A porch in 1941 Mobile and Sunday miscellany

I love this quiet photo: “Porch of old house at Monroe St., Mobile[, Alabama],” taken November 4, 1941, by Charles W. Cushman.

Used with the permission of  the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection of the Indiana University Archives.  Please do not “pin” or re-blog without contacting them here.

Miscellany

This post on Gardenista is about houses painted black, but I like the way all of them are incorporated into their natural landscapes.  

And GardenHistoryGirl has an interesting post on what we mean when we talk about ‘natural’ and  “beautiful nature.”

From her post, I learned that you can read the entire book The Wild Garden by William Robinson online  here at Google Books.

Please take a look at View from Federal Twist’s fall photos of the Federal Twist garden — just gorgeous.

Jean’s Garden explains here why your favorite plant may have had one name last year and has another today.

Kigali has gone into billboards in a big way in the last few years.  I wonder if it may eventually be building these too (see here too).

Zoe Tilley Poster of Pearled Earth is now selling her beautiful illustrations at her new Etsy shop here.

Francophiles can catch up on gardening news from France at Our Grumpy Gardener, a blog of French News Online.  If you’ve already starting to think about Christmas, the blog Réparons & Re-Parons Noël has good ideas for handmade decorations.

If you would like to see more of the photographs of Charles W. Cushman, click here for a series of images of New York City in the early 1940s.

A dachterrasse and Friday miscellany

I recently discovered the beautiful German blog Gartenblick  (Garden View) by Dusseldorf photographer Sibylle Pietrek.

I particularly liked this post about her small, but really lovely, roof terrace (dachterrace).  I was impressed that the designer  — Karim Rashid — could achieve a real sense of an edge of a meadow (with a lounge chair) in so few square feet.

In her post, Sibylle writes that she uses the space for “early evening aperitif, photo shoots, painting, reading, and painting nails.” And to catch the long autumn afternoon sun.  What a nice refuge.

I’m starting to  think about the possibilities for the flat porch roof of our house back in D.C. . . .

All the above photos: ©Sibylle Pietrek, used here with permission.  Please check her blog before pinning or sharing.

Miscellany

Please check out Garden Rant’s review of October annuals at the Smithsonian Institution’s gardens.  Again, why are the S.I. gardens so wonderful and its neighbor, the White House, has this?

Have you seen the online Landscape Architect’s Guide to Washington, D.C., featuring write-ups by 20 L.A.s on 75 historic and contemporary landscapes?  I wish it were somewhat more opinionated (see above), but it’s useful for a visit to the Capital.

The Global Garden,” the weekly series of the Los Angeles Times’s home and garden blog, explores “multicultural L.A. through the lens of its landscapes.”  Now it has created a library of its posts, here. In the last year, the series has looked at sugar cane, shiso, loquat, purslane, moringa, sweet lemon, ice cream bean, and more. It will continue to update the archive with new material.

I really like this garden by the firm Covachita in San Pedro, Mexico (I believe it’s their studio).  It effectively combines edgy modern urban with antique farm.

The “Urban Jungle” columns by Patterson Clark in The Washington Post are always so interesting, especially this recent one about milkweed (Asclepias syriaca — the light pink one).  If yours left pods and white fluff all over your garden in September, consider how — during World War II — you (or your enterprising child) could have been paid about 15¢ a bushel for them.  The Japanese occupation of Java had cut off supplies of kapok — a fiber (then) needed to fill life vests.

ADDENDUM: I clicked on ‘publish’ and then found one more. I have to admit I love this sort of thing.

Vintage landscape: Alabama porch and yard

“Typical farmhouse, spring housecleaning, homemade quilts and bedding in sun. Coffee County, Alabama.” Photo taken April 1939 by Marion Post Wolcott.

Via Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black and White Negatives Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Vintage landscape: the sleeping porch


A sleeping porch was added to the roof of the White House during the Taft Administration. Photo by National Photo Company, via Library of Congress.

Click here to read more about sleeping porches.