#american rose gardens

[abloomaday]

Yellow Pink Rose Burst

[fornpt1]

[the-cricket-chirps]

Guy Rose

The Poppy Field

1910

[galleryofart]

The Perfume of Roses

Artist: Charles Courtney Curran (American, 1861–1942)

Date: 1902

Medium: OIl on Canvas

Collection: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

[gennsoup]

If one is to be doomed, one must be beautiful, or the drama is only a comedy.

Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

[faggotfungus]

Magazine Issue of "American Homes And Gardens." Date: December 1911

[wallflowerglitter]

Well, the good news is I managed to get hula hair Barbie’s hair brushed….

The bad news is I accidentally pulled her head off and now I have to figure out how to get it back on.

[dahliaduvide]

"His name is lost to history, but perhaps he wouldn’t mind. His motivation was a speedy payday, not posterity. A ballad that stirred the passions could sell for a penny. Sometimes he sold his work directly to the printshops, but he often took to the streets himself. He borrowed tunes from familiar songs, and had a talent for singing his work that helped him draw a crowd and sell his broadsides."

"Our modern notion of a songwriter would have been nonsensical to him, of course. His trade was partly creative, but his task was also to record and remember the familiar songs already sung, and re-shape them for new events and local happenings. He was a kind of tabloid journalist in his time. Today, we might think of him as a historian of oral traditions, a cataloger of folkways. But that’s not quite right. He was no mere archivist, no passive documentarian. He shaped and reshaped these traditions. Writing was an astonishing technology, and the reach of the printing press gave it newfound power. Oral traditions were chaotic, unfixed, unwieldy—stories forever in revision, never complete. Versions would branch without end, and older branches would be lost with time. How did the lyrics go? Well, that would depend. You could say a song existed in superposition, until someone sang it in their particular way."

"Though he would have been dismissed as a scabrous hack at the time, the ballad writer has such a knack for poetic and efficient depictions of monstrous violence that it can start to feel like he is an artist, or a proto-artist, who is governed by a bloodthirsty aesthetic. But the truth is, he may not be a single man—he may be a composite, his single authorship an anachronism. Or he may be merely a transcriber. The song’s structure and rhythm are so clean that it suggests a writer’s hand, but it could be that the story and its language were born entirely in song, from the community. Later, scholars would bicker over what counts as folk tradition, but a song’s evolutions in oral tradition and popular writing surely would have crossed back and forth countless times. The past is so foreign and strange that we should be left humble when we write our histories. Whether he is one writer, or several writers, or the people as a whole, the shape of his thoughts—his entire manner of thinking—is unreachable."

Excerpts.

Thoughts.

Truly a beautifully written article, and you should totally take the time to read the entire thing. He interweaves perspectives from performers, listeners, and even what the creators of these broadside murder ballads might have been like. Artful writing, hard thoughts, and self-examination.

This article really put into words a vital part of my vision for this project, creating modern murder ballads to draw attention to cases, raise awareness and hopefully get some justice for the Knoxville girls of today.

[mrsterlingusa]

Spring Roses

[septembergold]

[knife-em0ji]

I was gonna add a little rant in the tags since about this but @spifflocated beat me to the punch in the replies with their beautifully cogent & empathetic response

okay someone desperately needs to fill the internet with accessible clear info on what distinguishes plant "species" "variety" etc because I'm sick and tired of seeing plants labeled so ridiculously poorly.

Yes i hate American landscaping culture but I can't exactly blame people for falling for it, when there's no way to even TELL what species of plant you are purchasing at most big box stores

Saw an article advertising something called "Diamond Marvel" Euphorbia or something like that, and I was just staring at it like...Genus Euphorbia has over 2,000 species in it. God knows what this plant is.

[abloomaday]

Pink and Yellow Roses

[fornpt1]

[the-cricket-chirps]

Guy Rose

The Cabbage Patch

1890-91

[wish-upon-a-wishlist]

[gennsoup]

If sanity was measured in feet and hours, learning was weighed in pounds of books carried to school and back again.

Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden