Portraits of dried leaves by Friends, 1816 (the year without a summer)

Julius

Friedrich

Ferdinand

In the long winter of 1816, the year without even a summer, there were food riots in the UK and famines in China and red snow falling in Italy, following on an ungenial, incessant rainfall that forced Mary Shelley and her friends to stay inside and write scary stories (Frankenstein being surely an unanticipated consequence of climatic variation). 

And Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld and his friends, the brothers Ferdinand and Friedrich Olivier, passed their time that long long winter in what must be the gentlest competition I've ever known:  vying with each other to make precise drawings of dried leaves.

Sources:
I found Julius' leaves at the blog illustrationart.  The other images are sourced from various places around the web; it isn't clear where these drawings make their home.  If you have additional information, get in touch.

George Orwell's Garden History: "A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray"

 "Some years ago a friend took me to the little Berkshire church of which the celebrated Vicar of Bray was once the incumbent. (Actually it is a few miles from Bray, but perhaps at that time the two livings were one.) In the churchyard there stands a magnificent yew tree which, according to a notice at its foot, was planted by no less a person than the Vicar of Bray himself. And it struck me at the time as curious that such a man should have left such a relic behind him.

The Vicar of Bray, though he was well equipped to be a leader-writer on THE TIMES, could hardly be described as an admirable character. Yet, after this lapse of time, all that is left of him is a comic song and a beautiful tree, which has rested the eyes of generation after generation and must surely have outweighed any bad effects which he produced by his political quislingism.

Thibaw, the last King of Burma, was also far from being a good man. He was a drunkard, he had five hundred wives--he seems to have kept them chiefly for show, however--and when he came to the throne his first act was to decapitate seventy or eighty of his brothers. Yet he did posterity a good turn by planting the dusty streets of Mandalay with tamarind trees which cast a pleasant shade until the Japanese incendiary bombs burned them down in 1942.

The poet, James Shirley, seems to have generalised too freely when he said that "Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in their dust". Sometimes the actions of the unjust make quite a good showing after the appropriate lapse of time. When I saw the Vicar of Bray's yew tree it reminded me of something, and afterwards I got hold of a book of selections from the writings of John Aubrey and reread a pastoral poem which must have been written some time in the first half of the seventeenth century, and which was inspired by a certain Mrs Overall.

Mrs Overall was the wife of a Dean and was extensively unfaithful to him. According to Aubrey she "could scarcely denie any one", and she had "the loveliest Eies that were ever seen, but wondrous wanton". The poem (the "shepherd swaine" seems to have been somebody called Sir John Selby) starts off:

Downe lay the Shepherd Swaine
So sober and demure
Wishing for his wench againe
So bonny and so pure
With his head on hillock lowe
And his arms akimboe
And all was for the losse of his
Hye nonny nonny noe. . . .
Sweet she was, as kind a love
As ever fetter'd Swaine;
Never such a daynty one
Shall man enjoy again.
Sett a thousand on a rowe
I forbid that any showe
Ever the like of her
Hye nonny nonny noe.

As the poem proceeds through another six verses, the refrain "Hye nonny nonny noe" takes on an unmistakably obscene meaning, but it ends with the exquisite stanza:

But gone she is the prettiest lasse
That ever trod on plaine.
What ever hath betide of her
Blame not the Shepherd Swaine.
For why? She was her owne Foe,
And gave herself the overthrowe
By being so franke of her
Hye nonny nonny noe.

Mrs Overall was no more an exemplary character than the Vicar of Bray, though a more attractive one. Yet in the end all that remains of her is a poem which still gives pleasure to many people, though for some reason it never gets into the anthologies. The suffering which she presumably caused, and the misery and futility in which her own life must have ended, have been transformed into a sort of lingering fragrance like the smell of tobacco-plants on a summer evening.

But to come back to trees. The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil. A year or two ago I wrote a few paragraphs in TRIBUNE about some sixpenny rambler roses from Woolworth's which I had planted before the war. This brought me an indignant letter from a reader who said that roses are bourgeois, but I still think that my sixpence was better spent than if it had gone on cigarettes or even on one of the excellent Fabian Research Pamphlets.

Recently, I spent a day at the cottage where I used to live, and noted with a pleased surprise--to be exact, it was a feeling of having done good unconsciously--the progress of the things I had planted nearly ten years ago. I think it is worth recording what some of them cost, just to show what you can do with a few shillings if you invest them in something that grows.

First of all there were the two ramblers from Woolworth's, and three polyantha roses, all at sixpence each. Then there were two bush roses which were part of a job lot from a nursery garden. This job lot consisted of six fruit trees, three rose bushes and two gooseberry bushes, all for ten shillings. One of the fruit trees and one of the rose bushes died, but the rest are all flourishing. The sum total is five fruit trees, seven roses and two gooseberry bushes, all for twelve and sixpence. These plants have not entailed much work, and have had nothing spent on them beyond the original amount. They never even received any manure, except what I occasionally collected in a bucket when one of the farm horses happened to have halted outside the gate.

Between them, in nine years, those seven rose bushes will have given what would add up to a hundred or a hundred and fifty months of bloom. The fruit trees, which were mere saplings when I put them in, are now just about getting in their stride. Last week one them, a plum, was a mass of blossom, and the apples looked as if they were going to do fairly well. What had originally been the weakling of the family, a Cox's Orange Pippin--it would hardly have been included in the job lot if it had been a good plant--had grown into a sturdy tree with plenty of fruit spurs on it. I maintain that it was a public-spirited action to plant that Cox, for these trees do not fruit quickly and I did not expect to stay there long. I never had an apple off it myself, but it looks as if someone else will have quite a lot. By their fruits ye shall know them, and the Cox's Orange Pippin is a good fruit to be known by. Yet I did not plant it with the conscious intention of doing anybody a good turn. I just saw the job lot going cheap and stuck the things into the ground without much preparation.

A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays--when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren? Nor does anybody plant a quince, a mulberry or a medlar. But these are garden trees which you can only be expected to plant if you have a patch of ground of your own. On the other hand, in any hedge or in any piece of waste ground you happen to be walking through, you can do something to remedy the appalling massacre of trees, especially oaks, ashes, elms and beeches, which has happened during the war years.

Even an apple tree is liable to live for about 100 years, so that the Cox I planted in 1936 may still be bearing fruit well into the twenty-first century. An oak or a beech may live for hundreds of years and be a pleasure to thousands or tens of thousands of people before it is finally sawn up into timber. I am not suggesting that one can discharge all one's obligations towards society by means of a private re-afforestation scheme. Still, it might not be a bad idea, every time you commit an antisocial act, to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at the appropriate season, push an acorn into the ground.

And, if even one in twenty of them came to maturity, you might do quite a lot of harm in your lifetime, and still, like the Vicar of Bray, end up as a public benefactor after all."

In 1936, Orwell moved to a small cottage called the "Stores", pictured above, in the tiny village of Wallington, Hertfordshire.  He spent hours working in the garden, and ten years later published A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray in the Tribune, 26 April 1946.  

The Vicar of Bray is a satirical song about a 17th century cleric who repeatedly changed his theology to suit whoever was in power and thus retain his living; the exact vicar who inspired the song is unknown.

In spite of Orwell's optimism about the continuity of his garden, his biographers (Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, Orwell:  the transformation) record that "according to a later occupant of the house, which is now known as Monk's Fitchett, the survival rate was not high, and there is nothing left to show of Orwell's tenancy but a few of the roses in front of the house."

I think there should be signs that say
"(Insert famous personage) GARDENED HERE."

The Cabbage that is King: Brassica oleracae longata

Or, the curious case of the seven-foot tall cabbage, which brought two seedsellers and one Reverend Laycock of Hampshire into Westminster County Court in 1898.  The sellers of seed were seeking to collect  £24 from the good Reverend for cabbage seeds with which they had supplied him; he was countersuing because the resulting plants were, well, not as described.

He had a full 200 acres--20,000 plants in all--of strange, tree-like stalks with cabbage heads waving like leafy nests at the top.  One can only imagine his consternation as the plants shot past normal cabbage height  to three feet tall, then four, five, six and "grew on until [they were] seven feet above the ground”.

At this description disbelieving laughter ensued in court, until Rev. Laycock produced Exhibit A:  a cabbage that was in fact “seven feet from the root”, about 4ft of which was “stout bare stump, then a cluster of leaves from which several shoots ascended”.  

This is the sort of courtroom drama that you rarely see on Law and Order.  "Your honor, I would like to submit as evidence this gigantic cabbage."

Cue the expert witness, a horticulturist who identifed the beast as Brassica oleracae longata.  Tree cabbage or giant cow cabbage or long-jacks or Jersey Kale is found on the Channel Islands, where it has historically been grown for, wait for it...walking sticks. 

Kew's Economic Botany Collection contains several of them, described as large, lightweight, and highly varnished, a product which was exported from the islands in annual quantities of as many as 30,000 in 1906, when "one could behold in almost every farm or garden this useful cabbage plant..here you may see a dozen of them sheltering the door of a little hut, there a big cluster grown to supply the cattle with food...you may notice them placed in a line along the edge of a garden, forming a picturesque and tidy border and a quaint kind of fence". 

The production of walking sticks had started on the islands more than 40 years previously.  To yield a strong, straight stem the lower leaves were stripped off as the plant grew, providing food for the table, wrappings for butter and cheese, and an excellent and now forgotten fodder for sheep or cattle.

Philip Miller's Gardener's Dictionary of 1835 asserts not only that the plant can grow up to sixteen feet tall (other sources list eighteen and even twenty feet), but also that sixty plants would provide sufficient fodder for a cow for an entire year, and that it lasted four years without fresh planting since only the side leaves were used.  Sheep fed upon the walking stick cabbages were said to produce wool of the finest silken texture up to 25 inches long.

Cabbage stems were also usd for roofing small buildings by the islanders, but their most lucrative transformation was into the walking sticks.  After several months (years? accounts differ) drying of the stems with the roots still attached, the sticks were smoothed, varnished, embellished and sold to tourists for a shilling.

They'll set you back more than that,  £37 now, from Philip and Jacquelyn Johnson, the last makers and purveyors of cabbage walking sticks on the Islands, who were featured on the BBC's Countryfile in an episode on Jersey broadcast in 2010 (the link is to the full episode; go to 8:50 to see the cabbages).

Our Reverend Laycock, though, remained undettered by any new economic potential for his strange crop.  Accompanied by more courtroom laughter, he asserted that he had desired cabbages, not walking sticks!   The judge fined the seedsellers £21 for breach of contract.

Sources:

--I first learned of the 'walking stick cabbage' in  D.G. Hessayon's Armchair Book of the Garden, Transworld Publishers, London, 1983, p. 186. 

--The tale of the court case, and the first image is from an article by Paul Chambers in the Fortean Times, which references The Daily Graphic, 26 April 1898.  It is also listed as being printed in The Farmer's Magazine in 1836.  The image also serves as the frontispiece of the book  The Giant Cabbage of the Channel Islands, a Guernsey historical monograph from 1974 by Southcombe Parker published by Toucan Press.  I love that there is an entire book on giant cabbages and can't wait for my copy to arrive in the mail. 

--An excellent 'plant portrait'  of the walking stick cabbage, from which the 1906 quotes are taken, is available from Kew as originally published in Economic Botany 54(2) pp. 141-143, 2000.

--Advice on growing walking stick cabbage can be found here and here.   A recent report on growing (and cooking) it is here. 

--Seeds may be ordered from any number of online purveyors.

Crooked Forests

A forest of about 400 pine trees in Western Poland all grow with a 90 degree northward  bend at the base of their trunks.  The patch, within a a larger forest of straight growing pine trees, was planted in approximately 1930, and it is assumed that their peculiar growth habit is due to some mechanical intervention, though the reason behind it is unknown.  A commenter on the original post (at discoverynews) said he was taught to do this by his grandfather, with the intent of making saplings grow ready-shaped for canes.  So perhaps this was a cane forest interrupted by World War II.

The twisted trees of Saskatchewan Canada are more mysterious. The grove of deformed aspens is on private land, and though the Friends of the Crooked Bush speculate that the trees could be due to meteorites or even UFO's, a more likely explanation seems a rare genetic mutation such as that causing contortion in the Henry Lauder's Walking Stick (Corylus avellana 'Contorta').  When vegetatively propagated and grown at locations in Manitoba, the Saskatchewan aspens retain their crookedness.

But my favorite crooked tree story is this one from my home state of Oklahoma, and the Land Run town of Shawnee (which oddly enough also happens to be the birthplace of Brad Pitt):

"In a whimsical moment" Shawnee residents Frank Witherspoon and Gule Rinneger went down to the banks of the North Canadian river, dug up two elm saplings, and brought them back to town in a one-horse hack.   Witherspoon decided that he would form an arch of the two trees by tying them together in front of his newly built house.  Witnesses said that the plants were more than six feet tall, and that he tied them together as high as he could reach, using ropes and burlap to bind them.  In spite of the mischief of neighborhood children, who used to cut the bindings, he was successful in his efforts to grow the trees into a knot.[source]

They grew more closely attached through the years, bending together with age. In 1930, their picture appeared in the syndicated "Believe It or Not" column of Robert Ripley, and again in the book "Nature Woodland Wonders" in 1945.  The Oklahoma state highway commission included them in its booklet, "New Thrills Ahead." at about the same time; they were by that time just a few feet away from State Highway 270 and a regular stop for travelers.  I can't find any information on when they went at last; but I'm sure they went together. 

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house. 

1960s Landscapes in the Help

Nearly a year ago, now, I got a request through the blog for more information about the early 1960s landscape, about which little (so far!) has been written. It was for a film, for the exterior setting of a ranch house in the American South in which lived a couple with one young child and one on the way and who were aspiring to social status. This was the house:

The foundation plantings are right but they would have been new and raw in 1960; small and tentative, as aspirational as the couple in the house. One of the most telling features of the landscape is actually the pole light; its white cap is just visible in the above photo near the front door.  Lighting not just the house but the yard was definitely a luxury, and became a tell-tale sign of class in the 1950s. Watch for it in the movie; the set designers appropriately show the light emphasized with garish annuals around its base.

I also recommended some newly planted rose bushes surrounded by box...Jacqueline Kennedy had renovated and replanted the White House Rose Garden in the early 1960s  and her influence on American women was pervasive.  You can see the rose garden in the first part of the Kennedy home movie below.   But that recommendation didn't make it into the movie. 



(for a look at the White House gardens over time, see the lovely series of historical photographs of the Rose Garden (the West garden) and the East Garden at the White House museum.) 

So I sent this advice, and promptly forgot about it. But the movie has just been released…it was The Help, about the struggles of the black women who worked in the households of well-to-do whites in Jim Crow Mississippi.

I watched it today in a movie theatre in the most prosperous square miles of Nashville Tennessee, right across the parking lot from the offices of the Junior League. When you see the movie you’ll understand what that means. The mid-day crowd of ladies-who-lunch was of a social type peculiar to the American South; of a piece with the women depicted in the film except with sleek bobs instead of 1960s bouffants. The strands of pearls were still in evidence, and the yard lights still glow over their front sidewalks. But on this day their laughter was at times too loud to have come from a comfortable place.

Hay in the Landscape

I grew up with this painting on the wall of my parent's home;   a gigantic haybale constructed by my great-grandmother Rose's family on the plains of Colorado.  That's her, in overalls and straw hat, on the right.  The utterly practical act of cutting, stacking, and storing grass against the winter leads naturally to a sculptural intervention in the landscape on a scale to strike envy into the heart of the modern 'land artist'...who might in their fondest dreams wish for the opportunity to dot acres of shorn fields with squares and circles and bishops hats that sparkle with morning dew and stretch into shadows at sunset.

Familiarity has made it invisible and mechanization has made it uniform, but I remember my farming forbears talking alot about the hay, taking pride in the quality, and the extent, and in the baling.  Talk of haying still often includes tales of near-death experiences accompanied by a puffed-out chest, wild gesticulation, and nods of assent all around.  Everyone knows it is difficult, and only for the strong.

Like many vernacular landscape traditions though, hay can be ignored by historians drawn more to famous garden makers and exotic orangeries,  in spite of haying's rich documentation in landscape art.

Alan Ritch's site "Hay in Art", though no longer being actively updated (so be warned that some links are broken), is devoted to the unique imagery of hay as it is shorn, stacked, stored and strewn...from the choreographic scythers in the 15th century Limbourg Brothers Book of Hours (June), to the twentieth century architectonic images of Australian William Delafield Cook

And stopping at all points in between, including hay as a background to Rosalind Russel pin-ups photos and of course all of those impressionists who loved the diffused light off a haystack.  Of particular note is the essay on "Countryside around Dixton Manor", an unattributed painting c. 1715, whose panaroma of the countryside includes a comprehensive depiction of the haymaking ritual (including Morris dancers!) as conducted in the fields not far from the Cheltenham Art Museum where it now resides.

Ritch also describes his visits to hay-making localities--an interesting sort of way to select travel destinations--including the dream-like landscapes of Maramureş, in the northwest of Romania.  He calls the region 'hay-heaven' which seems apt:

Maramures is apparently one of the only regions where hay is still treated in the medieval fashion, and is the subject of a kickstarter project by photographer Davin Ellicson to document the lives and traditions of 'Europe's Last Peasants', including haymaking (that's his photo below), before the culture is absorbed by modernity.  I'm supporting it...you can do so as well at the above link.

 

Garden History Images of the Week: Mexican landscapes in the Codex pictorius Mexicanus of Ignacio Tirsch

These images are so beautiful that they actually make me feel the pangs of nostalgia--for a Mexico I never saw and never will see.  Circa 1762, they are the work of Father Ignacio Tirsch,  Jesuit missionary to the Baja peninsula, who over the five years of his sojourn there created a portfolio of forty-eight drawings rich in garden history; recording both productive and decorative landscapes, as well as native flora.  The entire volume--architecture, costumes, flora and fauna--is a treasure of the Czech National Library, online at manuscriptorium (click on 'facsimile' to see the images).

Atomic Gardening lecture June 7, 2 pm

Dear readers,
Just a quick note to let you know that I'll be speaking about the Atomic Gardens at the Garden Museum in London on June 7 at 2 in the afternoon.  You can register here:  http://atomicgardening.eventbrite.com/

I'd love to see you there!
More soon,
gardenhistorygirl
P.S.  The fabulous Fernando Caruncho will be speaking that evening...register for both!

On Rainbow Fountains and Rainbow Portraits

Though I’m continuing work on the Atomic Gardens (and always working on Art Deco Gardens), I’m trying to time travel back from the twentieth century to the seventeenth, as I am due in June to talk about one of my most  favorite places:  the great garden at Wilton House, as built by Isaac de Caus in the 1630s. It was the first garden I ever wrote about.  Having crossed the Atlantic with a very large suitcase to reach a student room approximately the size of an American jail cell, having told my befuddled department chair that I was going to take a year off from the lab to study garden history, and having read on the plane my tutor Timothy Mowl’s  Gentlemen and Players: Gardeners of the English Landscape, which was to be our text for the course, I was captivated by this description of one of Wilton's garden fountains, a 'mystery of garden history':

Monsieur de Caus had here a contrivance,
by the turning of a cocke, to shew three rainbowes,
the secret whereof he did keep to himself; he would not let the gardener,
who shewes it to strangers,
 know how to doe it; and so, upon his death, it is lost.
--John Aubrey, The Natural History of Wiltshire, c.1656

Making three rainbows was a pretty advanced trick for the time period,  before Descartes and Newton had unwoven the mysteries of the bow.  Fountains purposely designed and sited to make rainbows were something of a garden fad in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when along with other hydraulic effects like weeping statues, chirping birds, and surprise jets of water they made the garden grotto a popular diversion and a great occasion for flirting.  Doubled rainbows are relatively common, but I knew that to make a triple threat Isaac would have needed a mirror, and on a trip to Wilton House I found one, hanging in a rather dark corner of the Upper Cloisters.

Knyff made a grand painting of the Wilton grounds about 1700, and added insets of the most important garden features.  Isaac's garden is already all but gone, and the grotto has been moved to a new location but is still intact; the inset shows an interior space with ball balanced atop a water jet and a curiously painted roof: 

The dark lines are columns, with capitals, and above them an arching roof that was described as being like a crown or coronet in appearance, and in which we can see a green four-square garden plot, and off in the corner, some small trees and a road.  The roof of the Grotto was a mirror. Knyff had painted it reflecting the ground plane outside.

The painting is now hanging in a much more prominent location in the house, which is pleasing. 

So I knew how Isaac made the rainbow, but I still wanted to understand what it meant. Our perception of the rainbow is so tied up with Newton’s that we’ve forgotten that people used to think there were only three colors (or maybe four or five) or that they were a reflection, in the heavens, of the essential elements of the earth, and platonic philosophy, or that a triple rainbow, in particular, was used by Dante to symbolize the Trinity. To understand the symbolic significance of the rainbow and what it meant to its viewers I needed to go deeper into the past, back into the Elizabethan era. And there one cannot help but run smack dab into this:

The Rainbow Portrait of QE1.

It is famously enigmatic; no one knows who painted it, or when, or why, or what it means, and it resides still in splendor at Hatfield House, built by Elizabeth’s Secretary of State Robert Cecil in 1611, though it's not clear when and how he acquired the portrait.  My dear friend Valerie drove me all the way there to stand in front of it for far too long, and lean in to see its white rainbow far too close, so that we were followed around through the rest of the house by a plainclothesman.

Adding to the mystery of a sketchy provenance is the painting’s torturous symbology: a serpent with a jewel in its mouth, a cloak of embroidered eyes and ears, a cryptic motto; all of which have been given equally contortionist interpretations by scholars. And never do they twist so much as when they try to explain its seminal motif: a rainbow held in the hand of a supreme ruler--an image unique in art--which gives the portrait its long-held title and yet it hardly seems a rainbow at all, just a ghostly apparition of what should be a brightly colored self.

So what is a rainbow without color? What can it mean? The idea that perhaps the pigments in the bow alone had faded (though the rest of the portrait blazes with color) has been broached and discredited. What is a rainbow without color, a white rainbow?

A moonbow.

The rainbow is of course simply the product of light refraction and reflection when passing through a raindrop. Any light source will do, the moon as well as the sun, though it must be bright. It is only our own perceptive powers that cause it to fade:  the limited ability of the human eye to detect color at night makes the bow seem pale and ghostly.

The unknown artist of the Rainbow Portrait (which should really be called the Moonbow Portrait) has rendered his white rainbow with exquisite sensitivity, showing the impression of spectral bands that are brightest in its central region (remember Newton's ROYGBIV so the center is green) and even giving it a greenish hue; an uncannily accurate representation for the sixteenth century.  He could not have known that the maximum color sensitivity of the eye is in the green wavelengths.

Moonbows are rare. While you may see many solar rainbows in your lifetime, most of us will die without ever having seen their lunar counterparts. Coupled with the unusual accuracy of the bow’s portrayal, it begs the question of whether the moonbow in the painting might reflect an actual meteorological event, something special that someone connected to the painting had seen. And who, who in the Virgin Queen’s circle saw a moonbow?

On the tenth of September about midnight...a large and perfect rainbow by moonlight, in the shape and bigness of those formed more commonly by the sun, though in colours not so various, but chiefly inclining to a pale or whitish flame.
--The Works of Sir Walter Raleigh

There is much more to say--about Elizabeth’s symbolic associations with the moon and the painting’s other cryptic symbols and its motto and who might have painted the portrait, and why the National Gallery ‘could not find a place’ for my paper on the topic--but this is enough, dear readers, to show where a little garden history can take you.

[P.S.  If you're really interested you can read the two papers I've published about Wilton: 

"Proof of the Heavenly Iris:  The Fountain of Three Rainbows at Wilton House, Wiltshire”

Garden History. 35-1, 51-67 (2007) and “Producing Pleasantness: The Waterworks of Isaac de Caus, 

Outlandish Engineer”, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 29-3,169-191 (2009).

 I would love to invite you to the Wilton lecture but it is already full with a waiting list even.]

The Landscape with Too Few Lovers

For your Valentine's Day, New Zealand artist Colin McMahon's "Landscape with Too Few Lovers", from his 1958 Northland Panels.  Hope your landscape is full of lovers today!

Garden History Image of the Week

A child's drawing of a sod-house homestead in Nebraska, c. 1885. [via the grovefamily genealogy site]

Corn in the front yard was not the norm on homesteads, but the sod house was always intended to be a temporary dwelling anyway, just until money could be raised for the lumber to build a proper wood frame home.  The symmetry, in age and placement, of the two trees makes it likely that they were intentionally planted.

My own great-great grandmother lived in a sod house on the plains of Colorado. 

The Garden that Climbs the Stairs: Verb Gardens

 

I've been thinking lately about this garden, a temporary 2009 installation at BilbaoJardin by Balmori Associates of New York, because of how rare it is to see a garden portrayed as doing anything but predictably
grow
-ing
-n
-er
-s

as if we didn't know that already.

What does it mean to make a garden that is [insert verb here] speaking, studying, playing, arriving, pushing, pedaling, blushing, juggling?  Can a garden--not a garden element, but the whole landscape--stand and stare, wobble, whistle or whirl?  If you could make a verb garden, what would it be?   

Modern Pressed Flowers

Via dezeen, the timeless art of pressed flowers transformed into three dimensions by designer Ignacio Canales Aracil:

"The flowers are held together without any structure or glue, they stand and stick together as the straw in a hat after being dried and pressed all at once. The roughness of the process which requires lots of physical effort contrast with the delicacy and fragility of the finished sculpture."

Georgian Shrubberies and Google Ngrams

Shrubberies at Carlton House as engraved by Woollett, c. 1760

I work some in the eighteenth-century but tend to find it tiresome because this epoch more than any other gives rise to scholars who obsess over small details and like to argue about them.  One of these is--ahem--the origin of the "shrubbery".  Say it with me:  "shrubbery".  Now say it five times fast. shrubberyshrubberyshrubberyshrubberyshrubbery.  That's how it feels to be in a room with shrubbery scholars.  I KNOW! Like you, I thought shrubbery was invented by the Knights who say Ni!  Au contraire, mon frère.  You have much to learn.  

"Now think of the gaiety of a Shrubbery ! —unlike to the monastic melancholy of the old wood walks ; and herein you may plant all the neat trees I have before mentioned, with ponds at proper distances, for gold fish, and benches with Latin mottos—to puzzle the ladies; besides temples dedicated to the heathen gods!"   Just think of it!  Goldfish!  Heathen Temples!  Puzzling Ladies! Do read the whole of Horace Walpole's satire of the "Modern Taste" in gardening, c. 1780 here;  it's only a page long, with f's for s's adding to its delight. 

More enlightening is a description in "The complete fabulist" by G. Grey:  "In the quarters of a shrubbery, where deciduous plants and evergreens were intermingled with an air of negligence, it happened that a Rose grew not far from a Laurustinus." (also c. 1780; don't believe the Google books date as there is a known error on the book's frontispiece)

Or this of the shrubbery at the Leasowes, c. 1775:  "The scene now changes to an open lawn, where the path waves up to the house and shrubbery, laid out in taste, and agreeably bushed by clumps of evergreens and flowering shrubs; a small lawn in the midst, has a statue of Venus, well executed, and the pedestal gives us these beautiful lines..."

and a helpful summary is the description of the poet William Cowper's landscape at Weston (c. 1793):  "The shrubbery..was very generally admired, being a delightful little labyrinth, composed of flowering shrubs, and adorned with gravel walks, having convenient seats placed at appropriate distances."

So. Mixtures of evergreens and deciduous flowering shrubs arranged in a 'theatrical' style (by height, basically) adjacent to open lawn, winding walks, appropriately placed features to engage the eye, inspire the mind, and rest the body...that's basically it.  But the real reason I'm wading into the discussion of shrubberies--where believe me angels fear to tread--is to point out the usefulness of a new google tool for historians, garden or otherwise.

As if making the world's literature fully word-searchable for free wasn't enough, Google labs will now analyze the number of appearances of a word, or a combination of words, in literature over time, and call it an Ngram.  How much do we love Google?  According to today's New York Times, this opens up a a new field of linguistic and cultural investigation: culturomics.  Below is the appearance of the word 'shrubbery', which analysis I shall refer to forthwith as gardenhistoromics:  

 

You can see that the word 'shrubbery' is basically non-existent prior to 1750  (okay, there are five references listed 1700-1750 but I know all of them to be misdated; you do have to watch Google on the early dates),  with budding usage 1780ish (note the above references), and then really takes off in the early 1800s, which is basically when widely-published J.C. Loudon begins to not only codify the shrubbery as a garden feature, but to use the word as an alternate for 'shrub'.

That is the most obvious origin of the word, and so it is tempting to think it was just a simple linguistic analogue.  But here again the Ngram can help, because it can show two words at once.   I've confined the data in this set to between 1700-1800 so it isn't compressed by the huge spike in the nineteenth century.  It indicates a lack of correlation between the words, with 'shrub' (the plant, in red) clearly pre-dating 'shrubbery' (the garden feature, in blue), which in its time would have been New Word of the Year! like 'bromance' or 'webinar'.  Or 'culturomics'.  Note especially that 'shrub' usage actually drops BELOW 'shrubbery' usage between 1780-1790, the critical period for shrubberies and the approximate dates of the references I've quoted. Just 10 years.  What do we have here ladies and gentlemen?  A fad.

 
If you're saying things like, "but how is this affected by the increase in number of books published", then you have the mind of a scientist and you'll be happy to know that Google normalizes by the number of books published per year.  But also the data from the graph can be downloaded as csv files and corrected for any number of variables.  This is so cool.  

UPDATE:  Alert reader Adam has pointed out that this can also be affected by OCR errors, especially because of the whole 'is it an f or an s' issue in page scans of old literature.  I did make the assumption that such errors would affect 'fhrubs' and 'fhrubberies' equally; to do otherwise would require examining the individual files. 

Atomic Gardens

In March 1959 an unusual group of scientists, government officials, and lesser worthies assembled for a dinner party in the dining hall of the Royal Commonwealth Society, London. Unbeknownst to them, one of the courses was a strange strain of American peanuts: ‘NC 4x’, ‘North Carolina 4th generation X-rayed’ peanuts, produced from seeds that had been exposed to 18,500 roentgen units of x-rays in order to induce mutations. The irradiated peanuts were unusually large--big as almonds, according to those in attendance, outshowing the British groundnuts served alongside--and had reached the dining table through the generosity of their inventor Walter C. Gregory of North Carolina State College, who sent them as a gift to Mrs. Muriel Howorth, Eastbourne, enthusiast for all things atomic.

Disappointed with the reaction of her guests, who were less than appreciative of the great scientific achievement present at table, Muriel afterwards “began inspecting [the] uncooked nuts wondering what to do with them all…I had the idea to…pop an irradiated peanut in the sandy loam to see how this mutant grew.” The “Muriel Howorth” peanut (for she had already named it after herself) germinated in four days and was soon two feet high. She called the newspapers.

Almost immediately there were interviews and television appearances, AP reporters in the driveway and sightseers peering into the glasshouse to get a look at the plant. Its portrait was commissioned and put on display at the Walker Galleries in London. Garden writer Beverley Nichols came to call:

"Yesterday I held in my hands the most sensational plant in Britain.

It is the only one of its kind. Nothing of its sort has ever been seen in the country before.

To me it had all the romance of something from outer space.

It is the first ‘atomic’ peanut.

It is a lush, green plant and gives you a strange, almost alarming sense of thrusting power and lusty health.

It holds a glittering promise in its green leaves, the promise of victory over famine."

Muriel was a great former of societies (about 12, near as I can tell, over her lifetime..she was invariably President), and she immediately constituted the Atomic Gardening Society and published a manual, Atomic Gardening:

"I now felt that by some stroke of luck which is difficult to ascribe to chance, I had been given the opportunity—so much longed for—to bring science right into the homes of the people. I organized an ATOMIC GARDENING SOCIETY to co-ordinate and safeguard the interests of ATOMIC MUTATION EXPERIMENTERS who would work as one body to help scientists produce more food more quickly for more people, and progress horticultural mutation."

The Atomic Gardens grew out of post-WWII efforts to use the colossal energy of the atom for peaceful pursuits in medicine, biology, and agriculture.  'Gamma Gardens’ at national laboratories in the US as well as continental Europe and the USSR bombarded plants with radiation in hopes of producing mutated varieties of larger peanuts, disease resistant wheat, more sugary sugar maples, and African violets with three heads and a singular atomic entrepreneur named C.J. Speas irradiated seeds on his Tennessee farm and sold them to schoolchildren and housewives, among them Mrs. Muriel Howorth.

Atomic Gardens are my current research project, and will soon result in a publication as well as a presentation to take place on February 28, 2011 at the rescheduled (after last year’s volcanic ash debacle) study day on the Landscape of the 1950s. They are just recent enough that there are those still alive who may remember what was at least enough of a cultural moment to to form the plot device for Paul Zindel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.  

If you know anyone that participated, that was involved in laboratory research, or grew the seeds, or was a ‘Mutation Experimenter’, please get in touch…the history of one of gardening’s weirdest moments needs to be captured before it’s too late! (And if you want to hear more, sign up for the 1950s study day at the University of Bristol...)