I spend a lot of time on Pinterest. It’s a great way to search for new ideas, aesthetics, and daydream about gardens. I joined in it’s earliest years. My sister sent it to me knowing how much I would love it. Before pinning stuff online, I was tearing out magazine clippings and saving those (I still do!)
I will admit I spend a lot of time pinning gardens and garden ideas without looking into their sources. I’m just their for the pretty pictures…and that is O.K.. Have you checked out my Farm and Garden board? Please do. It’s where a lot of my garden plans start. While you’re at it, check out my board for Family History. I use it to save research tips, info relevant to my personal genealogy, and ideas for creating.
Today, I want to share a new board I am creating called Vintage & Historic Garden. This one is all about historical gardens and images that relate. For this board, I will not be re-pinning, I will be on the hunt for photos found elsewhere. Most of the pins I hope to find from Open Access collections. I also plan to share photos from sites I use often in my research: The Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. Both have really wonderful digital archives.
I have just made this board public, I hope you enjoy the images I have discovered! Maybe they will add context to a piece of your family history or inspire a heritage space in your garden! I plan on adding to the board every week. It will be interesting to see what sort of images I find. I’m sure the pins will reflect whatever garden mood I am in that week!
Here is just an example of one of the images I’ve pinned!
I don’t know, how about it? I like having a ritual. I say ritual because routine sounds too depressing. As a family historian, general history fan, gardener, and seeker of general quiet, cemeteries fascinate me. I have checked out a few local cemeteries and have a couple I like to visit on occasion, but I am really interested in exploring more rural cemeteries. I’m going to try to research, visit, and document a new cemetery at least one Tuesday a month (or maybe weekly) and when I get home…I’m going to celebrate with tacos, because it is Tuesday after all!
I also partake in volunteer headstone searches for Findagrave.com. That will give me another excuse to get out around the area. If you’ve never used it for researching your genealogy or local history, I highly recommend it.
Cemeteries can be the homes to beautiful old plantings, headstones, local history, and are often set in lovely, little asides out in the country. They can also be holdouts for ecosystems rapidly vanishing. I would love to volunteer as a caretaker for some of these cemeteries
Today, since it’s cold, windy, and nothing is really growing yet. I want to share a few very different ways cemeteries can relate to history, genealogy and gardening.
Prairie Cemeteries: Did you know some of the best preserved native prairies are within the boundaries of pioneer cemeteries? Not only do you get to see and learn about those who settled the frontier, but see what grew there hundreds of years ago. Read up about Pellsville Pioneer Cemetery in Rankin, Illinois, one of many pioneer cemeteries guarding native prairie:
photo byMichael D. Tedesco from Cemetery Prairies Preserve the State’s Horticultural History
Grave Gardens:I have known for many years that many cemeteries in the US became well-loved and well-used public spaces, especially beginning in the mid 19th century. The park like settings were home to specimen trees, shrubs, and flowers. I did not know, until this recent clip on Sunday Morning, about “grave gardeners.” The Woodlands Cemetery in Pennsylvania is amazing. It has a long tradition as public space and grave gardening. Read up on its history here and discover all the amazing gardens planted by volunteers through its Grave Gardeners program. I am excited to discover and maybe visit more cemeteries like this in future (even if I have to travel)!
Local Cemeteries: Just a few short blocks from my house is one our town’s older cemeteries. It’s filled with beautiful monuments, headstones, and planters. It’s also the final resting place of many of Point’s founding citizens. Walk through one of your town’s older cemeteries, read the names. I bet there’s a few you’ll recognize as streets and neighborhoods. It can be a wonderful place for a reflecting walk, learning about local history, and for seeing beautiful, seasonal plantings. In some cases, you may even see historic plantings. Make sure to pay attention to more than just flowers. Cemeteries can be the home of many old shrubs and trees too!
Family Cemeteries: I have a lot of family buried in large cemeteries, a few buried in smaller country cemeteries, and very few buried in family cemeteries. These often tiny, forgotten family plots are dotted all across the United States. Some are hiding in woods, on large farms, on the corners of country roads, and sometimes tucked into neighborhoods. Even if it’s not your family, they are interesting glimpses into the past and sometimes long lasting perennials, trees, or shrubs still grow. Some cemeteries are even marked with historical markers. I would love to the Young Cemetery in Plano, Texas. It’s the final resting place of two members of my Finley line, my 5th great uncle Thomas Finley, and his sister, Prudence (Finley) Jackson along with their families. It’s a well loved pioneer cemetery with the burials of a few of Collin County’s first settlers from the 1840s! Iris and daffodils bloom throughout the cemetery in Spring, something I hope to see for myself, someday!
Cemetery Rose Gardens: I’m not likely to find 200 year old roses growing here in central Wisconsin, but in warmer climates, there are some cemeteries that are home to some very, very old roses. Maybe there are some around here? Who knows? Roses pop up in old cemeteries quite often. Mid summer is a great time to look for them blooming. You can also find some really amazing collections across the country.
Lynchburg, Virginia is home to Old City Cemetery, which holds the commonwealth’s largest antique rose collection. While the collection was started in the 1980’s, many of the cultivars are hundreds of years old.
In Sacramento’s Historic City Cemetery volunteers have worked for over 20 years to collect and grow California’s historic roses. Roses are collected from cemeteries, homesteads, and the wild and replanted at the once derelict cemetery.
UPDATE: Despite having more time than I know what to do with lately, I still don’t fee like I’ve caught up on chores. Ugh. That being said, I am getting ready to pot up my little seedlings, dig up some new beds, and I have a ton of posts in my draft section. There should be a good mix of history, genealogy, and plants in topics coming soon!
UPGRADE: I have acquired 24 landscape timbers to start laying out two new garden beds in the vegetable area. After doing some research on landscape timbers, I decided I am OK with using them in the veggie garden. I have been watching so many British garden shows lately that I am starting to want to call it a “veg patch.” Oh. Boy. The newer process of treating lumber means they are now safer to use in gardens. I did some research and double checked the description on the lumber I bought. So, I feel confident in using these. But, be sure to double check any lumber you choose to add in your garden!
UPGRADE: I have a fancy new camera. I bought it in January, but I am just now starting to get it figured out. It’s aNikon D3500 which I got as bundle from Target while I still worked there. I was able to stack several discounts and get a good deal on it. It will definitely be an upgrade from my S7 phone and my Nikon Coolpix L310. I also bought a few accessories: this Altura wide angle lens and this Altura viewfinder eye piece. The camera and both accessories are great starting points for people like me. I like to take beautiful photos, but really only have high school photography class knowledge. Todd and I both agreed we need to document more adventures and visits to ancestral places!
Enjoy photos of life so far! Can you guess which are from my phone and which are from the new camera!?
Well, here’s to catching up, praying for a lift on the stay-at-home order, warmer weather, and more posts! I can’t wait to get more projects and posts rolling.
~p.s. I am trying out ‘affiliate’ linking. There are affiliate links in this post, but they are only for products I appreciate or use personally!~
A while back, I discovered the glory of watching YouTube shows on our smart TV (it’s new to us). Instead of watching the news, I enjoy my morning cup of coffee with a variety of garden shows. Some, like Garden Answer and Monty Don, I’ve followed for years. Others, I’ve started to seek out and haven’t been disappointed in finding. Craig LeHoullier is my tomato guru and finding his channel was very exciting. I’ve already picked up some new tips for this year’s garden. Recently, I discovered a PBS favorite on YouTube, Growing a Greener World.
A couple of days ago, I was watching Growing a Greener World and Joe Lamp’l introduced his guest for the episode, a gardener so many grew up watching and one of his own inspirations, Paul James. I called my mom to tell her before the episode ended. She watched his show on HGTV for years and I watched it with her a lot of the time. I knew she would be excited. He was the first garden show on HGTV, but the show ended when the network glammed-up and went for more home improvement and decorating shows.
It is such a great episode that I have to share it here. Towards the end Joe and Paul discuss what gardening means to many people. Paul James says,
“That got me thinking about why a lot of people garden. They garden to live a memory.”
We garden for food, sustainability, tasty things, and beauty, but the nostalgia and memories make it a deeper, worthwhile experience. Gardening returns you to your parents, grandparents, and childhood homes. We get to cultivate food, joy, and keep our precious memories alive…to live a memory.
Paul James really hit it for me. My love of growing flowers and veggies stems from a long line of memories of my mother’s and grandmothers’ gardens. I’m just taking it a bit further as a way to connect to family histories and homes long gone.
Watch the episode. Enjoy the excitement of Joe Lamp’l spending time with one of his inspirations. Enjoy seeing Paul James on the screen again. Think about the gardeners who inspire you and the memories attached to it. It is worth it.
Winter sucks. We don’t going anywhere and I spend my days dreaming about all the cool ‘ancestral’ places I’d like to visit. Yesterday, I was particularly bummed about it being February, -25, and the ground covered with snow, then I remembered something I had stumbled across quite awhile back. We aren’t the first Chamberlains to live in Point . Of course, there are quite a few families with that surname but not all of them belong to my husband’s Chamberlains. I decided to revisit that little discovery.
While researching Todd’s 2nd Great-Grandfather, William Henry Chamberlain, I spent some time investigating William’s brother. Joseph Addison Chamberlain isn’t particularly interesting to me, I was hoping to find more clues about the brothers’ father. Joseph’s obituary popped up in the Ancestry hints section with some surprising information in it. One of his daughters lived in Stevens Point. How cool!? I left that tidbit floating in space for over a year, until last night.
This home isn’t a deeply important connection to our family history, but it’s a fun one. It took me less than hour to track down, Carrie May Chamberlain and her husband, Joseph Robert Weyher, living in Stevens Point. They lived here for at least a few years between 1918-1920 based on the obituary and census records. By the 1930 census, they lived somewhere new.
Which house!? That was the real question. The 1920 census has the street name and house number. They lived right on Main Street. Sometime in the 1970s (If I remember correctly) Point renumbered their streets/addresses, so I had to do a little digging. Using the Sanborn Maps from the Library of Congress, I was able to track down the old address and figure out which house it is today. It’s still standing!
I checked it out on Google Maps to see what it looks like now. I’m hoping to get a chance to drive by it soon. It will be fun to think of that little connection we have to the town, however small it may be. And it’s fun to think there were Chamberlains living here 100 years ago!
Grow Your Roots 