Tag: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Vintage landscape: the iris garden

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A little Sunday morning prettiness.

Japanese iris garden in East Hampton, NY/Library of Congress

The Japanese iris garden at “Grey-Croft” in East Hampton, NY, in 1913, on hand-colored glass lantern slides.

Grey-Croft, Library of Congress

The images are part of the Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Grey-Croft, Library of Congress

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.

Grey-Croft, Library of Congress

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.

Grey-Croft, Library of Congress

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: nice March day

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March 10, 1926, game between Republicans and Democrats of House, via Library of Congress
. . . for a baseball match between the Republican and Democratic teams of the House of Representatives, March 10, 1926, presumably in Washington, D.C.

I like it that they are all playing in suits and ties.

Photo via National Photo Company Collection of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

— Charles Dickens, from Great Expectations

Vintage landscape: all our joy

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Crude seeing’s all our joy. . .*

HABS photoMount Ephraim, Chincoteague Bay Vicinity, Worcester County, Maryland.  Photo taken 1940, by D. H. Smith for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

*by  John Frederick Nims, from “Blind Joy.”

Vintage landscape: tranquility

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Tranquilly, by Eleanor Butler Roosevelt

The photo shows Tranquility, the rented summer home of the Theodore Roosevelt family at Oyster Bay Cove, New York, in 1872. The photographer is unknown.

Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt — the parents of future President Theodore Roosevelt — lounge on the verandah; Edith Kermit Carow (later Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt) and Corinne Roosevelt are on the lawn. The house was demolished in the mid-1940s.

The picture is from scrapbooks Eleanor Butler Roosevelt, daughter-in-law of the President, via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

. . .   so sweet as drowsy noons,
And evenings steep’d in honey’d indolence;
O, for an age so shelter’d from annoy,
That I may never know how change the moons,
Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!

— John Keats, from “Ode on Indolence“

January reading

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Happy 2013!

January WPA posterA silkscreen poster of  the Illinois WPA Art Project (ca. 1936 – 1941), via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

On my nightstand for January reading:

Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City by Dan Pearson.  His city garden is the best example of what I want for our Washington, D.C., garden when we return.

Illustrated History of Landscape Design by Elizabeth Boults and Chip Sullivan

The American Meadow Garden by John Greenlee and Beautiful N0-Mow Yards by Evelyn J. Hadden

The City Shaped:  Urban Patterns and Meaning Through History by Spiro Kostof

Color by Design:  Planting the Contemporary Garden by Nori and Sandra Pope

The New Perennial Garden by Noël Kingsbury

— none particularly new, but indications of my current interests.

I just finished re-reading Peter Martin’s The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia:  From Jamestown to Jefferson.  I recommend it — along with Barbara Wells Sarudy’s Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake, 1700 – 1805 — if you garden in the U.S. mid-Atlantic.  Martin is particularly good on Mount Vernon and Monticello and on Jefferson’s changing enthusiasms and false starts.  (Martin and Sarudy differ somewhat on the extent of the influence of the English landscape garden style in 18th century America.)

(I also love Fergus M. Bordewich’s Washington: The Making of the American Capital for landscape/city planning history.)

Right now I’m really taken with the Game of Thrones books (I know, I’m behind the trend; I’m in Rwanda.)  I’m thinking of making the jump to an e-reader this month and then loading on the second book (aka Season Two) to watch in February.  I also want Hillary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies soon (I had to re-read Wolf Hall last month first — it’s so good).

What are your plans for winter reading?