind the apartment buildings and townhouses of the 2500 block of Q Street, NW, at the edge of Georgetown. I often pass it on my bus ride home. On Wednesday, as I was walking home after the earthquake, I stopped to take a closer look.
The burial ground covers about 3 acres. Many of the headstones have fallen or have been moved over time and are now consolidated into a few groupings. The grass is neatly cut and trimmed around the stones, but there are no flowers or other plantings. The woods of the Rock Creek Park trail surround the cemetery to the north and east.
What I suspected as I looked around — later confirmed by some online research — was that Mt. Zion was an old African-American cemetery, a reminder of the time (from the 1700s until the 1950s) when Georgetown had a large Black population.
Beginning in 1809, the cemetery’s western side was used by the Mongomery Street Church for the burials of its white members and their slaves, as well as of free African-American members. It was known as the Old Methodist Burying Ground, and its largest monument marks the graves of the white Beck and Doughty families. It was a biracial cemetery for a biracial (but not equal status) church while slaves were still being sold in Georgetown.
Old Methodist fell into disuse after Oak Hill Cemetery, located just to the west and north, was founded in 1849. In 1879, the plot was leased for 99 years by Mt. Zion Methodist Church, the oldest African-American church in Washington.
The east side of the cemetery had already been purchased in 1842 by a local cooperative benevolent association of Black women and had become the Female Union Band Graveyard for the burial of free Blacks.
For decades, both cemeteries were well maintained, but eventually lack of funds led to disrepair, and the last burials were held in 1950.
In the late 1960s, the cemeteries were threatened with removal of the graves for development. Various local groups and individuals worked together to save them, and, in 1975, they were declared a Historical Landmark of Washington, D.C., and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
There’s a complete history of Mt. Zion Cemetery by Pauline Gaskins Mitchell in the appendix of the 1991 book Black Georgetown Remembered, which can be read at this link. The complete book can be purchased at Amazon.
ADDENDUM: “A 2 Georgetown Cemeteries, History in Black and White,” New York Times, October 21, 2016, here.
I love to see rows of pollarded trees in French squares and courtyards. The quality of light and shade they produce, the formal rhythm of their trunks, and the sculptural qualities of their branches and old “knuckles” have a timeless beauty for me.
Pollarded trees aren’t common in the United States, so I was surprised and delighted when I walked into the lovely, serene courtyard of Meridian House on Friday morning.
Meridian House in Northwest D.C. (just a stone’s throw from Meridian Hill Park on 16th Street) is home to the Meridian International Center. Since 1960, the Center’s mission has been to advance American public and cultural diplomacy efforts. It manages international visitor exchanges, holds cultural exhibitions, and hosts conferences and seminars.
I was able to see it — and the garden — last week, when I attended a seminar on Rwanda.
The house, built in 1920 as the home of diplomat Irwin Boyle Laughlin, was designed by architect John Russell Pope, who also designed the Jefferson Memorial, the National Gallery, and the National Archives. The style of the house, both inside and out, is neoclassical and French.
The rectangular courtyard just outside the house’s reception rooms is paved in pea gravel and canopied by 40 pollarded linden trees, which were imported from Europe when the house was built (more links on pollarding are here and here and here).
The side garden has a large lawn and planting beds bordered in pink and white impatiens. The design of both areas is largely original to the house.
Not surprisingly, Meridian House is one of the outstanding wedding venues of Washington, D.C.
To see more photos of the courtyard and garden, click on “Continue reading” below and click on the thumbnails in the gallery to enlarge them.
If you’ve been reading this blog awhile, you’ve probably realized that I love anything old and contorted. (No, I’m not going to make you look at any more 200-year-old boxwoods.)
So, of course, I wanted to share my photos of two lovely old Katsura trees (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) at Dumbarton Oaks at the edge of the East Lawn.
Just for fun, here’s an entertaining little video (well, I thought so) of the staff of the New York Botanical Garden moving a mature weeping Katsura tree last fall. It first appeared on the NYBG’s blog, Plant Talk.
Dumbarton Oak Gardens is currently hosting Easy Rider by the sculptor Patrick Dougherty. The installation is in the Ellipse, a large oval space rimmed by an aerial hedge of pruned hornbeams and anchored by a center Provençal fountain.
Dougherty works in woven saplings, and his sculptures evoke ancient rustic architecture, as well as nests, haystacks, and baskets.
He describes the Dumbarton Oaks work “as ‘running figures,’ or twisted architectural elements, that rise into the trees and pursue each other actively and gracefully around the Ellipse.”*
Each element can be seen as a building or house with a doorway and window. Each is just wide enough for an adult to stand in. They are like sentry or guard houses. If I anthropomorphize them, as the artist does himself, I would say they make me think of storybook soldiers running or even dancing. They also seem to reference magical landscapes a la Lord of the Rings, yet they are not twee.
In an interview with The Washington Post last August, Dougherty said, “I was really thinking about how the natural world has been conscripted as manmade architecture. You don’t think about nature as being staid or over-organized, you think of it as having a life of its own. But there, they’re pruning it and fixing it up like a big living room. My idea was to throw that off kilter and bring in a natural force.”
While the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens are primarily the work of Beatrix Farrand, Alden Hopkins, who worked on the gardens at Williamsburg and the University of Virginia, also contributed to the design of the Ellipse. The admittedly formal, rather static space is a nice blend of old and modern forms. With “Easy Rider,” the contrast between the brown sapling branches and the green leaves is striking. I imagine that it will be lovely in October when the leaves start to turn.
The Dumbarton Oaks installation took a team of volunteers 21 days and a variety of saplings (chiefly maples) to complete. You can see volunteers working on a similar installation at DePauw University at this link. Dougherty has built over 200 of these large works all over the world.
Melissa Clark, in her blog, Garden Shoots, wrote about the Easy Rider installation last September and posted some pictures of its construction. Her blog also has a post about another Dougherty sculpture, The Summer Palace.
Easy Rider will remain through Fall 2011 (the brochure does not give an end date). The gardens (at R and 31st Streets, N.W.) are open daily (except Mondays) from 2-6 p.m. General admission is $8.
*Installation brochure.
To see more photos, click on “Continue reading” below and then click on any of the thumbnails in the gallery to enlarge. Continue reading “A “natural force” at Dumbarton Oaks”
enclos*ure 