On the Transience of Garden Fads

"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

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

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)

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

"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

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!

"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

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

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

"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.]

Zelda's Flowers

This past spring I provided some garden history background to the producers of the new Great Gatsby movie (who were lovely to work with), and now I shall have to wait all the way until summer to see the final result, as the release has been delayed.  I am anxious to see what they did with the garden.

In the reams of scholarly writing devoted to the material culture of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work, to the cars and the clothes and the interiors of the Great-American-Novel-Gatsby in particular, the garden has been entirely and strangely neglected.  It’s a reflection of how much the garden as an element of culture is neglected in all sort of historical analyses, really.  

Fitzgerald is at his best as a describer of moments that seem like flashbulbs of experience and nostalgia all at once:  written Instagrams.  Sometimes these include landscapes.  But there’s nothing in his biography to indicate a particular affinity for the garden, and most often his moments are rich in impressions but poor in details.  

His wife Zelda, on the other hand, was a Southern girl.  Raised on the verandas of Montgomery Alabama, creaking with heat and gossip and confederate jessamine.  I don’t think she was ever well-suited to the fast urbanity she adopted, poor thing.  Or bless her heart, as they’d say in the south.  Old family photos show her set amongst the flowers (in the springtime in my city, the parks are still full of parents setting their Easter dress-clad daughters amongst the daffodils.)  

And so it seems likely to me that she, not Frances Scott, included in the book ‘the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate”—quite old-fashioned garden elements for Gatsby’s modern life—and the white plum tree under which a ‘gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman sat in state’. 

Zelda herself was photographed beneath a fruit tree in spring-white flower, near the time of the writing of the Great Gatsby, though I can’t tell if it is a plum. 

“I can’t, Amory.  I can’t be shut away from the trees and flowers, cooped up in a little flat, waiting for you.  You’d hate me in a narrow atmosphere.  I’d make you hate me.”

Rosalind to Amory in This side of Paradise

In later, troubled times, making him hate her and on the verge of a complete breakdown far from the magnolias of Montgomery, Zelda wrote a remarkable synesthetic description of the flowers of Paris:

“Yellow roses she bought with her money like Empire satin brocade, and white lilacs and pink tulips like molded confectioner's frosting, and deep-red roses like a Villon poem, black and velvety as an insect wing, cold blue hydrangeas clean as a newly calcimined wall, the crystalline drops of lily-of-the-valley, a bowl of nasturtiums like beaten brass…she bought lemon yellow carnations perfumed with the taste of hard candy and garden roses purple as raspberry puddings…tulips like white kid gloves and forget-me-nots from the Madeleine stalls, threatening sprays of gladioli and the soft, even purrs of black tulips.” 

But these are hothouse flowers, flowers of a narrow atmosphere, of artifice and even threat: the description ends with ‘flowers with the brilliant carnivorous qualities of Van Gogh’.    Not the gentle flowers of Zelda's youth, the old-fashioned flowers she could transplant northwards to Gatsby’s East Coast garden but across the Atlantic was too far and she could not find them there and writing her semi-autobiographical novel in Paris she calls herself, achingly, ‘Alabama’.  

“The mistake I made was in marrying her.  We belonged to different worlds—she might have been happy with a kind simple man in a southern garden.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald to their daughter Scottie 

Sources:  early photographs of both Zelda and Scott can be found in The Romantic Egoists:  a pictorial autobiography edited by Matthew Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr.; the picture at the top of this post is on page 44. The definitive non-pictorial autobiography is Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, also by Matthew Bruccoli with Scottie Fitzgerald Smith.  The description of the flowers was published originally in Zelda’s semi-autobiographic novel, Save me the Waltz.   Zelda’s mother was an avid gardener in Montgomery (see Zelda Fitzgerald by Sally Cline) and Zelda took comfort in gardening upon returning to Montgomery herself after her hospitalization for mental illness and Fitzgerald’s subsequent death.  If you have access, my article on Art Deco gardens for Apollo magazine is here. 

Prairie Studies, J.E. Weaver

 The Nurture Studies reminded me of the story of J.E. Weaver, who I first read about in the excellent book Gardening with Prairie Plants by Sally Wasowski.  Prairie plants are, of course, oh-so-fashionable now in gardening circles, but when they were just part of a place, not of a garden (and the current mistake is to make them more of-a-garden than of-a-place) they were a subject of incredibly focused study by John Earnest Weaver, a member of the University of Nebraska from 1932 to 1952.

Weaver developed a laborious, painstaking technique for exposing and drawing a network of prairie roots in situ--a labor that must have suited his own precise personality for he conducted his field research wearing a three piece suit and a green eyeshade, like some accountant who had lost his way in the country.  He drew the roots in great detail, documenting them at depths of up to fifteen feet from the ground surface.  Later, he paid his students 25 cents an hour to dig the trenches (1500 trenches for one four-year study alone), stretch a grid with string and nails against the freshly exposed root bed, and draw.   Occasionally photograph, but mostly draw, and I particularly love his three-dimensional reconstructions which subterranea are just as beautiful as art as they are as data.

Reportedly, even his wife called him 'Dr. Weaver', and he read nothing but technical literature and never engaged in small talk.  His obsession was prairie plants and their root systems, documented in 12 monographs, 8 books, and some 90+ scholarly articles, some of which are available at the University of Nebraska archives with engaging titles like "The Wonderful Prairie Sod".   His studies were crucial for coming to understand the dust bowl, and why agricultural plants were not as successful as the native prairie in resisting drought and combating erosion.  They record plant distribution and varieties in prairies that have long since vanished.  And gardenhistorygirl advises that they should be read by those who are attempting to recreate a prairie landscape in say, Oxfordshire.  Or on a rooftop in Brussels.  

As for my own prairie I leave a wide band  of the native grasses unmowed, encircling the house like an oval racetrack, the price of which is that switchgrass and bluestem occasionally (okay, every spring, actually) seed into my flower and vegetable beds.  I now understand why it is so difficult to weed out. 

Nurture Studies, Diana Scherer

Photographer Diana Scherer grows her subject flowers from seed over a six-month period, confining their roots in a vase.  When it is removed the exposed roots retain the shape of their now absent container, to be preserved in a single photograph.  Scherer is inspired by 17th century botanical encyclopedias, which often showed roots as well as flowers, but these are far from the idealized specimens found in those illustrations.  The flowers are common, the stems bent, the leaves browning, and the blooms imperfect; capturing the mortality of a real garden.

Garden of Gold

It was Sir Walter Raleigh who got me started on the garden of gold (I am always chasing Sir Walter and his moonbow).  His 1595 voyage to South America in hopes of finding El Dorado and regaining the favor of Elizabeth I, his ‘Cynthia’, was disastrous:  he found no gold, his eldest son Wat was killed, and upon his return he was accused of fraud in overstating the voyage’s prospects, a charge that eventually led to his execution.  He knew it might happen; knew that he was in danger as soon as he stepped onto English shores and so composed as masterful a document of spin as any political party ever used to torque a bad election result.

In his account of the  ‘Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the great and golden city of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado) etc. performed in the year 1595”, Raleigh attempted to divert attention away from his failure by describing lots of things that he had heard about, but not actually seen, including this description:

“Yea, and they say, the Incas had a garden of pleasure in an island near Puna, where they went to recreate themselves, when they would take the air of the sea, which had all kinds of garden-herbs, flowers, and trees of gold and silver; an invention and magnificence till then never seen.”

Like Eldorado itself, it is a myth grown large in the retelling, but one that is nonetheless based in fact. 

There WAS a Garden of Gold. 

At Coricancha, the sacred precinct of the Incan capital Cuzco,  grew a supremely artificial and precious garden that honored not a decorative landscape tradition but a productive one:  the cultivation of maize.  

“They had also a garden, the clods of which were made of pieces of fine gold; and it was artificially sown with golden maize, the stalks, as well as the leaves and cobs, being of that metal.” 
The Second Part of the Chronicle of Peru, Pedro de Cieza de León, 1532-1550

The only eyewitness account to survive is that of Pizarro, who is also the only one to speak of how the Garden of Gold was used, in a ritual 'growing' of the golden food:

"Away from the room where the Sun was wont to sleep they made a small field, which was much like a large one, where at the proper season they sowed maize. They sprinkled it by hand with water brought on purpose for the Sun.  And at the time when they celebrated their festivals, which was three times a year, that is when they sowed the crops, when they harvested them, and when they made orejones; they filled this garden with cornstalks made of gold having their ears and leaves very much like natural maize all made of very fine gold which they had kept in order to place them here at these times."

Maize was clearly the garden's patron saint, its centrality is apparent in all the accounts.  But they differ as to the other features of the garden:  de Leon describes twenty golden sheep and lambs, along with figures of shepherds to keep watch, while Garcillasso de la Vega (c. 1600)  recounts a complete landscape of flower, fowl,  and creeping things:  

“That garden, which now supplies the convent with vegetables, was in the time of the Incas a garden of gold and silver, such as they also had in the royal palaces. It contained many herbs and flowers of different kinds, many small plants, many large trees, many large and small animals both wild and domestic, and creeping things, such as serpents, lizards, and toads, as well as shells, butterflies, and birds. Each of these things was placed in its natural position. There was also a large field of maize, the grain they call quinua, pulses, and fruit trees with their fruit; all made of gold and silver.”

And the enclosing garden wall was covered with a band of gold all around its perimeter, to reflect the sun.  de la Vega's mention of the convent is telling; it is likely around the time of its establishment (c. 1571) that the garden disappeared into the yawning, insatiable maws of the Spanish galleons.

So in fact, the garden of gold was already gone by the time Raleigh penned his apologia.  As with all great troves, there are of course rumors that it was buried, that it was hidden, that it might still be found.  But for now only a few stalks of maize remain.  

Incan gold and silver stalk of maize from the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

 

Garden History Giveaway Winner!

Another favorite from Frances Benjamin Johnston...the 'House of Usefulness' school window at the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, Ohio.  From the Library of Congress.

The random number generator at random.org selected comment 20 as the winner...so Gardens for a Beautiful America goes to Bell and Star!  Please email me your postal address to receive your book.

And thanks to everyone for the very kind comments...fingers crossed they will keep me posting more regularly.  Watch for more giveaway opportunities to come! 

Random Sequence Generator

Here is your sequence:

20  11  19   3  12  13  23  10  16  17   6  15  14   1   5   2  21   7   4  22   8   9
18

Garden History Giveaway: Gardens for a Beautiful America, Frances Benjamin Johnston

I love the way the title of this book sits in American garden history.  America's strongest landscape tradition is not of its private gardens but of its national parks; and 'Beautiful America' is most often, even today, its unique wildernesses.  In 'My Country 'Tis of Thee', the nation's de facto anthem, it is

"Thine inland seas, Thy groves and giant trees,Thy rolling plains;Thy rivers' mighty sweep,Thy mystic canyons deep,Thy mountains wild and steep,--"

of which we sing, and where stronger 'garden' histories arise (of the garden as opposed to the natural or presumed natural landscape) they are generally in more urban regions of what remains a sparsely populated country, for its size. 

from the online history of Frances Benjamin Johnston at clio, which also lists her main biographical sources

But Frances Benjamin Johnston--pioneering photographer, photojournalist, visual artist, whose garden photography, 1895-1935 is the subject of a truly beautiful new book by Acanthus Press--was a city girl and saw the making of gardens as a way to improve urban conditions, presaging modern trends like the urban farming movement and guerilla gardening.

She was a member of the first city garden club, The Society of Little Gardens, founded in Philadelphia in 1915, which promoted 'the love of growing plants and making gardens within small city limits'.  Her goals are still laudable today:

"...to turn unsightly backyards into gardens, to beautify all waste places, to plant trees near important buildings and on long treeless streets, to encourage window-box planting, and to be observant of the workings of the park department, in order that we may make city life richer by fostering the love of beauty..." 

 (gardenhistorygirl detects a bit of suspicion of the nefarious park department there), and her photography was part and parcel:

"...we feel that it is very necessary to have photographs for successful developments so that people can clearly see the possibilities of their own backyards, and receive inspiration". 

Laura Stafford Stewart house, 205 West 13th Street, New York, New York

Grey Gardens in the Hamptons in 1914, later to be famous as the home of Big and Little Edie

A celebrity photographer, FBJ shot the wedding of Alice Roosevelt, portraits of successive US Presidents, and produced vanity garden spreads for wealthy homeowners as well as photographing gardens for 'magazines of class'.  But she used that access and patronage to further her own goals, to do things like documenting vanishing colonial architecture or the success of the agriculture college in Hampton, Virginia, where Booker T. Washington went to school. 

Cupola House, Edenton, North Carolina;  in the Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

from MoMa:  Agriculture. Plant life: Experiments with plants and soil Frances Benjamin Johnston (American, 1864–1952)

1899-1900.

In these efforts she was catholic in her taste, photographing both hovels and plantation houses. Her garden photography, though heavily weighted toward the rich and famous, shows this same expansiveness, an appreciation of the beauty to be found on the stairs to a basement apartment, as in my favorite photograph of the collection, the Janitor's Garden.

1922

"The most ardent and enthusiastic horticulturist I ever met was an eastside janitor who gave the best of the sunlight  that filtered into his gloomy basement to his window boxes filled with 'Old Man' and stunted geraniums and who rescued the faded Easter plants thrown out on the ash-heap...'  FBJ, 1926

Most of the photos are something of a Social Register for Gardens, with hand-coloring in FBJ's preferred Ruskinian idealism to boot.  So you'll find the Vanderbilt estates here, and some of England and Italy's most famous gardens, but I am more enamored of the Rhode Island Farmhouse and the sandbox in the back of a doctor's townhouse and the California adobes (present day Californians could learn much from the appropriateness of these landscapes to their settings). 

FBJ 1917

I had seen some of these images before, but without proper credit to Frances.  Now they're all appropriately catalogued, thanks to years of efforts on the part of the book's author Sam Watters.  They are freely online at the Library of Congress, which  holds FBJ's archive,  but it is much nicer to have them along with the informed discussion of the American Garden Beautiful that the book provides.

The lovely folks at Acanthus Press have made a copy available to give away to you, dear readers!  Just leave a comment to this post by midnight CST on Monday, May 14 to be eligible. You can leave any sort of a comment, but of course I always like to hear nice words about the blog.  Nice or not, though, all comments will be numbered and the winner selected by random number generator on Tuesday.   Bonne chance!

Edward Steichen's Garden History

Edward Steichen is best known for his fashion photography--in the 1930s he was chief of photography for Condé Nast publications, which included Vogue and Vanity Fair.  But one of the great photographer's lesser known roles was as President of the Delphinium Society of America.

His archives at the Eastman Kodak House contain an entire section known as the Delphinium Papers, devoted to his passion for plant breeding.

Edward Steichen with delphiniums (c. 1938), Umpawaug House (Redding, Connecticut). Photo by Dana Steichen. Gelatin silver print. Edward Steichen Archive, VII. The Museum of Modern Art Archive

 

Edward Steichen (American, b. Luxembourg 1879-1973), Delphiniums,1940, dye imbibition process. Bequest of Edward Steichen by Direction of Joanna T. Steichen © Joanna T. Steichen from the Eastman Kodak Archive blog

In June 1936 his flowers were the subject of an eponymous show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  Edward Steichen’s Delphiniums showed the preternaturally tall, unusually colored delphs for a week, taking pains to remind prospective visitors that the exhibit was not photos of plants, it was the real thing! Unwilling to entrust his precious blooms to some mere art handler, Steichen trucked them to the museum galleries himself from his 400 acre farm (10 planted solely in delphiniums) near Redding, Connecticut. 

Installation view of the exhibition, Edward Steichen's Delphiniums. June 24, 1936 through July 1, 1936. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by Edward Steichen

It was the first and only MoMA show dedicated to flowers.  

It is now also considered the first intersection between genetic modification and art:   Steichen applied colcichine, a chemical mutagen that induces chromosome doubling, to his delphiniums.  The normal delphinium of the day was three to four feet tall; Steichen's could be seven, as seen below in the white behemoth he named for his brother in-law the poet Carl Sandburg. His most popular variety, the Connecticut Yankee, was named as an homage to Mark Twain and is still commercially available.
 

From left: Carl Sandburg with the "Carl Sandburg" delphinium (c. 1938), Umpawaug House (Redding, Connecticut). Photo by Edward Steichen. Gelatin silver print. Seed packet of "Delphinium Connecticut Yankees," bred by Edward Steichen (c. 1973). Offset, printed in color. Both images Edward Steichen Archive, VII. The Museum of Modern Art Archives

MoMA has also placed on line the original press release for the delphinium exhibition, and this is my favorite bit:

How much does gardenhistorygirl want to see an exhibition of giant delphiniums next to a display of Modern Architecture?  So much. 

The press release records that Steichen had been working on his delphiniums "for twenty-six years", that he had been interested in the cross-breeding and selection of flowers since "thirty years ago" but that his particular interest in delphiniums dated to 1906, which even precedes his time at Voulangis par Crècy-en Brie, a village just northeast of Paris where the Steichens lived from 1908 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

It was of that landscape, where Man Ray and Brancusi toasted the poplar column, that his daughter, Mary Steichen Calderone spoke:   "The lovely garden created by my father came to mean as much to him as did the garden at Giverny to Monet—a bottomless well for creativity, peace, challenge, joy, inspiration, surcease, renewal—and sheer sensual pleasure." 

Unknown photographer, Steichen and Kate in the Garden at Voulangis, photograph, Steichen Family Collection, from the US National Gallery of Art

 

Edward Steichen, The Voulangis Garden, May 1908, oil on canvas, Steichen Family Collection, from the US National Gallery of Art.  The woman pictured is Steichen's wife Clara.

  Memories of it remain in his photographs, the Heavy Roses (1914),

and the poplars in a three-color halftone from 1913...

source

......could one of these have been the trunk carved by Brancusi?

I have never had success with delphiniums in my brutal Oklahoma summers.  But I will try again, in a rare shady spot in my garden, with Connecticut Yankees, for Edward Steichen's sake. 


Sources:

I first found information on Steichen's delphiniums in an article by Ceila Hartmann at the MoMA blog.

There are two sources I haven't been able to access:  a full account of the exhibit in Gedrim, Ronald J. "Edward Steichen's 1936 Exhibition of Delphinium Blooms," in: History of Photography (vol. 17, No. 4, Winter 1993, London: Taylor and Francis), pp.352-363, and  "Delphinium, delphinium and more delphinium!" by Steichen himself published in the journal of the New York Botanical Garden, The Garden (March 1949).  If you have a copy of either please share them!

The Heavy Roses image is widely available around the web but the one in this post is from Christies, where the original sold for $108,000 in 2005.

See also an enlightening local history article about Steichen's time in Redding Connecticut.

Lumiere Press has published a very beautiful and equivalently expensive volume of newly discovered photos from Steichen's time in Voulangis.