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?