Blandfield garden, Caret, Virginia, 1935, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (both photos).
Caret, Virginia
Tag: Frances Benjamin Johnston
Wreathed
“Woman with wreath of leaves in her hair sitting in a field of daisies,” ca. 1900, photographer unknown, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
This photo was part of a large group of “artistic photographs,” primarily by early women photographers, that was donated to the Library of Congress by Frances Benjamin Johnston. In the spring of 1900, she had used some of these images in an exhibition of work by American women photographers at the Exposition Universelle Internationale in Paris.
The Sunday porch: Dallas, North Carolina
Mason House, near Dallas, North Carolina, 1938, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
A narrow porch for a narrow house. I think those are cannas at the bases of the columns.
This picture was published in The Early Architecture of North Carolina by Johnston and Thomas Tileston Waterman in 1941, but I can’t find out anything else about the building.
The Sunday porch: Montgomery, Alabama
“Early dwelling, 222 S. Perry St.,” Montgomery, Alabama, 1939, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
A huge vine is growing beside the steps, but it seems to go up into the tree on the left, rather than onto the porch.
The sidewalk is tiled in a simple geometric pattern. The effect, with the arches of the porch and basement windows, is a little Moroccan/Andalusian.
The house no longer stands.
Englewood, New Jersey
“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.
enclos*ure 