In September, when my husband and dog and I were staying in an Airbnb in Asheville, NC and waiting on news that would determine where we’d ultimately be moving to, I randomly started two new Instagram accounts. It was a nerve-wracking time and I needed some distraction, so I made an account for my collection of vintage poodle photos and later on an account for the old gardening pictures I was coming across online.
The garden account is called In Their Gardens—a take on the title of my favorite Vita Sackville-West gardening book. When I started the account I thought that I’d fill it up with very aspirational photos of beautiful gardens of the past, but I quickly found myself much more drawn to pictures of spaces that were less grand and more personal. I did come across plenty of vintage travel photographs and Kodachrome slides of some of the great gardens. They’re just not as interesting to me as the pictures people took of their own smaller, much less perfect gardens.
In these gardens, roses crawl up chain link fences and breeze blocks, and plantings are often pushed out into the far perimeters of the yard. Slick new 1950s houses are fronted by neat rectangles of perfectly spaced marigolds and petunias, with metal water meter boxes serving as garden sculptures. Small, square photos frame the 1950s/1960s suburban dream in landscape form: a white picket fence, a window box filled with pansies, potted geraniums on a clean cement patio.
But not all of the gardens are neat. Some are—unfashionably then, but fashionably now—overgrown with tall grasses and cottage garden flowers. Hollyhocks, sweet peas, lupines. Dahlias, even! Lots of them. Small herbaceous borders spill out onto dirt driveways. Sometimes you can’t really tell where flower beds begin and grass ends. It’s all tangled together.
The people are sometimes interacting with the garden, caught by the camera in the middle of a task. Pulling a weed, holding the hose, picking a strawberry. Or they might just be standing proudly in front of what they created. I really like the photos of people lounging in their gardens, aluminum lawn chairs pulled into the middle of the grass on a sunny day. Or of them sitting with a drink on a patio surrounded by roses. How nice!
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I was spending so many hours looking through old photos of gardens (not to mention poodles) during a time when everything seemed scary and uncertain. There’s something so comforting to me in those old domestic photos, especially mid-century ones. I’m really not sure why. It’s not that I’d like to live back then—it may look like it was a simpler time to be alive and I’m sure it was for some people, but not for everyone. It wasn’t an easy time and it definitely wasn’t a fair time. And of course, a photo is only a photo, and it’s never going to give away the whole story.
It’s just that these people in their gardens seemed so steady and solid, their lives so settled. Did I want their lives? No. But I wanted to believe that something steady and solid existed for us, in whatever form it took.
Seeking out comfort from the past during nerve-wracking times of my life isn’t something new for me. In high school, when I was depressed and shy and dealing with scoliosis stuff that made me feel like an outsider, I wanted to disappear into the 19th century novels I was reading. It was the late ‘90s; my sister subscribed to Seventeen and I subscribed to Victoria. I wasn’t cool. But I liked these things because they weren’t considered cool. Definitely not at my high school, at least.
I liked them because they were lovely and welcoming in their own way. Escapist, warm, sometimes kitsch. I liked the connection that they, as well as my other old person hobbies, gave me to my grandparents. When I was in high school, one of my great-grandmothers lent me her Jane Austen novels, and I inherited my other great-grandma’s knitting needles after she passed away. My dad tells me that I also inherited my love of flower gardening from her, and that she had had a beautiful garden in the Midwest. I wish I had a photo of her in it. I wonder if her garden looked anything like the gardens in the old photos I’m posting? It was definitely the same era.
When I first started gardening it really wasn’t considered to be a very cool hobby, which probably made me want to do it more. But things have changed a lot since then, especially ever since the pandemic. There’s so much good flower growing content on Instagram now that I can’t keep up, and I honestly think that gardening is going to one day take over the houseplant craze. It should! I love keeping up with modern garden design and reading Gardens Illustrated, and I just walked the High Line today. What was that little gold/burgandy-striped crocus and why didn’t I take a photo of it?
I want to see as many of the modern and naturalistic gardens as I can while I’m here in New York, but when it comes to my own garden I think I really want it to look like it was created by a little old lady in 1955. Or by a Barbara Pym character. Or by my great-grandma back in Dubuque, Iowa.
Garden Notes:
Speaking of Gardens Illustrated, did you know that if you have a library card with access to the Libby app, you can digitally check out lots of garden magazines for free? I’m not sure if it’s just in the US or not, but there are so many good ones on there, and from around the world, too.
I’ll do a proper March garden post next week, but so far the cold frame/bin is working! The sweet peas are getting taller and leafier, and I even put some freshly-germinated seedlings out in the cold frame, and they seem to be doing fine.
Daylight saving time was last weekend and Gardener’s World is back on the air this weekend. It may not officially be spring yet, but it really is feeling like it.
Super comfort. Thank you. Very reminiscent of lots of gardens in past before we all got so designer conscious.
Great article and the pictures are great!
You are so good at writing…can’t wait for the next article. Both of my Grandmothers always had flowers and garden’s and my Dad always had a “Rose Garden”.