gardenhistorygirl

Modernist Planters, then and now

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 22:20:00 +0000

Bas-relief from the reign of Ur-Nammu, King of Sumer 2057-2030 BC (first depiction of a potted plant)

'Spindel' planter designed by Willy Guhl and Anton Bee, 1951. I knew I had seen it somewhere before...

The Garden History of Thomas Edison

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Sat, 19 Jul 2014 17:08:00 +0000

Edison ordered agaves in 1886, soon after moving in. [source]

I think about Thomas Edison quite a bit, actually. The 'Edisonian' method of scientific investigation has been much derided as in the last half-century Science decided it knew enough about how the world worked to proceed on theoretical predictions alone. But I haven't found that to be true, and I take myself the advice I once gave to my students; that you must, in the laboratory, take care to "keep your wits about you" as Mark Twain said, because the unexpected results are the important ones.

And now that I have been so fortunate as to say goodbye to the university and establish my own laboratory (in the midst of finishing my book on garden history), I think of Edison alot.

After Menlo Park, there was Seminole Lodge, in Fort Myers, Florida. He purchased property there in 1885, next door to Henry Ford, and together they experimented with plants that might become a domestic source for rubber. The Edison Botanic Research Corporation was formed, commissioning botanical collectors far and wide to seek out promising varieties. He had seedlings sent from foreign countries and tramped around in the swamps himself looking for specimens. Over 17,000 plants were tested. In the end, a giant version of the common goldenrod, dubbed Solidago Edisonia, was deemed the best candidate. Alas, we drive not on golden tires because of the invention of synthetic rubber.

Specimens from the Edison Botanic Research Corporation are still held at the New York Botanical Garden. [source]

Edison made his own garden plan for Seminole Lodge. It's not particularly good. Practical, utilitarian. But it was like him to think he could lay out a garden as well as he could lay out a laboratory.

He used soil from the adjacent Caloosahatchee River to enrich his fourteen acres, and one of the reasons he originally bought the property was that it was already established with bamboo. Carbonized bamboo was one of the first lightbulb filaments, lasting over 1200 hours before burning out. Other specimens planted by Edison and Ford for their research still grow on the property, some having reached huge proportions in Florida's plant-friendly climate: a 57 foot sausage tree, a 97 foot royal palm (Edison loved royal palms), a 102 foot ficus, and one of the largest banyans in the United States, now adorned with Edison's likeness.

[source]

Edison's second wife, Mina, was the one who went in for ornamental gardening; hiring society designer Ellen Biddle Shipman to make for her a 'Moonlight Garden' of antique roses, datura, plumbago, pentas and bougainvillea, and contributing to the beautification of the public landscape of Fort Myers.

[source]

Edison's botanical research, prompted by rubber shortages in WWI, was the last of his large scientific efforts. It was still underway when he died in 1931. As he neared the end of his life, Edison tributes were many. Apparently there was a press release listing his favorite flowers, though I haven't been able to track it down. In 1929, the Thomas Edison Dahlia was introduced at the American Dahlia Society's annual show in Madison Square Garden (does Madison Square Garden still host dahlia shows? It so should).

Milan, Ohio floral arrangement honoring Edison, 1929 [source]

My lab is in borrowed quarters for now, thanks to an investor, with no outdoor space to call our own, just a parking lot. But sometime, sometime there will be a laboratory cum garden, with Thomas Edison dahlias planted in it.

Thomas Edison had 1,093 patents. I have four. I think about him alot.

[source]

Sources:
Wikipedia's article on Edisonian techniques is a good summary of his practical approach to scientific research.
The Edison and Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers are open to the public.
Don't miss the NYBG article on rediscovering an Edison letter.
See also an article on the Edison gardens in the Tampa Bay Times.

Worst Gardener's Contract. Ever.

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 06:23:00 +0000

I have a friend who is a head gardener and I know they must sometimes suffer their employers with patience, but...

...witness the "Gardening Agreement" between Talames and her gardener Peftumont, c. 500 B.C, Egypt.

Contents of the agreement which Talames, daughter of Imuthes, has made, she giving her garden, on his agreement to Peftumont, son of Udjaf:

If you intend to be gardener for me in my garden, then you are to give water to it. You are to give 8 drawings of water to it, in the proper measure of 28 hins of water to the pot and you are to give 20 drawings at the beginning of the water of inundation and 20 afterward. You are to connect the dike to my garden according to the drawing which you shall cast; and you are to put it behind the gardens; and you are not to cause me to compel you to do it.

I am to ask you for your work at evening, and you are to give it to me, when it is complete and whole. And you are to twist and splice 200 cubits of rope...and you are to stitch 4 earth-baskets; and you are to give them rims; and you are to give them their handles. And you are to make them as your work at evening, and you are to give them to me, when they are complete, for the cutting which is to be made to my garden.

And you are to go to "The Island of the Atum," and you are to bring fibers of palm-leaf to my garden. ....for sparrows and [food] for crows. And you are to cause that I find them hanging above me...

And I am to ask you for your dung three times daily; and I am to probe it with a stalk of flax. The grape seed which I shall find in it, I am to take one silver coin to the seed among them.

Yes, his bowel movement was examined to see if he was eating her grapes. Plus he only got his wages in wheat (which he had to pound and grind himself) or bread, and he had to bring a spear and a sword to defend himself from the hyena and the wolves.

On the plus side, she promises to bail him out if he gets arrested.

Read the whole contract (there are gaps in the translation) here.

Appropriately, the contract is inscribed on the clay pot (above), now in the collection of the Oriental Institute of Chicago. Some Egyptologists think it might be satire.

On Planting by Cannon

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Tue, 06 May 2014 22:57:00 +0000

Craigybarns, image available at redbubble

"The Duke of Athol consulted my father as to the improvements which he desired to make in his woodland scenery near Dunkeld. The Duke was desirous that a rock crag, called Craigybarns, should be planted with trees, to relieve the grim barrenness of its appearance. But it was impossible for any man to climb the crag in order to set seeds or plants in the clefts of the rocks. A happy idea struck my father. having observed in front of the castle a pair of small cannon used for firing salutes, it occurred to him to turn them to account. His object was to deposit the seeds of the various trees amongst the soil in the clefts of the crag. A tinsmith in the village was ordered to make a number of canisters with covers. The canisters were filled with all sorts of suitable tree seeds. A cannon was loaded, and the canisters were fired up against the high face of the rock. They burst and scattered the seeds in all directions. Some years after, when my father revisited the place, he was delighted to find that his scheme of planting by artillery had proved completely successful; for the trees were flourishing luxuriantly in all the recesses of the cliff."

And according to contemporary photos of the now-climbable cliff, they still are.

Inspiration for your spring planting from the famous engineer James Nasmyth (inventor of the steam hammer), who was writing about his father, Scottish landscape painter Alexander Nasmyth. The cannon-planting took place about 1788. Both Nasmyths were polymaths with wide interests. Alexander was considered the founder of Scottish landscape painting, but he was trained in architecture and dabbled in engineering and in the formation of actual landcapes, providing designs for the pump room that still stands over St. Bernard's well in the center of Edinburgh, a picturesque plan for the landscape at Inveraray (including a 'beehive cottage' for the gamekeeper), and advice for turning the ruined Colinton Castle into a folly.

[source]

Remnants of William Blake's Garden at Lambeth

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 06:38:00 +0000

From the Spectator, 6 May 1916.

"And there is the little red-brick house in Poland Street, No. 23— the Blakes' first settled married home—standing as Blake must have known it, shabby and dark now with the London smoke of a century and a half, a strange setting for the radiant beauty of the Songs of Innocence which were written and designed within it. In 1793 Blake and his wife migrated to Lambeth, , to a house known now as 23 Hercules Road. It makes one of a terrace which has been condemned, and which waits, blackened, untenanted, glassless, behind its hoardings, for the coming of the housebreakers. Even in its present ruin it is worthwhile to cross Westminster Bridge to gain a last sight of it before it disappears, for it is without doubt the most interesting of all Blake's homes.

The front door of Blake's house is nailed up, and anyone fortunate enough to gain an entrance must make his way through the passage of the house next it, and so into a tangled garden, all overgrown with vine and fig tree—the descendants, doubtless, of those trained by Mrs. Blake with so much loving care into the arbour famous for its apocryphal legend of Adam and Eve, and for the prettier story of the Flaxman visits to the Blakes, and their tea-drinkings and music together."

[n.b. The apocryphal legend: ""Visiting the Blakes while they lived in Lambeth, [Thomas] Butts found the couple nude in their garden summer house. ‘“Come in!” cried Blake; “it’s only Adam and Eve you know!” Husband and wife had been reciting passages from Paradise Lost, in character’ (Gilchrist, 1.115)."]

"In summer time this jungle of greenery is thickened by a small forest of Jerusalem artichokes, left by later tenants, and by lilac bushes and bright double dahlias and marigolds. At every step the foot is caught by the trailing vine, and broken glass and waste rubbish lie everywhere underneath the tangle. And so we get to Blake's garden door...

"The Vale of Lambeth "—" Lambeth the Lamb's Bride," as Blake speaks of it in one of his prophecies—with fields and gardens, and open views over to the river and the towers of Westminster and the wide western sky, must have been a pleasant quarter at that time to live in. There is Wordsworth's Westminster Bridge sonnet, written in 1803, three years after the Blakes had left Lambeth, to bear witness to the beauty of London "open unto the fields and to the skies."

The Songs of Experience belong to this time, and it was on the stairs here that Blake had the great vision of the Ancient of Days with the measuring compass which was to become one of the most famous of his designs...No one can stand before this blackened shell of a home, once alive with so much fire and passionate vision, without a sense of awe, as they think of the "treasure in earthen vessels," of this great spirit. It is not perhaps quite fanciful to think that the open skies and sunset clouds of Lambeth had their influence on this outburst of visionary power.

Where was born Kim Il-Sung?

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 07:34:00 +0000

Mangyongdae is the birthplaceof Kim Il-Sung. This is what it looks like.

Image source Taedong Travel

But this is what it looks like to North Korean School children.

Image by Raymond Cunningham

The majestic conifers! The candy-colored blossoms! And all in bloom at the same time! An Eternal Spring for the dear leader. On anniversaries of Kim Il-Sung's death, flowers are said to bloom out of season, just like the picture. (But those white gates and pickets look strangely well, western.)

Kim Il-Sung even has his own flower, the Kimilsungia, a violet dendrobium cultivar that he took note of on a 1965 trip to Indonesia's Bogor Botanical Garden with his neighbor autocrat Sukarno. Its origin is rated by Pyongyang as one of the Top 100 Important Events of the 20th Century:

He stopped before a particular flower, its stem stretching straight, its leaves spreading fair, giving a cool appearance, and its pink blossoms showing off their elegance and preciousness; he said the plant looked lovely, speaking highly of the success in raising it. Sukarno said that the plant had not yet been named, and that he would name it after Kim Il Sung. Kim Il Sung declined his offer, but Sukarno insisted earnestly that respected Kim Il Sung was entitled to such a great honour, for he had already performed great exploits for the benefit of mankind.

Kimilsungia festivals may be, by visitor attendance, the most visited flower shows in the world.

Image by Joseph A, Farriss III

Kimilsungia was joined by Kimjungilia, a bodacious red begonia created in 1988 by a Japanese botanist (neither plant can be said to be North Korean in any way) for Kim Jung-Il's 46th birthday.

The red flowers that are blossoming over our land
Are like hearts: full of love for the leader
Our hearts follow the young buds of Kimjongilia
Oh! The flower of our loyalty!

Floral displays mingle these impresa of the two leaders with...tanks and test missiles.

Image by Joseph A, Farriss III

"Someone in my group asked why the Kimilsungia was a smaller flower than the Kimjongilia, our North Korean guide simply said that that was not a wise question to ask." [americaninnorthkorea]

But I'm most fascinated by the miniature landscapes placed in North Korean schools along with those pastel-ized prints of the birthplace. They personify the leader as much as his portrait, placing him in pure and abundant and beautiful nature as a stage set for narrative and myth.

photo by Eric Lafforgue

"In a school in Pyongyang, the room dedicated to Kim Il Sung, the father of Kim Jong Il.
The teacher asked the kids "where was born Kim Il Sung?"
They all answer, loudly: "Kim Il Sung was born in Mangyongdae!"
In the center, the native house of Kim Il Sung." [eric lafforgue]

The 'best' schools (the ones in which they allow Western tour groups) have three rooms, and three gardens. One for Kim Il-Sung, and one for Kim Jung-Il, and one for Kim Jong-suk (first wife of Il-Sung, mother of Jung-Il). The trinity of North Korea. And these are their gardens of origin, their Gardens of Eden.

Photo by Raymond Cunningham

See the pointer? "And here Kim Jong-Il gave his winter boots to another child. And here Kim Jong-Suk washed Kim Il-Sung's socks and dried them in her bosom."

Garden-as-propaganda.

Constantino Nivola's Artist Garden, c. 1950

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 01:39:00 +0000

I am snowbound here in the Midwest and thinking of Constantino Nivolo's sunny midcentury garden. It had a fully enclosed solarium (accessible by ladder and block-staircase) with mural-covered concrete walls that must have been scorching in summer but was designed to allow sunbathing even in a New York winter.

When I think of the Hamptons, I mostly think of conspicuous celebrity house parties and overpriced lobster. But in the 1950s, when a "postwar wave of artists, architects, and writers" swirled out of New York City, "East Hampton was a vital center of the American avant-garde. Back then, before all the traffic, people in the Hamptons argued about art, not real estate."

The best documentation of the uber-cool landscape where Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline hung out--smoking and lounging in Bertoia chairs, natch--and the house where Corbusier painted a mural on the living room walls is a 2001 New York Times article by Alastair Gordon from which the quotes in this post are taken, and the book Weekend Utopia: Modern Living in the Hamptons also by Gordon.

After restoring and painting the 18th century farmhouse he had purchased in 1948 (with white walls and New York taxi-yellow floors, and Corbu painted his mural with leftover house paint over a long weekend in 1950) sculptor 'Tino' Nivola turned his attention to creating a pleasure garden, an outdoor gathering space for friends, in the grounds. Bernard Rudofsky (author of ''Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture,'' and a lecturer with the best presentation title EVER: "How Can People Expect to Have Good Architecture When They Wear Such Clothes?") helped with the layout, suggesting "a sequence of ''rooms'' using paths, free-standing walls, fences and landscaping to create what he called an interplay of wall surfaces, sunlight and vegetation. ''The garden became an extension of of the house -- an open-air house,'' said the Nivolas' son, Pietro, 56, who grew up in the house with his sister, Claire" .

It seems very British, the garden room ideal. But Nivola was Sardinian, and originally a mason, and these rooms are sketched out in grape arbor and stucco, with bread ovens and fireplaces and a very Mediterranean mood. He did most of the work himself, including planting a tight circle of cedars that eventually grew into its own narrow, shady chamber. 'My father was always creating these kinds of intimate spaces,'' Claire Nivola said. ''It's a bit like Orani, his hometown in the central part of Sardinia. Every wall and roof is at a different angle and height, with very narrow streets and little piazzas everywhere.'"

"Near the center of the garden, a whitewashed fence of horizontal slats defines one room. Perpendicular to it is a concrete wall where, before it set, Mr. Nivola inscribed allegorical figures that appear to be marching to war. A third wall is suggested by a line of evenly spaced trees, while a sculpted fountain rises from a bed of lilies of the valley."

A terrace with a free-standing fireplace, a tall chimney and barbecue grill forms the next space. Another wall has a square window through which the branch of an old apple tree was allowed to grow.

The "tree window" wall was designed so that shadows fell across it like a kinetic mural. Rudofsky said that it was both a foil and a projection screen.

''That's where we would have lunch parties every weekend,'' Mrs. Nivola said." For twenty or more of their artistic friends, because then "The Hamptons weren't filled with restaurants and bars...People went to each other's houses for dinner. There was a lot of dropping in.'' [Pietro Nivola] remembers Pollock coming around. ''He gave me my first bike, and I remember driving around in his Model A Ford.''

Over time, the garden was filled with Nivola's concrete sculptures and later his sand-casts, a patented process he developed while playing at the beach with his children. "My father was very good at making sand castles,'' Pietro Nivola said. ''He loved to sculpt with wet sand on the beach. Then one day he wondered what would happen if he poured fluid plaster over the forms he had made.'' He painted the castings with different colors. This technique made for a fairly primitive and rough-edged kind of work..." eventually used in his most famous works, large bas reliefs for the Olivetti typewriter showroom in New York. See, Apple wasn't the first to realize that design sells what are basically office tools.

But in the Hamptons, it was all much more casual...Nivola mixed batches of concrete and let the children sculpt with him, and intentionally used a paint for the murals that would wash off after a couple of years so they could be painted again. And Corbu wandered down to the beach and to make his own sandcasts with the kids. Golden moment, indeed.

After Tino's death in 1988, the garden continued to live and breathe with the addition of his daughter Claire's own sculpture. In 2012, the house and grounds were renovated and preserved and at the time of this writing they remain in the Nivola family.

Other sources:
All the photos are via the blog mondoblogo; see lots more there.
See the story of the renovation and contemporary photos of the house here.
See also the foundation and museum devoted to Nivola's works.

P.S. Apologies for the lack of blogging lately; I have been deep in The Cave of The Writing of The Book. But I think I've written enough now that I can breathe again. I feel like I haven't breathed in six months.

"They've Found Another Bloody Cascade!"

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Sun, 01 Sep 2013 07:42:00 +0000

Lord Cobham to Joe, hand on wallet.

And indeed they had; giant men in giant cranes digging with the delicacy of bare hands had discovered yet another of the 'other rills' recorded by Thomas Whately in his Observations on Modern Gardening in 1770.

When he went round Hagley (as I and some garden historian friends did this week) he observed

:...a narrow vale divided into three parts; one of them is quite filled with water which leaves no room for a path, but thick trees on either side come down quite to the brink; and between them the sight is conducted to the bridge with a portico upon it which closes the view: another part of this vale is a deep gloom over hung with large ash, and oaks, and darkened below by a number of yews; these are scattered over very uneven ground, and open underneath; but they are encompassed by a thick covert under which a stream falls, from a stony channel, down a rock; other rills drop into the current, which afterwards pours over a second cascade into the third division of the vale, where it forms a piece of water, and is lost under the bridge. The view from this bridge is a perfect opera scene through all the divisions of the vale up to the rotunda..."

And we saw it too, emerging phoenix-like from a hundred years of silt that descended the valley and eventually completely covered its chain of ponds, its rills and its cascades.

A year ago, this narrow vale was so grown in with trees that it seemed a clear path to the rotunda (barely visible behind its scaffolding at the top) couldn't be recreated. Joe and helpers shone torches from the top to the bottom at night to prove it was possible.

Soon you'll be able to see again the Rotunda and the Ruined Castle, and the view from Milton's Seat (below); the monument to Alexander Pope (a friend of the Lord Lyttleton that created the park), the Palladian Bridge and the Obelisk: all of this landscape where Horace Walpole said he wore out his eyes with gazing, his feet with climbing, and his tongue and vocabulary with commending.

Many thanks to Joe Hawkins and Lord Cobham for giving us a delightful preview; the restored Hagley Hall park will reopen to the public in 2016.

[The other major seventeenth century description of Hagley is by Joseph Heely (1775), available on google books here. See also a BBC slideshow of the Hagley park restoration here.]

Ogden Nash, Superman and Batman in the Victory Garden

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 17:52:00 +0000

MY VICTORY GARDEN

by Ogden Nash

Today, my friends, I beg your pardon,

But I'd like to speak of my Victory Garden.

With a hoe for a sword, and citronella for armor,

I ventured forth to become a farmer.

On bended knee, and perspiring clammily,

I pecked at the soil to feed my family,

A figure than which there was none more dramatic-er.

Alone with the bug, and my faithful sciatica,

I toiled with the patience of Job or Buddha,

But nothing turned out the way it shudda.

Would you like a description of my parsley?

I can give it to you in one word--gharsley!

They're making playshoes out of my celery,

It's reclaimed rubber, and purplish yellery,

Something crawly got into my chives,

My lettuce has hookworm, my cabbage has hives,

And I mixed the labels when sowing my carrots;

I planted birdseed--it came up parrots.

Do you wonder then, that my arteries harden

Whenever I think of my Victory Garden?

My farming will never make me famous,

I'm an agricultural ignoramus,

So don't ask me to tell a string bean from a soy bean.

I can't even tell a girl bean from a boy bean.

Nash's contrarian view of gardening for victory was printed in House and Garden magazine in November, 1943. That year,20 million home gardens produced over 80 million tons of food; about 40% of the vegetable consumption of the US. Impressive, but this was my grandparents era and they grew all their vegetables at home anyway, Victory or not. So I've always wondered about these statistics.

The DC comic book in which Superman, Batman, and Robin labor in a Victory Garden was released around the same time, in September of 1943. I've only been able to locate the cover...if you know the inside story of why exactly these superheroes have found themselves toiling in the garden (to defeat the dark powers of eggplant, perhaps?) do get in touch.

Parterre de Broderie, now and then

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 18:58:00 +0000

Correspondence I and II, Louise Despont, 2008

Bridge Organ, Louise Despont, 2008

And speaking of parterres, the lovely contemporary sketches of Louise Despont (graphite on antique ledger book pages, 2008) appeared, magically, when I was searching for parterre de broderie images from D'Argenville (1709). A lovely garden now-and-then arising from an image similarity algorithm.

Google, you are too, too clever.

Sol Lewitt's Parterre Garden

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 16:50:00 +0000

Image via the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Being a fan of both old gardens and modern art I feel kindof ridiculously pleased that Sol Lewitt has made a garden. And that it's a parterre! Not himself of course, since he's been dead since 2007. But his 1981 proposal for a parterre garden--his only garden plan--has finally been realized in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park.

The original proposal was “To plant flowers of four different colors (white, yellow, red and blue) in four equal rectangular areas, in rows of four directions (vertical, horizontal, and diagonal left and right) framed by evergreen hedges of about two feet in height. In the winter the rows of plants would retain their linear direction; in the summer the flowers would bloom and provide color. The type of plant, height, distance apart and planting details would be under the direction of a botanist and the maintenance by a gardener.”

Image via Philadelphia Museum of Art

Those are pretty sketchy specifications. But Lines in Four Directions in Flowers was executed by OLIN to reflect Lewitt's "affinity for creating variation within a rigid structure", and for each of the color quadrants they selected "four to five species that bloom sequentially, with the lowest flowers blooming first. This pixelation of heights allows the negative space to be as impactful as the positive space—an extremely important factor to LeWitt.

White

Yellow

Red

Blue

Hedge Border

It's in place for two years. I will definitely be visiting.

Image via OLIN

Happy Anniversary to Australian Garden History!

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 22:27:00 +0000

I was pleased to be part of a special 25th anniversary issue for the journal of the Australian Garden History Society, with remarks on that most overused of new terms, 'new media', and its relevance to our discipline. You can read my thoughts in this post, but the AGHS has made the entire issue available online, with contributions from other esteemed garden writers like Andrea Wulf and my fellow Bristol alum and 21st century Rococo Shepherdess Laura Mayer.

Happy Anniversary to Australian Garden History! If you have an interest in our green and pleasant subject, you can do no better than to join your local/national garden history society. I am not good at keeping up my lists of links, but if you know of a society I should add to the short list in the sidebar, just leave a comment.

Boojum

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 03:11:00 +0000

"But if ever I meet with a Boojum, that day,

In a moment (of this I am sure),

I shall softly and suddenly vanish away—

And the notion I cannot endure!"

-Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, 1874

And this is the tree called the boojum, described by some as an upside-down carrot, and named after Carroll's character so strange. Found only along the Baja coast of California, Fouquieria columnaris sells for as much as $1000 per foot.

[image by Cliff Hutson]

Words with a Garden History: Radical

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Sat, 29 Jun 2013 16:53:00 +0000

Rooftop Gardens and Gardeners of New York

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 03:20:00 +0000

a rooftop theater garden from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York; unknown photographer

"The bicycle has attained an economic position of vast importance. The roof garden ought to attain such a position, and it doubtless will soon--as we give it the opportunity it desires.

The Arab or the Moor probably invented the roof garden in some long-gone centuries, and they are at this day inveterate roof gardeners. The American, surprisingly belated--for him, has but recently seized upon the idea, and its development here has been only partial. The possibilities of the roof garden are still unknown.

Here is a vast city in which thousands of people in summer half stifle, cry out continually for air, fresher air. Just above their heads is what might be called a county of unoccupied land. It is not ridiculously small when compared with the area of New York county itself. But it is as lonely as a desert, this region of roofs. It is as untrodden as the corners of Arizona. Unless a man be a roof gardener, he knows practically nothing of this land.

Down in the slums necessity forces a solution of problems. It drives the people to the roofs. An evening upon a tenement roof with the great golden march of the stars across the sky, and Johnnie gone for a pail of beer, is not so bad if you have never seen the mountains nor heard, to your heart, the slow, sad song of the pines."

The elegiac closing paragraphs from Stephen Crane's Roof Gardens and Gardeners of New York, a newspaper piece published 9 August, 1896. In it Crane references the rooftop garden of the Olympia Theatre, recently opened by Oscar Hammerstein, which featured "a bit of Swiss scenery on the left and an Italian grotto on the right', plus a lake and cascade, growing plants, swans and monkeys. Outré? Perhaps. But I was at the Met rooftop garden this past fall to see the Saracena sculpture and it strikes me that this is our version of the monkeys.

I am more touched by the reference to 'Johnnie's' tenement-roof garden...of a type that was described by Jacob Riis in 1890 (but amongst his photos exposing slum conditions I could find none of the roof gardens).
Roof gardens are once again stylish in New York, now in quite a different social and economic setting. So if you're a New York rooftop gardener, perhaps plant some Golden Glow in Johnnie's memory.

"..to the blackest cloud there is somewhere a silver lining if you look long enough and hard enough for it, and ours has been that roof garden. It is not a very great affair--some of you readers would smile at it, I suppose. There are no palm trees and no "pergola," just a plain roof down in a kind of well with tall tenements all about. Two big barrels close to the wall tell their own story of how the world is growing up toward the light. For they once held whisky and trouble and deviltry; now they are filled with fresh, sweet earth, and beautiful Japanese ivy grows out of them and clings lovingly to the wall of our house, spreading its soft, green tendrils farther and farther each season, undismayed by the winter's cold. And then boxes and boxes on a brick parapet, with hardy Golden Glow, scarlet geraniums, California privet, and even a venturesome Crimson Rambler."

Sources:
Read the entire essay by Stephen Crane as part of his "New York Sketches" at project Gutenberg.
Read the entire essay by Jacob Riis as part of "How the Other Half Lives" here.
There is a book just about the roof gardens of Broadway theaters by Stephen Burge Johnson.

On the Transience of Garden Fads

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:08:00 +0000

"It was visited by all the gentlemen and gentlewomen for the size and beauty of its flower. But now it is so vulgar that no one cares about it".

Ulisse Aldrovandi on the first "Peruvian Chrysanthemum" seen in Italy (actually a sunflower), planted in Bologna in 1594. Seen above in his 18 volume Tavole di piante, available online in its entirety at the University of Bologna.

Sprouts of Valour: Gog and Magog

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Mon, 13 May 2013 22:08:00 +0000

Spring brings to this garden blogger an annual Spate of Spam from purveyors hoping to get a mention of their book recommendations and their Top-Ten Gardening Trends!, which this year includes: “8. Topiary.”

To which gardenhistorygirl replies, “When has topiary ever NOT been a garden trend?” and thinks of Gog and Magog.

Above is a 1675 engraving of the Oxford Physic Garden by David Loggan. And below is a zoom of the area just behind the lower gates.

Oh, for a higher resolution image, but do you see them standing there? The fearsome guardians of all things botanic? Gog and Magog.

The London Guildhall Gog and Magog, via booknerd

Aka Antagonists of the Revelations, namesakes of the hills outside Cambridge, and guardians of the City of London, the Oxford Physic Garden version of Gog and Magog were clip't in yew--the creation of caretaker Jacob Bobart the elder (1599-1680) who was also wont to dye his beard silver to amuse garden visitors. Best. Head Gardener. Ever.

Tales of Bobart can be found in R.T. Gunther and C. Daubeny, Oxford Gardens. Based Upon Daubeny's Popular Guide to the Physick Garden of Oxford: With Notes on the Gardens of the Colleges and on the University Park (Parker, 1912), which immortalizes a 1683 sketch of Gog and Magog on its cover, and is online in its entirety at openlibrary.org (the digitized copy is from the library of Beatrix Farrand, and signed by her, which is also fun).

"This old Jacob some years past got two yew trees wch being formed by his skill are now grown up to be Gigantick bulkey fellows one holding a Bill th' other a Club on his shoulder, which fancy made an Ingenious person strow this Copie of verses on them..." Thomas Baskerville, 1683

The verses he refers to are a series of student works, apparently competing for Gigantick Wit, entitled
‘Poem upon Mr. Jacob Bobards Yew-man of the Guards to the Physic Garden, to the tune of the ‘Counter-Scuffle’ (by Edmund Gayton, Oxon. 1662), 'Upon the most hopefull and everyflourishing Sprouts of Valour, the indefatigable Centrys of the Physick Garden" (by John Drope, M.A.) and my person fave: ‘A Ballad on the Gyants in the Physic Garden in Oxon, who have been breeding Feet as long as Garagantua was Teeth".

Excerpted below for your topiary dreams, as preserved in Pack of Autolycus (Hyder Edward Rollins, 1927). Milton it is not.

What is our Oxford Africa?

It teemeth Monsters every day

About East-bridge which is the way

To Whately.

That these are Gyants you may guesse,

Byth' Foot as well as Hercules,

And as by Tallons nothing lesse

Than th' Lyon.

They'r Grimme as any dogge of Hell,

Though heads so many we cant tell,

For only two (and yet that's well)

We spy on...

But how I wonder came their Feet

So greene, so great, so thick, so neat

A hundred come them for to greet

From Colledge...

They guard a Book full of such Plants

And fright out snailcs, locusts, and Ants

And any vermin foule that haunts

These places...

Nor Westminster, nor yet the Strand

Nor any Garden of the Land

Such hearbs as come through Jacobs hand

Can sell yee...

For Jacob and his Gyants will

Not suffer any thing that's ill

(Unlesse it be for purge or pill)

There growing,

So that 'tis prudence to induce

The Knight and Giants to a Truce,

That we the Garden still may use

In quiet.

I could do this! Samara Garden Seating, Frank Lloyd Wright

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 21:08:00 +0000

image: Brian Pomeroy [source]

I once thought I might like to write an article about a Frank Lloyd Wright landscape. My hometown of Tulsa has a FLW house, Westhope (which no one is allowed to enter, or perhaps I am simply not well-connected enough to enter) and a set of intriguing old photos of its gardens I once found in an archive remain in my memory as an unrealized garden history dream.

Westhope is one of Wright's squares, and I like Wright best in squares, not in the triangles he later adopted as a guiding geometry. But I recently ran across this garden bench from his 'Samara' house in West Lafayette, Indiana., whose assymetrical polygons give the standard boulder-and-seat arrangement a great mid-century vibe. I could do this!

Russian Gardens in the Seventeenth Century (and the History of Salad)

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 22:40:00 +0000

The Summer Garden of the Peterhof as engraved by Zubov, c. 1716, via the Russian Museum.

There is very little recorded garden history in Russia prior to the eighteenth century refinements of Peter the Great. So I was fascinated to stumble across this description from Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia (1634), which documents both traditional agricultural practices and the very beginnings of a new focus on design and decoration.

"In some places, especially in Moscow, there are also fine garden plants, such as apples pears, cherries, plums, and red currents...there is one [apple] whose flesh is so tender and white that if you hold it up to the sun you can see the seeds...They also have all sorts of kitchen vegetables, notably asparagus as thick as a thumb...they grow good cucumbers, onions, and garlic, in great quantities. The Russians have never planted lettuce or other salad greens; they paid them no attention and not only did not eat them but even laughed at the Germans who did, saying that they ate grass."

"The Russians have their own special methods of planting and cultivating melons...they soften the seeds in sweet milk, and sometimes in standing rainwater mixed with old sheep dung. Then they arrange a mixture of horse manure and straw on the ground into a bed two ells deep. On top it is covered with good soil, in which they make small holes about half an ell wide. They plant the seeds in the middle so that they will be warmed not only below, but o all sides, from the collected heat of the sun, which helps them along. At night they cover these mounds against the frost with little roofs made of mica..."

[n.b. an ell is normally a cubit, or about a yard, but that seems too large for this description of melon cultivation. Windows with panes made of mica came to be called 'Muscovy glass' because of their use in Russia, so it is not unexpected that mica was used as well for what were essentially cloches.]

"Formerly, Moscow had few pretty herbs and flowers However soon after we were there, the last Grand Prince ordered that a fine garden be planted and that it be beautified with various costs herbs and flowers. Until then the Russians knew nothing of fine cultivated [double] roses but were limited to wild roses and eglantine, with which they ornamented their gardens. Some years ago, however, Peter Marselis, a leading merchant, brought there from the garden of my most gracious Prince, in Gottorp, the first double and Provence roses, and they were well accepted...from the foregoing it may be inferred that the absence of certain fruits and plants is to be attributed not so much to the soil and air as to the negligence or ignorance of the inhabitants. They have no lack of those fruits of the soil essential for the ordinary nourishment of life..."

It points out that just because there wasn't a recorded garden history doesn't mean there wasn't a garden history. And that the decorative impulse didn't suddenly appear with the arrival of the cultivated roses. It had been there long before with the wild eglantines transplanted into garden spaces as ornament. I'm writing about that in the book, at present. Early garden math, really: the additions (wild roses) and subtractions (removal of weeds or other unattractive specimens) that were the beginnings of the decorative garden.

Humphrey Repton and Accessible Gardening History

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 19:23:00 +0000

"I have lived", said Mr. Humphrey Repton in 1816, "to see many of my plans beautifully realised, but many more cruelly marred, sometimes by false economy, sometimes by injudicious extravagance. I have also lived to reach that period where the improvement of houses and gardens is more delightful to me than that of parks and forests, landscapes, or distant prospects."

Repton died just two years later after this looking-back, in 1818, having spent his last years in a 'Bath chair', (we would now call it a type of wheelchair) after injuries sustained in a carriage accident. His confinement prompted him to pen what are to my knowledge the earliest guidelines for accessible gardening:

"...my own infirmities have lately taught me how the solace of garden scenery and garden delights may be extended a little further, when the power of walking fails...The loss of locomotion may be supplied by the Bath chair with wheels; but, if these are to grind along a gravel-walk, the shaking and rattling soon become intolerable to an invalid, and, therefore, glades of fine mown turf, or broad verges of grass, should be provided, as means of avoiding the gravel; and such grass communications may be so made, as to increase the interest of the scenery, by varying its features; for, although a gravel-walk must have its two sides parallel, or nearly so, yet a grass-walk should never be of any uniform breadth; it should rather vary in its outline, sometimes flowing among shrubs, sometimes under trees, as in the chequered shade of an open grove; and sometimes in one ample green mall, or terrace, commanding a distant prospect, a pleasing landscape, or even the curious though confined combination of rare exotic trees, within the sheltered boundary of the pleasure-ground.

All these may be enjoyed by the cripple, with as much, and perhaps more, satisfaction from his wheeling-chair,or from a garden-seat, than by those who can encounter the fields of the farm, or the haunts of the forest; caring very little for the luxuries of a garden, as felt under the painful pressure of infirmity. These remarks are equally applicable to the fruit-garden, the flower-garden, or the pleasure-ground: they should all be accessible to a garden-chair on wheels, and all should he provided with ample grass-walks, to avoid the offensive noise of gravel."

[Quotes are from The landscape gardening and landscape architecture of the late Humphrey Repton, edited by J.C. Loudon in 1840, and available online at google books. The images accompanying this post are from the Morgan Library's Red Books for Fernery Hall and Hatchlands.]

More on Atomic Gardens

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 11:46:00 +0000

I know that when I am not blogging it must seem to my readers that I am not writing but indeed I am! My paper on Muriel Howorth, founder of the Atomic Gardening Society has just been published in the British Journal of the History of Science. Cambridge University Press has the enlightened policy of allowing the author to post the article on their personal website as soon as it appears in print (take that, Taylor and Francis) and so I am posting it here, for those of you that are interested enough in the topic to brave a scholarly article. (Really, it's not too bad. I am invariably told by journal editors that my style is too narrative anyway). The information on the AGS is mostly in the last section of the paper.

Above is my favorite picture of Muriel, from the Wilkinson collection, which is the family archive of her remaining papers. Who gives their mayor atomic models?? Muriel does. In furs and an amazing hat. You can download the paper as a pdf here: Safeguarding the Atom.

Gardenhistorygirl is writing a book!

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:47:00 +0000


"A member of the Pole family at her desk C. 1806 at 14 St. James Square, Bristol" From the collection of Bristol Museums and Art Gallery

When I was doing my garden history degree in Bristol I went more than once to its museum to see this watercolour of a daughter of the Pole family at her desk c. 1806. I had a similar long window in my university accomodations, though not so commodious a view, and a laptop rather than a quill pen but still, it kept me writing.

And now this little notice has appeared in Publisher's Marketplace:

From Garden History Girl blogger Paige Johnson, THE LITERATE GARDEN: from the secret gardens of medieval monasteries to Gatsby's infamous "blue gardens" to the atom-blasted seeds of the 1950s, a cultural history of the garden -- as viewed through the lenses of science, politics, art, architecture, literature, and more -- that explores what our evolving relationship with the cultivated outdoors reveals about us as people, to Denise Scarfi at Norton, by Danielle Svetcov at Levine Greenberg Literary (World).

18 months to write, with a hopeful appearance in 2015! I'm thrilled, and looking forward to sharing so many garden stories with you, both here (I'll still be blogging) and in the book.

Words with a Garden History: Favela

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 18:46:00 +0000

Cnidoscolus quercifolius Note the spines...[source]

Until this recent article in the Financial Times I didn't know that the notorious 'favela' of Brazil is also a plant...

"Favelas take their name from a hardy plant which thrives in the arid northeast of the country (which happens to be where most of the slum dwellers hail from ). Not only do vicious thorns protect the favela against predators but, if ingested, its leaves can kill you with a poison that mimics the effects of cyanide."

Favela is Cnidoscolus quercifolius, a member of the notoriously phytotoxic Euphorbia family. Its usage as a synonym for 'slum' grew out of a shanty town established by decamped (and unpaid) soldiers who settled on the hills outside of Rio in temporary protest at the end of the 19th century. But the government never paid and they never left. They named their site Favela Hill after the plants on the hill where they had celebrated their victory over the rebels of Canudos. (see rioonwatch).

What is your favorite word with an unexpected or forgotten garden meaning? Mine is vignette, which means something short enough to be written on a vine leaf.

Cnidoscolus quercifolius [source]

Arborglyphs

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 01:54:00 +0000

image via yorkstories

"Nay, I will try these verses, which lately I carved on the green bark of a beech-tree..."

Mopsus (Virgil, c. 50 B.C.)

I've always just called them tree carvings but technically they're arborglyphs, or sylvaglyphs, "culturally-modified trees" or just tree graffiti. But by whatever name they're personal histories--carved into the bark of a tree. Smooth barked varieties--beech, birch, aspen--are generally preferred and these unique documents--manuscripts in their own right for is not paper itself made from trees?--have begun to capture the attention of scholars.

Professor Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe, a specialist in Basque History at the University of Nevada, Reno, documented over 20,000 arborglyphs in the mountains of the western United States, carved by Basque sheepherders who left their own Pyrenees Mountains behind to supply mutton to isolated mining camps. They summered their flocks in the lush meadows of the high Sierra above Lake Tahoe, and left a record of their solitary sojourns including names, dates and images of what they were thinking about: towns back home, bears and buffalo, but often naked women; some carvings are not for the easily offended.

Arborglyphs by Etienne Maizcorene

Some like Etienne Maizcorena left a naively artistic, stylistically recognizable body of work. Etienne even created his own forest gallery:

"Aware of the merit of his art, Maizcorena chose a site for his "gallery" near a kanpo handia in Humboldt County, where all his arborglyphs "hang" some eight or nine feet above the ground. Obviously, he did not want anyone touching, overcarving, or disturbing them ... Maizcorena either stood on his horse, or he used a ladder.
— Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe in Speaking Through the Aspens, p.147

There is historical as well as artistic merit in the arborglyphs. Angie KenCairn, a heritage specialist for the U.S. Forest Service, studies aspen art in the Routt National Forest of Colorado, gleaning information about historic construction projects and stock drives, especially since the herders' usually dated their work. "Much of the oldest art has actually been discovered on standing dead or fallen trees, and the forest service is striving to document these carvings before they disappear. “They’re a cultural resource,” Angie emphasizes. “Defacing them in any way is a federal offense. Anyway, people should be respectful of those who came before them and respect their legacy.”

Sego Canyon arborglyph [source]

Arborglyphs are inherently ephemeral; most of those currently being recorded date no earlier than the 1920s, when shepherding in the west peaked. Earlier "cultural modifications" to the treescape have been felled or lost to the vagaries of fire and drought that afflict any forest, even one with artistic interventions.

In a time when contrived urban interventions like sticking legos on a building are a Very Big Deal, I'm moved by the unaffected authenticity of these rural interventions.

Sources and additional reading:

The best source of information on the Basque sheepherder arborglyphs is a multimedia site by the University of Nevada, Reno Library. The Maizcorena images are from this site.
Dr. Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe published a book "Speaking Through Aspens: Basque Tree Carvings in California and Nevada", in 2000. He notes that arborglyphs contain the most comprehensive record of sheepherders compiled anywhere in the American west. yet "Until recently, federal archaeologists and historians made almost no attempt to record the arborglyphs, despite the ephemeral nature of aspens. Their failure was the result of a number of factors, not excluding prejudice against minorities and their cultures and the wholesale dismissal of the arborglyphs as pornography or simple doodling. The inevitable results was that a great portion of this massive data bank was lost."
The quotes from Angie KenCain are from an article about Colorado arborglyphs: "Aspen Diaries" by Kelly Bastone, published in Steamboat magazine.
A PhD student at my alma mater, the University of Bristol, did her thesis on a comparative study of arborglyphs left by WWII soldiers on the peaceful Salisbury plain with those left on the front lines in France. A story about her work in the alumni newsletter inspired this post.

Into the Wild

noreply@blogger.com (arcady) — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:01:00 +0000

"Beautiful nature" in the 18th century: Pope's Garden at Twickenham, c.1730, by William Kent. From the British Museum

“Follow Nature. Gardening is an imitation of “Beautiful Nature” and not works of Art.”

In 1751 the Reverend Joseph Spence, who is not nearly so well-known to garden history as his friend Alexander Pope, penned a list of sixteen “general rules” for the design of landscapes. The first repeats Pope’s all too famous “consult the genius of the place” aphorism, but the other rules are actually more interesting, and I particularly like his recommendation for imitating “Beautiful Nature”, because that’s really what all gardeners, and all gardens, seek to do in their own way.

But by modern lights few of us would call Spence's ideal--Pope’s garden at Twickenham (above)--so very natural.

In a way that's what enables garden history: the fact that the sort of Nature we perceive as being beautiful, and therefore want to create in our gardens, is constantly changing.

"Beautiful Nature" in the 21st Century

Like notions of what “Beautiful Human” means—the ancient Greeks admired a unibrow and seventeenth century Parisians prized a double chin (and both are more ‘natural’ than our current expectations of a plucked forehead and a timely jawlift)—“Beautiful Nature” also shifts in the cultural winds, towards what society views as important, as precious.

Thus the paeans to philosophy in the eighteenth century garden, and the paens to ecology in ours. The more we view the wild as precious, the more we seek to create it. Reverend Spence might not recognize the forms, but he would surely be in comity with the means, because the 21st century garden above still follows his rules:

4. Assist or correct the general character of the ground
5. Conceal any disagreeable object
6. Open a view to whatever is agreeable (n.b. Spence would definitely have taken out that middle tree)
8. Conceal the bounds of your garden everywhere
10. Contrive the outer parts to unite well with the country around them

Is a carefully constructed rock bridge more 'natural', more wild, than a shell-encrusted grotto? No, yet I don't think that's a bad thing. Defining a garden style as particularly ‘natural’ has frequently been a way to scorn previous styles by attaching to them the scurrilous ‘unnatural'. Horrors! But all designed landscapes are places of artifice. Even if (especially if?) they're made of weeds.

The award-winning 2009 'Crack Garden' by CMG Architecture featuring aesthetically pleasing weeds.
Only in our time would this be considered beautiful.

Make no doubt about it, these weeds are carefully pruned and controlled...and quite unnatural. How we achieve our imitation of wild and beautiful nature is always a subject of debate. William Robinson’s 1870 The Wild Garden (available in its entirety on google books) is currently having a resurgence of popularity, but it’s appropriate to question his enthusiastic championing for introducing hardy exotics into native plant areas. Frederick Law Olmsted, that great 'constructor of nature' followed Robinson's ideas, but botanist Charles Sprague Sargent disagreed so fiercely that he demanded that 'his' side of the Boston riverway project be planted only with natives in direct challenge to FLO's side, which mixed in exotics. And I get snippy about the faddish ‘prairie garden’ of European descent, because it doesn't look like real prairie to this native; just like an English perennial bed in a grassy dress.

"Beautiful Nature" c. 1870: the frontispiece of William Robinson's The Wild Garden

I love 'wild gardens', and my own landscape is wild-ish more by default than by pure intent. But I also want to continue to see other forms of created nature. On this debate, we must let the Reverend Spence have the final word. His own landscape had a kitchen garden, and a fruit orchard, and a grassy meadow 'dashed with trees' and sandy paths for walking and flowering evergreens and a long view of the hills. "Variety" he said, summed it up. "Study variety in all things."

[Sources: Reverend Spence's list can be found in Ann Leighton's American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century" or in The Genius of the Place: the English Landscape Garden 1620-1820 edited by John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis. The lattter also contains the description of Spence's garden. Both should be in any serious garden historian's library. The best discussion of the concept of the wild garden in the 20th Century is Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century, Volume 18 in the Dumbarton Oaks series, edited by Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn. It's an excellent scholarly overview, though expensive, and I found the reference to the dispute between Olmsted and Sprague there. The best wild gardener, for my money, was Jens Jensen, about whom we'll talk more in the future. And in the interest of full disclosure, this post has been prompted by a conversation with House Beautiful magazine. Which is good, because it has gotten me posting again.]