A Tudor Vegetable Garden and A Pause

I have been captivated by this illustration of a Tudor vegetable garden ever since I saw it in my 1935 Woman's Home Companion. 

I'm familiar with Tudor Knot Gardens but I've never seen a picture of vegetables planted in this style except for those dreamy but luxurious vegetable gardens in Monty Hall's French Gardens. 

One thing I love about my vintage women's magazines is that they are full of the most beautiful paintings done by the great illustrators of those days, many who went on to have their work in museums and art galleries. 

This illustration is by Harrie Wood and the article it illustrated was written by Marni Davis Wood. Related? I couldn't find out but the illustration is of her actual Tudor vegetable garden. 

She describes each and every planting in it but admitted that the one drawback was how to keep the garden symmetrical when they pulled a head of lettuce. Key to the garden was "intensive cultivation and succession planting of crops."

I love it for its artistic beauty but I also love it because it is so beautifully tidy. Which is strange because I prefer gardens that are English cottage garden blowsy.

But don't you think that if Marie Kondo had a vegetable garden it would look much like this?

I guess I love tidy gardens and blowsy gardens. I even love wild gardens. In this 2 1/2 acres surrounding our house, there is a big patch I asked RH not to mow and so many unusual wild things (weeds?) have grown there. But I would not want our whole yard and garden to be wild. 

 A certain amount of weeding must be done, both in our gardens and in our lives so that the terribly paralyzing feeling of being overwhelmed is addressed.

And so, I'm giving myself permission to pause posting here at Dewena's Window for a while to pull some weeds in my life and tidy up a bit.

This is only a pause, God willing. And I'll still be visiting a couple of blog friends each day.

A woman must find time for a little inspiration. A whole day cannot be devoted to weeding, can it?

Of course not! 

[RH would never forgive me if I didn't make it clear that I'm speaking of weeding figuratively as he is the one who does the actual weeding in the yard!] 



 

Story of a 1930s Woman and Her French Normandy-style Home

Today is our tenth wedding anniversary. You may think it odd that I've chosen to celebrate this milestone at home. I turned down John's offer to take me out for dinner and dancing in the city, and my best friend's insistence on a party in our honor at her house.

Tonight I want only to be with the three most important people in my life, John and our two children. At nine years old, Johnny is growing up so quickly and little Joyce won't be a baby much longer either. The years ahead will pass all too quickly.

As I set the table for dinner I can't help thinking about the years when the children were so young and John was always home from work to see them before they went to bed.

Now he works such long hours to see his company through a tough year.

Maybe we shouldn't have built the big house last year, but we both fell in love with the houses of Normandy when we honeymooned there, staying with a friend John met during the War. John says that when this Depression ends, the house will only rise in value.

But will it be too large for us once the children are grown and gone from home? We've not been able to have a third child yet. I've always wanted a house full of children and even grandchildren someday.

And John by my side, us growing old together.

I think back to our first anniversary when John and I celebrated at our favorite Italian restaurant.

We were so much in love and so happy talking about what we would do the next day. Our Sundays alone together were so important to us because we worked in the city six days a week.

As we ate our dinner, John told me his plan for our returning to France in five years. We were like children let out for recess in our happiness, discussing all that we would do and the places we would visit. 

Our plans changed once the children came along, only postponed, John insisted. 

I hear Joyce coming down the stairs and turn to see her pulling her dolly behind her and rubbing her eyes sleepily from her nap. I put the last plate down and hurry to her, forgetting about Paris.

Paris could wait. It always has.

***************************************


You all know my love of the 1940s and 1950s. I have an armoire full of women's magazines from the late 1800s through the 1960s but have tended to ignore the many 1930s magazines produced during the Depression years.

But recently I began wondering about the homes and families of that time period because our house was built in 1935. I've been spending hours immersed in those 1930s magazines and have become fascinated by the women of those years. 

I kept coming back to one woman in an ad for laundry soap, wondering why it drew my eye.

 I love her green dress, her hairstyle, her pearls and her poise. And then I found the perfect home for her, in the same magazine, a French Normandy house. 

Aren't the clustered chimneys fabulous? And the slate roof and the green shutters? Look at the casement windows. I've always loved casement windows but can you see that the little awning window over the casement is open on the second story? I wonder if all of them open? Darling!

And the porch is quaint, don't you think? Hopefully, it will never be ripped off by an HGTV host, being that it is in a historical district.

This house is from a real neighborhood, the very desirable Forest Hill in Cleveland, Ohio. The entire neighborhood was planned to include only house designs of European Provincial architecture. 

It is on land from the John D. Rockefeller Estates. Four hundred French Normandy-style houses were planned but only 81 built. These houses still stand as they were built of masonry walls, concrete slabs and steel joists.

Here is a link to the historical society there.

The pictures of the Normandy-style houses are gorgeous! You are in for a treat if you watch the slide show of the houses. I even spotted the exact windows I talked about on many of the houses.

Have any of you ever heard of this neighborhood? 

One of my favorite books of old is Came A Cavalier by Frances Parkinson Keyes, set in Normandy. Have any of you who have had the good fortune to visit France ever been to the Normandy region?

Thank you for reading my story and for indulging my new passion for the 1930s!

[All of the above pictures were from the March 1932 issue of Ladies' Home Journal.]

 

Furs Again, Princess Marina of Greece, Mama in Greece

On November 3, 2016, I wrote a post here called "The Shorter the Sleeves, the Longer the Gloves," and had a photo of myself wearing my mother's silver mink stole on my honeymoon many decades ago. 

When I found the photograph above, another one RH took of me on our honeymoon, it reminded me that I had intended to do a followup discussion of furs. With the move back to Tennessee not long after that it never got written.

What better time for it than now during the bitterly cold weather across much of the U.S. and Canada?

In comments at the old post, here, many friends wrote of still wearing fur coats or jackets in cold weather, especially ones from consignment stores even if they might not buy new ones now. 

One woman even wrote that she had once lived in the Yukon and wore fur, where I would guess it makes not just perfect sense to wear them but good plain horse sense also. I imagine there may have been many women in the Chicago area who wore theirs this week, if they ventured outside. 

Deborah of The Beautiful Matters wrote that she had some fur collars she loves found at consignment stores and I thought of her when I spotted this one at a local antique mall after Christmas that was 50% off and cost me a big $10.

I could not resist that bargain and it feels so soft and warm around my neck and reminds me of the mouton fur collars my girlfriends and I wore in high school with sweater sets and form-fitting wool skirts with kick-pleats. We really dressed up for school back then.

I don't know if I'll ever get up my nerve to wear it anywhere but if I do I think I'll buy a piece of soft lining satin to line it with. There's even a little hook and eye at the neckline that is broken so I need to replace that.

Before you ask where is a picture of me wearing it or my mother's mink stole now, here it is...

                                     Ha!

And that's all you're going to see of me in it for now because a jillion attempted selfies did nothing but show how frizzy my freshly shampooed hair was and that I badly needed to visit a professional makeup artist first.

I splurged on a good haircut in downtown Nashville a couple of weeks ago so I will show you pictures the stylist took of me afterwards, even though lipstick was all I'd taken time for that day.

Why can't I blow dry my hair that smoothly? I've decided that RH needs to go to hair salon school so he can do it every morning for me. And learn to be a makeup artist. Don't you think he should do that?

Then I could wear my mother's 60-year-old mink stole almost as elegantly as Princess Marina of Greece did in the picture below in 1934 in Vogue magazine when she was about to be married to H. R. H. Prince George of England.

Her fur is an ermine cape from Molyneux, who also designed her wedding gown. Isn't it gorgeous?

I treasure the old Vogue magazines in my collection and can spend hours reading every single word in them, even the advertisements, and swooning over the beautiful clothes and furs. 

After reading the article about the princess, I talked to Greek-Canadian girlfriend Poppy about her and she told me lots of interesting things about this princess of Greece and Denmark who after her marriage was a beloved member of the British Royal Family until she died in 1963. (Poppy, I could not find the notes I took that day and if you happen to read this, please add in what you remember!)

I wish so much that I had a photo of my mother wearing her mink stole but my sisters and I couldn't find a single one of her in it for this post. We still remember how exciting it was when our father surprised Mama with it and how perfectly elegant she looked in it, the silver fur lovely with her hair that was dark as a raven's breast.

Another surprise came to Mama much later in life when her sister invited her on a Mediterranean cruise. On it she had the joy of visiting Greece herself. I have a copy of her itinerary and read it again today.

She arrived in Athens in October of 1997 aboard the Orient Lines' the Ocean Majesty, which I understand is now operated by a German cruise line. 

She and her sister Marty toured Athens for two days and then went back to the ship for ports of call at Delos and Mykonos and then on to Santorini. They also traveled to Rhodes and to Kusadasi and then on to Istanbul.

Here is a photo of her at Santorini...

I'm so grateful that my dear mother, the first Dewena, who I was named for, was given the opportunity for this trip of a lifetime by her sister. What a great time they had with lots of stories to tell us!

My mother had four sisters and they were all very close, seeing each other as often as they could. That's when the fun really happened. Oh, those sister parties at Myrtle Beach! Only Mama, the oldest of the five girls, and June, the baby sister, are are here with us now, the three middle girls now in their heavenly home. 

Here is Mama sitting next to her mother, with three of her four sisters, celebrating my grandmother's birthday. 

I've thought a lot about these beautiful women while writing this post. I grew up in the elegant age of the 1940s, 1950s and early 60s and remember how beautiful my mother and aunts were, dressed up in their finest. 

Whatever our view of wearing fur is now, we all must admit that the early part of the 20th century was certainly a glamorous age, wasn't it?

I never could see why women could be seduced with jewels, but, oh, I'm sorry for those who are tempted too far by furs! I should like to be swathed in them.

Agnes Sligh Turnbull (1941)

I don't care what they say: I love fur; I read National Enquirer; I rarely recycle; I think Prince Charles and Camilla deserve to be happy.

Julia Reed in an interview on

wowowow.com