market gardens – enclos*ure

Upper Hutt, Wellington

February 26, 2018February 26, 2018 Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

“Mrs B Captain, Ekins and garden, Savage Crescent,” Upper Hutt, New Zealand, ca. early to mid 20th c., by J.W. Chapman-Taylor, via Museum of New Zealand/Te Papa Tongarewa.

I wonder if the wooden crates stacked up on the left indicate that this was a market garden, which were common in the Hutt Valley until the 1940s.

You can click on the picture to enlarge it (or click here and then on the image to zoom in even more).

Chapman-Taylor was an important New Zealand domestic architect, builder, furniture designer, and photographer who lived in the Valley in the mid 1930s.

Dawson, Yukon

February 21, 2018February 21, 2018 Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

G. M. Woodworth’s beet garden, 8th Avenue, Dawson, Yukon, date and photographer unknown, via Library and Archives Canada on flickr (used under CC license).

Dawson was founded in 1896 and was the center of the Klondike Gold Rush. It became a city of 40,000 people in only two years. By 1899, however, the rush was over and the number dropped to 8,000. Today, about 1,300 people live there.

The region has a subarctic climate, and the town is built on a layer of frozen earth. The average temperature in July is 60.3 °F (15.7 °C) and in January is −14.8 °F (−26.0 °C).

I wonder if the picture above was one of a few photos taken that day. The woman (Mrs. Woodworth ?) is carrying a cushion. Perhaps she meant to sit or kneel down among the beet leaves for another image.

The family would have had reason to show off its garden. At the turn of the 20th century and for decades afterward, fresh vegetables were in high demand and brought good prices.

In 1896, when gold was discovered in the Klondike River drainage, there was no time to farm, and the population . . . relied on supplies shipped up the Yukon River.

But in 1897-98, serious experimentation began. . . . Market gardens were established around Dawson, on the banks of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers, and on various islands in the Klondike. Even so, the supply of fresh vegetables was limited and there were many cases of scurvy in Dawson in 1898.

But by the next year there were a dozen market gardens selling vegetables in Dawson City. . . . Farms were small, about four or five acres, or just the right size to be worked by two men.

The yield from these small acreages was impressive. The Fox and Daum farms, both on Klondike Island, produced between them thousands of pounds of potatoes, celery, cabbage, turnips, cauliflower and cucumbers, plus radishes, greens and lettuce.

At Sunnydale Slough John Charlais harvested 1,000 cauliflowers. One of his cabbages weighed 30 pounds and spread its leaves five feet in diameter, and he displayed it proudly in Dawson.

— from “Constant Gardeners: The Early Days of Yukon Agriculture,” Yukon News.

Quai d’Auteuil, Paris

January 30, 2017August 20, 2017 Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

The little vegetable gardens near pont Mirabeau, behind quai d’Auteuil (now quai Louis-Blériot), Paris, on May 30, 1928, by Auguste Léon, via Collection Archives of the Planet – Albert Kahn Museum/Département des Hauts-de-Seine.

The Auteuil wharf or quai, next to the Seine River, was situated at the top of the sandy-looking embankment on the right side above (also see here, third photo). Then there was a drop down to the gardens, and, on the left, Avenue de Versailles was at the top of the wall (I think). In the distance, you can see the Eiffel Tower and before it, a little to the right, the small Paris replica of the Statue of Liberty at the southwest end of the Île aux Cygnes.

There’s another view here (the 15th photo down). The area was filled in and covered by the highway Voie George Pompidou and modern apartment buildings in the 1960s.

This lovely autochrome is one of about seventy-two thousand that were commissioned and then archived from 1909 to 1931 by French banker and pacifist Albert Kahn. He sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to 50 countries “to fix, once and for all, aspects, practices, and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is no longer ‘a matter of time.'”* The resulting collection is called Archives de la Planète and now resides in its own museum at Kahn’s old suburban estate at Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris. Since June 2016, the archive has also been available for viewing online here.

*words of Albert Kahn, 1912. The above photo (A 54766) is © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.

On the Champ de Mars

April 23, 2012April 13, 2016 Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

When we visited Paris in the first days of spring, the edges of the pleached trees on the Champ de Mars were still razor sharp.

Located between the Eiffel Tower and the Ecole Militaire, the park was named for the Campus Martius — ‘Mars Field’ — in ancient Rome, which was dedicated to the god of war. (Click any photo to enlarge it.)

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the lawns were used for military marching and drilling. They were opened to the public just before the French revolution.

In the 16th century, the space had been part of an area was called Grenelle and was set aside for market gardening plots.

The trees are London plane trees, Platinus x acerifolia (or x hispanica). In France, they are called platane à feuille d’érable (maple leaf plane tree).