Hill Plantation, Wilkes County, Georgia, 1939 or 1944, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
I love the latticework on this old side porch.
Tag: Frances Benjamin Johnston
Vintage landscape: Grey Gardens
While walking along the High Line in New York City last month, I spotted this billboard for a storage company. It made me remember these Library of Congress hand-colored lantern slides by Frances Benjamin Johnston and Mattie Edwards Hewitt.
This was Grey Gardens in 1914 — long before it was made famous by the 1975 documentary.
The walled garden section of the four-acre estate in East Hampton, N.Y., was designed by Anna Gilman Hill and landscape architect Ruth Bramley Dean.
Anna and her husband, Robert Carmer Hill, had purchased the property in 1913. They sold it to Phelan and Edith Bouvier Beale (whose daughter was Little Edie) in 1927.
Hill imported the concrete walls from Spain. She took the name for the house and garden from its environment.
It was truly a gray [sic] garden. The soft gray of the dunes, cement walls and sea mists gave us our color scheme as well as our name… nepeta, stachys, and pinks… clipped bunches of santolina, lavender and rosemary made gray mounds here and there. Only flowers in pale colors were allowed inside the walls, yet the effect was far from insipid….I close my eyes and sense again the scent of those wild roses, the caress of the hot sun on our backs as we sauntered to and fro from our bath and lazy mornings on the beach.
—Anna Gilman Hill, from Forty Years of Gardening
Beyond the property is the Atlantic Ocean. The walled garden was 70′ x 40′.
The estate (now two acres) has been owned by Ben Bradlee (formerly editor-in-chief of The Washington Post) and Sally Quinn since 1979. They have restored both the house and garden.
Now the land between the walled garden and the ocean is filled with newer houses and gardens, and there is a very tall hedge just behind the far wall and the pergola.
The open doorway in the photo above lined up with the pergola. It seems that, at the time of this photo, there was an opening in the garden wall between the house and pergola. But I can’t tell if the opening was there before or after the time of the other photographs.
Vintage landscape: the iris garden
A little Sunday morning prettiness.
The Japanese iris garden at “Grey-Croft” in East Hampton, NY, in 1913, on hand-colored glass lantern slides.
The images are part of the Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
They were taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston and Mattie Edwards Hewitt, when the two photographers worked together. The slides were used by Johnston as part of her garden and historic house lecture series.
The garden — owned at the time of these pictures by Stephen and Emma Cummins — is now part of the Nature Trail and Bird Sanctuary, according to the Library of Congress online catalogue.
Having [divided, planted, fed, and weeded your irises] more or less faithfully, you will be rewarded by spectacular blooms in May. The iris is one of those plants that may as well be spectacularly well grown as not. Properly done — and it is at least as easy as growing tomatoes or corn or roses or things of that sort — the bloom will be so thick you cannot believe it at all, and the colors will be so sparkling and fresh you will jump (as it were) up and down.
They will be, as a rule, in total perfection by May 22, or whenever the year’s major hail and thunderstorm is scheduled.
— Henry Mitchell, from The Essential Earthman
Vintage landscape: beautiful weeds
“Elizabeth’s Hill, Great Mills vic., St. Mary’s County, Maryland,” 1936-37, Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O Let them be left, wildness and wet:
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins, from “Inversnaid”
Mount Vernon’s garden and a Wednesday miscellany
I love this 1902 photograph of the Upper Garden at George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon. It’s so high Colonial Revival.
Early American Gardens has a post this week, “Mount Vernon after George Washington’s death,” with images from the 19th century. While looking at them I remembered the picture above and the two below.
Above is a hand-colored slide from a 1929 aerial photo, part of the lantern slides collection of Frances Benjamin Johnston. The Upper Garden is on the right side.
And here is a general view (c.1910 – 1920) of the the Upper Garden by the Detroit Publishing Co. All three images above via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The 20th century photos are pretty, but they don’t accurately represent the Upper Garden of Washington’s time. In the late 19th century, restorers thought that the boxwood parterres (many filled with hybrid tea roses) were original to Washington’s time, but research in the 1980s found that they were actually planted in the 1860s or 70s (although they may have been rooted from Washington’s boxwood).
The garden was substantially re-worked in 1985 (the greenhouse was restored in the 1950s), but such is the romantic power of a boxwood hedge that they were largely “kept in place by their own mythology and the mythology they supported of Washington as American royalty,” according to The History Blog, here.
By the early 2000s, the boxwoods were dying, so the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which owns the estate, decided to make an extensive (six-year) archaeological dig on the site. This culminated in a “new” (1780s) design in 2011. The area now holds large open beds of vegetables and flowers. They are bordered by low boxwood hedges and centered by a 10′ wide gravel walkway.
You can read about the restoration in this Washington Post article, here. However, I really recommend watching this very interesting 30-minute C-Span video about the research and archaeology that informed it.
Miscellany
I’ve almost finished reading the excellent Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake, 1700 – 1805, by Barbara Wells Sarudy (aka Early American Gardens). You can read its first chapter, about the 18th century garden of Annapolis, Maryland, craftsman William Faris, here.
For Anglophiles: thousands of aerial photos of Great Britain have recently been made available online; read about it here.
I recently found this 2010 (inside) art installation by Beilu Liu, which I think is just lovely, here. It’s called “Red Thread Legend.” (My Pinterest page — link on the right — is red today.)
In 2011, artist and former urban planner, Kathryn Clark, made a series of map quilts, shown here, representing neighborhoods that have had high foreclosure rates in recent years. Earlier this year, she gave an interesting interview with The Atlantic blog, Cities, here.
I also recently found the blog Miss Design Says, about “all good things Danish.” It currently has a post about Rabalder Parken, a park that combines a street skate area with an overflow water drainage system, here.
Of course I saw this on Pinterest: an umbrella that looks like a head of lettuce, here. It’s from Japan, but the link will help you order it from other countries.
I liked this Q & A information on rose hips in the New York Times, here. And I have recently been looking for some good flower frogs, and I found them here, from a tip from Gardenista.
Finally, O-Dark-Thirty, the online literary journal of the Veterans Writing Project, launched in August. The VWP is a 501(c)(3) non-profit based in Washington, D.C. It provides no-cost writing seminars and workshops for veterans, service members, and military family members. Please visit them here.
ADDENDUM: Today, Thursday, Washington Post garden columnist Adrian Higgins discusses boxwood blight, a disease that comes from Europe and has infected shrubs in nine states, here.
enclos*ure 