Long Island, New York

“Unidentified Garden in Long Island, New York,” 1930, a hand-colored glass lantern slide by an unknown photographer, via Archives of American Gardens, J. Horace McFarland Company Collection, Smithsonian Institution (used by permission).

Thoughts of summer. . . we woke up to snow this morning in Stuttgart.

The Archives of American Gardens holds over 60,000 photos and records documenting 6,300 historic and contemporary American gardens. Among them are over 3,100 black and white photographs and 445 glass lantern slides from the J. Horace McFarland Company, from the years 1900 to 1962. The firm printed nursery catalogs, horticultural books, and trade publications.

McFarland was an author and horticulturist, as well as a publisher. He also became an important proponent of environmental conservation and the City Beautiful movement.

The Sunday porch: Eastpoint, Florida

Mr. and Mrs J. C. Williams on their porch, Eastpoint, Florida, ca. 1900, via Brown Family Collection, Florida Memory Commons on flickr.

The Williams were among six families who settled on a peninsula called Eastpoint, across the bay from Apalachicola, Florida, in 1898. The group called itself the Co-Workers’ Fraternity, and together the members pursued philosophical and religious study and farmed and ran seafood and lumber businesses. Land was individually owned, but profits were shared.