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

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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.

Brancusi in the Garden

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There is one other thing I think of when I think of Romania and that is Brancusi.  In doing the research on Mogosoaia I ran across this wonderful photo of him and Man Ray in Edward Steichen’s garden at Voulangis.

Brancusi had sculpted his 'Column' directly from one of the poplar trees in the garden in 1926; when Steichen moved back to America Brancusi disassembled it, but not before he and Man Ray toasted its health.

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Forgotten Gardens: Magosoaia

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong; And I am Marie of Romania (Dorothy Parker, 1937)

When I think of Romania I think of Ceausescu. And orphans.  But there was a time when the idea of 'Romania' conjured visions both regal and exotic, an explosive combination, when Matisse painted La Blouse Romaine and Marie of Romania glittered across America via luxury train--the Royal Romanian--with an entourage of 85 and jewels in abundance. 

La Blouse Roumaine by Matisse, 1940

Marthe Bibesco (1911) by Giovanni Boldini, via wikimedia commons

And throughout the 1920s and 1930s Marthe Bibesco, friend to Jean Cocteau, Rainer Marie Rilke and Winston Churchill, attracted so many world leaders to her 17th century castle outside of Bucharest  that it was called a second League of Nations. 

Her guests strolled after dinner in new terraced Italianate gardens leading down to a Venetian-style boat landing; appropriate for a building style that blended Ottoman and Byzantine influences in an architectural style known not as Romanian, but as Brancovan, for the famed Prince of Wallachia who built it and whose empire would eventually become one of a crazy quilt of royal principalities (Moldavia, Bukovina, Bessarabia, Transylvania) stitched into our modern 'Romania'. 

Prince Constantin Brancoveanu constructed the palace in 1698-1702 as a summer residence, and along with it an oak-paved road stretching all the way to his city home in the center of Bucharest (and conveniently, over the estates of his rivals).  The road, the Podul Mogoşoaiei,  not so much the castle, was one of the wonders of its time and even well into the nineteenth century, when it was lit by candlelight.

Bucharest Brancoveanu Palace, 1708 [source]

But Mogosoaia, the house, was by then already in a state of protracted disrepair that began with a plundering at the end of Constantin's reign in 1714 and from which it would not emerge until the 1870s when Niculae Bibesco, then reigning Prince of Wallachia, renovated the estate.  He retained the French gardeners Rohan and Montigny (disappointing, that) to 'replant the park', though I could find precious little information about either Rohan and Montigny or this phase of the landscape's life, and it is likely that it was simply a tree-planted plain similar to that shown at the city palace above, though Montigny *may* have been a rosarian and it would have been entirely appropriate for the time period to have added rose gardens around the house.  

But it was Marthe, with a privileged upbringing that included an old Romanian peasant woman retained to teach her the folk tales and traditions of her country, who valued the palace and park enough to save it for future generations.  The task of renovation was largely accomplished by George Matei Cantacuzino, an unjustly forgotten Romanian architect who restored the house and brought the landscape into its present form which he hoped would symbolize all of Romania:

"The idea was to surround this luminous architecture with a landscape at once vast and intimate, rich and calm, possessed of lively contrasts of sunlight and shade, or warmth and cool, of field and water, to evoke the country as a whole, to represent and contain in the way Versailles represents France, the Escorial Spain, and the gardens of Isfahan all the oases of Persia."

[from Cantacuzino's essay "Mogosoaia:  A Palace, A Garden and a Landscape"  (which I haven't been able to find in English) as quoted in Romanian Modernism by Scoffham and Machedon (which is in English)].

A 1932 visitor described it as "an outside marvel, an inside marvel, a marvel around – a marvel from the secret little Florentine garden, in which the rowan grows amid stone slabs along the beautiful and haughty rose, hanging on the vaults extending the old Brancovan kitchen, to the flowered terraces, whose steps are soaked by the foul waters of the lake, on which mirror surface large water lily leaves sprawl. Everything is harmony in this work without dissonances: no broken line, no empty space troubles the eye."

[from the present day website of the Magosoaia palace]

"Mogosoaia is not only a princely residence, a lonely landscape or a great estate. Mogosoaia is a sphere, an entire part of a country, a landscape taken from reminiscence, founded by the creative ambition of a series of generations that organized their lives for the functioning of their principles and their aspirations…. Mogosoaia is not only the image of the past, but also the expression of a live present, the testimony of a becoming. This is why Mogosoaia occupies such a special place among the historical monuments of Romania”

When George Cantacuzino wrote those words, he could not have imagined Mogosoaia's future or his own:  that he would be imprisoned by the communists and his beloved landscape would become a site for hosting homages to a dictator, the orchards cut down, and the garden left to ruin.

But after that long darkness, the restored landscape has absorbed another part of Romania:  it is where they brought the toppled statues of Lenin and former prime minister Petru Groza after the dictators finally fell.   

Iosif Kiraly, Reconstruction (Mogosoaia, Lenin and Groza, 4), 2007-2009, from the exhibit Territories of The In/Human“ (April 30 – August 1, 2010, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart

Sources:

I first learned of  Magosoaia after randomly stumbling on the next to last photo shown, a 1932 photogravure of the landscape that is part of a set for sale on amazon.   

The other period images are from a dissertation on Romanian architect G.M. Cantacuzino by Dan Teodorovici, available online but in German.  

 Information on Queen Marie's American tour is available at historylink:  see her visit to Seattle, and her dedication of the Maryhill Museum.  See a video of her visit at youtube.

 The best source of information on Mogosoaia's history is the palace's website; it is now a cultural center.