July among the Natives and their glamorous foreign Cousins
2008-2020
Philadelphia, which itself sits in a vast natural park, Fairmount, climbing northwestwards on both sides of one of its two rivers, the Schuylkill
The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), 1871, oil on canvas, and detail.
Thomas Eakins, 1844-1916, American. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.
The Schuylkill and its surrounding park is an area of recreation for metropolitan Philadelphia
is the horticultural center of the country by reason of the thirty parks and gardens in and around it:
pleasure gardens, research institutes, parks of native plants.
Increasingly, the focus of these green areas is plants classified as native in light of the catastrophic decline in the number of birds and bird species, insects and particularly bees in the continental USA.
Franklin Tree (Franklinia alatahama), native
Mt. Cuba, Hockessin, Delaware. Legacy of the Lammot du Pont Copelands
Have been added in the last 40 or 50 years, wilderness areas, preserved by gift of their owners to conservancies with a duty to protect their status.
Before Mowing, 2009, tempera on panel.
George A. Weymouth, 1936-2016.
Private collection on loan to the Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania in 2019
Weymouth, a du Pont heir, student of Andrew Wyeth, was an instigator of the preservation of wilderness and left much of his own land around the Brandywine Creek to be preserved in perpetuity.
You can sit and meditate amidst tree branches above a small valley in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia on a half bridge constructed by Martin Puryear.
Pavilion in the Trees, completed 1993. Martin Puryear, American born 1941. West Fairmount Park, Philadelphia.
This is Lenni Lenape territory. They are, of course, absent.
Beginning in the 1750s, they were forced out of these their territories to Ohio and then to the far West.
Tammanend, Chief of the Turtle clan, chief of chiefs of the Lenni Lenape, c. 1605-1725.
Statue placed by Philadelphia at Front and Market very near the spot where William Penn set foot on Lenni Lenape land from the Delaware River in 1682.
The two men, with other Lenni Lenape, negotiated celebrated peace and friendhsip treaties in 1688 and 1692, memorialized in the wampun belt carried by the eagle, representative of the Great Spirit.
The turtle is Mother Earth.
They left to us the names of trees and flowers; streams now streets in Philadelphia; and of rivers and streams which cross the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. And a philosophy of care.
The Brandywine River at Montchanin, Delaware
My sojourn in the United States has been sustained and comforted by this rich natural and cultivated environment.
A small sample of plants which flower in July
Stokes aster, a native
Milkweed (Asclepia)
Swampmilkweed (Asclepia incarnata)
Milkweed at Mt Cuba, Hockessin Delaware
Swamp Rose Mallow (Hibiscus)
To my knowledge, there is only one hibiscus native to the east coast of the US
A cultivar of Hibiscus moscheutos in a garden in Philly
a modest flower compared to her glamorous Asian kin which here have to be overwintered indoors to survive.
These are a few from the collection in the conservatory at Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania
in a garden in Philly
Conservatory of Longwood Gardens, legacy of Pierre S. du Pont
The Painted Lady (Cynthia Vanessa Virginiensis) on a spike gayfeather.
All plants but one are native at Mt. Cuba, Hockessin, Delaware
Sneezeweed (Helenium for Helen of Troy) has perennial varieties native to the eastern US. Its dried, ground leaves were formerly the main ingredient of snuff.
These were bred for study at Mt. Cuba, Hockessin, Delaware
The flower of the fragrant, native Summersweet bush.
Such potent fragrance that in the protected New Jersey Pinewoods where there are mature bushes, I thought I should stop the car before I drove off the road for the transporting headiness I felt.
