Tag: parterre

Fontainebleau

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Part of the formal garden of the Château de Fontainebleau, with the Grand Canal barely visible in the distance, Ile-de-France, France, between 1914 and 1925. This is a glass lantern slide by Williams, Brown & Earle, Inc., via Archives of American Gardens, Garden Club of America Collection, Smithsonian Institution (used here by permission).

The Archives holds over 60,000 photos and records documenting 6,300 historic and contemporary American gardens.  At its core are almost 3,000 hand-colored glass lantern and 35mm slides donated by the Garden Club of America, which is the source of this image.

(Click on the picture to enlarge it.)

Blue and silver

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“Château de Dampierre: the château’s façade from the garden side, with a formal parterre garden in the foreground,” Dampierre-en-Yvelines, France, July 8, 1936, a hand-colored glass lantern slide by an unknown photographer, via Archives of American Gardens, Garden Club of America Collection, Smithsonian Institution (used here by permission).

The Archives holds over 60,000 photos and records documenting 6,300 historic and contemporary American gardens.  At its core are almost 3,000 hand-colored glass lantern and 35mm slides donated by the Garden Club of America, which is the source of this image.

(Click on the picture to enlarge it.)

Madison, Georgia

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The parterre, viewed from the porch of “Boxwood” (Kolb-Pou-Newton House), Madison, Georgia, June 1936, by L. D. Andrew for an Historic American Building Survey (HABS), via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (all three photos).

‘Parterre’ means ‘on the ground’ (par terre) in French.

The other side of the house, looking down from second-story window.

A parterre is a garden of planting beds laid out on level ground, typically in geometric patterns, often outlined in clipped boxwood.

This house was built about 1845; its garden was laid out about 1854. A 1935 HABS drawing of its parterres, front and back, is here.

There are more photos of the garden in this 2007 article in Garden and Gun.

The Sunday porch: Hill End

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“Two women on veranda of rendered* cottage with shingle roof and front garden, Hill End, New South Wales, ca. 1872,” by Charles Bayliss, via National Library of Australia Commons on flickr.

Hill End was a gold rush town. At the time of this photo, “it had a population estimated at 8,000 served by two newspapers, five banks, eight churches, and twenty-eight pubs,” according to Wikipedia. The rush was over by the early 20th century. In 2006, the town was down to 166 people.

The photographer came to Hill End as an assistant to a traveling photographer who had been contracted to take pictures of the area that could be used to advertise the mining colony and attract new residents.

*Render is stucco.

Mount Vernon

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A repeat “Vintage” from 2012. . .

I love this 1902 photograph of the Upper Garden at George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon. It’s so high Colonial Revival.

Early American Gardens has a post this week,  “Mount Vernon after George Washington’s death,” with images from the 19th century.  While looking at them I remembered the picture above and the two below.

Above is a hand-colored slide from a 1929 aerial photo, part of the lantern slides collection of Frances Benjamin Johnston.  The Upper Garden is on the right side.

And here is a general view (c.1910 – 1920) of the the Upper Garden by the Detroit Publishing Co.  All three images above via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The 20th century photos are pretty, but they don’t accurately represent the Upper Garden of Washington’s time.  In the late 19th century, restorers thought that the boxwood parterres (many filled with hybrid tea roses) were original to Washington’s time, but research in the 1980s found that they were actually planted in the 1860s or 70s (although they may have been rooted from Washington’s boxwood).

The garden was substantially re-worked in 1985, but such is the romantic power of a boxwood hedge that the mid-19th century bushes were largely “kept in place by their own mythology and the mythology they supported of Washington as American royalty,” according to The History Blog, here.

But by the early 2000s, those boxwoods were dying, so the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which owns the estate, decided to make an extensive (six-year) archaeological dig on the site.  This culminated in a “new” (1780s) design in 2011.  The area now holds large open beds of vegetables and flowers.  They are bordered by low boxwood hedges and centered by a 10′ wide gravel walkway.

You can read about the restoration in this Washington Post article, here.  And I really recommend watching this very interesting 30-minute C-Span video about the research and archaeology that informed it.

(There’s more about the garden in 2017 here.)