Tag: bench

Englewood, New Jersey

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“Beechgate,” Englewood, New Jersey, 1918, a hand-colored glass lantern slide by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Some mid-week prettiness. . . . The four-acre garden was designed by Anna Gilman Hill about 1911.

Hill and her husband also owned “Grey Gardens,” the East Hampton estate later famously inhabited by Edith Bouvier Beale and “Little Edie.” She was Director of the Garden Club of America for six years in the 1920s, and, in 1938, she wrote a book about her gardening life, called Forty Years of Gardening. You can read it online here.

My mother’s garden

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Wordless Wednesday pictures from an August 2012 post. . .

Northern Virginia, August 2011.

Click on any thumbnail below and enjoy.

The garden and view from the patio on the first of three terraces. A small pond is hidden by the arbor.
The view from the pond. The area is planted with lamb’s ear (Stachys byzantina), Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia), and a bright green small creeping sedum. You can also see the spent stalks of naked lady lilies (Lycoris squamigera) and some irises.
The arbor, built by my father, holds Clematis montana. In the foreground is beautyberry, Hellebores, and wild violets. The center holly has been limbed up by the deer. My father also built the stone retaining walls, using stone from the woods. On the top terrace (hidden by the arbor) is a patio area covered by a pergola.
Clear filament protects Viburnums and Hostas. The dark green plants in the background are Hellebores.
Hellebores border a path from the woods to the pond.
The pond.
A tall persimmon tree and a perennial bed that covers the site of an old sinkhole. Beyond is the old Christmas tree farm.
The view of distant mountains.
Sophie hunts in the Miscanthus; a grove of persimmon trees is in the background.
A birdhouse surrounded by Buddleia, goldenrod, and Miscanthus.
View from the house.
Looking down from the top terrace level and pergola.
My grandparent’s garden chairs.
“Tread lightly.”
Stepping stones with the imprints of grandchildren’s hands and feet.
The holly over the bench was limbed up by the deer.
Lichens on the bench.
A high fence protects the vegetable garden.
We brought this sculpture made from old auto parts back from Niger.

Life in gardens: tea and talk

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“Picnic-style tea ceremony,” Japan, ca. 1900, a hand-colored postcard, via The New York Public Library.

It may be a “ceremony,” but I think it’s more likely an informal bite to eat after a long walk under the cherry blossoms — with lots of conversation.

Life in gardens: Aoyama

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Ecole d'Aoyama, enfants et balançoires, Tôkyô, Japon, été 1926, (Autochrome, 9 x 12 cm), Roger Dumas, Département des Hauts-de-Seine, musée Albert-Kahn, Archives de la Planète, A 55 945 XA very nice playground at a school in Aoyama, a neighborhood of Tokyo, summer 1926, by Roger Dumas, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine.

This autochrome is one of about 72,000 that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker who was committed to the ideal of universal peace and believed that “knowledge of foreign cultures encourages respect and peaceful relations between nations.”* He was also acutely aware that the 20th century was going to bring rapid material change to the world.

Accordingly, from 1909 to 1931, Kahn sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to 50 countries “to fix, once and for all, aspects, practices, and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is no longer ‘a matter of time.'”†  The resulting collection is called Archives de la Planète and now resides in its own museum at Kahn’s old suburban estate at Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris. Since June 2016, the archive has also been available for viewing online here.

*Collections Albert Kahn website. Also, the above photo (A 55 945 X) is © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.
†words of Albert Kahn, 1912.

Life in gardens: the nap

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Woman taking nap in D.C. Botanical Garden, 1942, Library of Congress“Washington, D.C. Government employee taking a nap on a bench in the [U.S. Botanic] Garden,” September 1942, by John Ferrell, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.