A garden in Loch Earn, Scotland, ca. 1864, by D. T. K. Drummond, via National Galleries of Scotland Commons on flickr.
Tag: vegetable garden
Vintage landscape: repurposed
World War I victory garden in a formal setting, location unknown,* ca. 1917 – ca. 1920, by Harris & Ewing, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The photo seems to have been taken for the National War Garden Commission, also known as the National Emergency Food Garden Commission.
The organization was created in early 1917 by Charles Lathrop Pack. It sponsored a campaign of pamphlets, posters, and press releases aimed at “arous[ing] the patriots of America to the importance of putting all idle land to work, to teach them how to do it, and to educate them to conserve by canning and drying all food that they could not use while fresh.”
Like it or not, what you do with the land around your house tells the world what sort of citizen you are.
*Harris & Ewing was located in Washington, D.C.
Life in gardens: standing watch
“W. D. Terrell in garden with radio,” probably in the Washington, D.C., area, July 7, 1926, by National Photo Company, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Mr. Terrell was Chief of Inspection Service of Radio at the U.S. Department of Commerce during the 1920s.
Just as Ariel, in the fables of the Middle Ages, was a spirit guardian of the air, so in this day of wireless, the Radio Inspector, a modern Ariel, stands a silent watch over the ether. But though he may be silent and, indeed, an angel, he is far from a fable, as those who attempt to dispute his wavemeter soon find out.
— from “Guiding the Good Ship Radio,” an October 1925 interview with Terrell in Radio Broadcast magazine
Vintage landscape: the watchers
“Figurines de pierre (stone) dans un potager,” between 1859 and 1910, by Eugène Trutat, via Bibliothèque de Toulouse Commons on flickr.
Unfortunately, the old image is not very clear.
The location of the vegetable garden was not noted, but the Bibliothèque assigns it to the Germany album. Trutat took a large number of pictures while traveling in the Rhineland-Palatinate region in the early 1920s.
Life in gardens: Woodbine
“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.
enclos*ure 