“. . . standing on road in (cemetery) garden [in Japan]; large flowering cherry trees, evergreens and stone monuments,” ca. 1910, a hand-tinted glass-plate slide, via University of Victoria Libraries Commons on flickr (both photos).
(Click on the images to enlarge them.)
A commenter on the flickr page thought this was the pathway to the Kasuga Shrine in Nara.
“Group of deer feeding on lawn in wooded garden; stone monuments and summer house in mid-ground.”
Yesterday was chilly, damp, and brown. Today, it’s warm and sunny, and I found primroses in the woods.
Wagtail smart in his belted blue,
Primrose paying her gold ere due,—
(Out upon Winter! Down with Sorrow!)
These are the things that I know are true.— Louise Imogen Guiney, from “Firstlings“
“Planting a garden in the backyard, Woodbine, Iowa,” May 1940, by John Vachon, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (both photos here).
In the spring of 1940, John Vachon was on assignment for the Farm Security Administration in the Midwest.
. . . I photographed Spring – clothes blowing on the wash line, kids playing marbles, women planting backyard gardens, blossoms on trees.
— John Vachon’s journal
Woodbine is a town of about 1,400 people on the Boyer River. It was named for the woodbine vine (Parthenocissus vitacea) by the wife of the first postmaster, according to the community’s website.
I had an odd January and February. Ever since we returned from our Christmas vacation, I’ve had very little interest in working in the garden, and I’ve been fascinated by the cold and snow back home in Washington, D.C.
The weather here in Kigali has been its usual just-about-perfect, but except for a couple of nice trips out of town, I haven’t wanted to be out in it that much.
I know those of you who live in North America and Europe will probably not have any sympathy for me, but gardening in a climate where it’s constantly late spring is relentless. . . and I think I was tired. So I did the same thing all of you are doing (although not by choice): I curled up inside with T.V., books, and the internet.
But now it’s March, and I’m determined to shake off my “winter” doldrums.
I won’t be posting anything this week. I’ve decided to take an electronic media break and work everyday at a number of overdue gardening tasks, as well as some domestic organization (my desk area is too messy to find anything).
I’ll be back next Sunday. In the meantime, here are some of my favorite photos from a walk I did take around the garden on February 24th, during a very light rain.
The lower, even light allowed me to capture both the long front hedge and the hills in our view. (Usually, I get either very dark hedge or whited-out view.)
You can pause the slideshow by hovering the cursor over it.
Please do leave comments, if you like. I’ll probably cheat and check back a few times.
You can scroll through larger versions of the images by clicking on ‘Continue reading’ below and then on any thumbnail in the gallery.
Continue reading “Our garden: springtime (again)”
enclos*ure 