The finishing touch. . .
Schoolchildren’s victory gardens on 1st Avenue between 35th and 36th Streets, New York City, June 1944, by Edward Meyer for U.S. Office of War Information, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (all photos here).
The first taste.
The location was St. Gabriel’s Park at the time of the photos. It is now called St. Vartan Park.
Please click on any of the thumbnails below to see a few more pictures of this garden.
A group of children with flowers in the cloister of San Zeno, Verona, Italy, May 10, 1918, by Fernand Cuville, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine.
Tradition has it that the crypt of San Zeno is where Romeo married Juliet.
The autochrome above is one of about seventy-two thousand that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker and pacifist, between 1909 and 1931. Kahn sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to fifty 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.
*words of Albert Kahn, 1912. Also, the above photo (A 19 474) is © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.
Lady Henry Somerset and T.P. O’Connor in a garden distributing cabbages to children, between ca. 1910 and ca. 1915, Bain News Service, via Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Lady Henry (born Lady Isabel Cocks) was an heiress who married the second son of the Duke of Beaufort. After the couple separated, she turned to charity work on her various properties. She later became president of the British Women’s Temperance Association and a campaigner for birth control and women’s suffrage. In 1913, the readers of the London Evening News voted her their choice for first female prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Thomas Power O’Connor was an Irish journalist who founded and edited several newspapers in London. He was also a member of Parliament for the Irish Nationalist Party and later as an independent (representing Galway and then Liverpool).
I cannot tell what plants are growing in the flower (?) beds, but they are sectioned off — perhaps by bloom color?
Mary and Sandy Lee (daughters of the photographer) cleaning the porch, Mountain Park, Alberta, 1935, by Charles Lee, via Provincial Archives of Alberta Commons on flickr.
Cleaning should probably be in quotation marks. I think their mom was in the house having some quiet time.
The girls’ father, Charles Lee, emigrated from England to Mountain Park, Alberta, in 1919. There, he worked for the coal mine as a delivery person, steam engineer, and watchman. He also became a photographer and created postcards of Mountain Park. The mine closed in 1950, and the Lee family moved on. Mountain Park is now a ghost town.
“Safety first for this Miss, Washington, D.C.[,] August 8[, 1936]. Equipped with bumpers fore and aft, 4-year-old Betty Buck is taking [no] unnecessary chances as she tries her first pair of roller skates.” Photo and caption by Harris & Ewing, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
enclos*ure 
