Tag: gardening tools

Generations

Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

“Trying to hear,” Wisconsin, May 1973, by David Brill, via U.S. National Archives Commons on flickr.

This photo was taken for DOCUMERICA, an early photography program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). 

From 1972 to 1977, the EPA hired over 100 photographers to “document subjects of environmental concern.” They created an archive of about 20,000 images. In addition to recording damage to the nation’s landscapes, the project captured “the era’s trends, fashions, problems, and achievements,” according to the Archives, which held an exhibit of the photos, “Searching for the Seventies,” in 2013.

Life in gardens: two boys

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Two boys, 1860, NY Public Library“Two boys sitting in a garden,” Orange, New Jersey, ca. 1860, cropped from a stereoscopic view, via Robert Dennis Collection of the New York Public Library.

The boys look a little as if they were sharing a secret joke.

They may have just been working in a garden plot of their own; there’s a cultivated space with a low rustic border on the lower right side.  The boy on the right — with lilacs in his hat — is sitting in a small wheelbarrow, and there’s a child-size shovel or spade beside him.  The other boy has a bunch of lilacs in his hand.

Lilacs, . . .
You are brighter than apples,
Sweeter than tulips,
You are the great flood of our souls
Bursting above the leaf-shapes of our hearts,
You are the smell of all Summers,
The love of wives and children,
The recollection of gardens of little children . . .

— Amy Lowell, from “Lilacs“