In a vase on Monday: tulips

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I love tulips better than any other spring flower; they are the embodiment of alert cheerfulness and tidy grace. . . .

― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

To see what other garden bloggers have put in a vase today, please visit Cathy at Rambling in the Garden.

The Sunday porch: Detroit Lakes

Fairyland Cottages, West Lake Lane, Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, 1980, by John Margolies, via John Margolies Roadside America archive, Library of Congress Commons on flickr.

The twelve cabins were built in 1938, modeled (roughly) after the cottage in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. They were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. Unfortunately, this did not protect them from demolition in 2008 — burned by the fire department in a training exercise. There are two condominium buildings on the site now.

Parc de Bagatelle, Paris

A re-post from 2013. . .
Bagatelle/enclos*ure Strolling in Bagatelle Park, Paris, France, ca. 1920, 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).

(Click on the picture to enlarge it.)

The park has been a botanical garden inside the Bois de Boulogne since 1905. Today, it’s best known for its over 9,000 rose bushes. The land was originally laid out in 1777 in a fashionable Anglo-Chinois style as a garden for the Chateau de Bagatelle — built by the Count of Artois in only 64 days as part of a bet with Marie Antoinette.

Another well-dressed lady in the same garden, also ca. 1920, an autochrome by an unknown photographer, via Photographic Heritage on flickr (under CC license).

The Archives of American Gardens (top image) 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.

Écardenville-sur-Eure

Cross and coquelicots, Écardenville-sur-Eure, Normandy, France, June 30, 1920, by Georges Chevalier, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine.

This autochrome is one of about seventy-two thousand that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker and pacifist, between 1909 and 1931. Kahn sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to fifty 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. Also, the above photo (A 22 388) is © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.