Several thoughts have come together about landscaping. First is that it is not true that I saw no large scale landscaping as a child. Aside from Lucknow, I had a long childhood acquaintance with [the] thousand-acres of the Waumbec Hotel in Jefferson, New Hampshire. This included its golf-course.
Second, my uncle, C_ (J_ C_ C_, my mother's brother) loved landscaped gardening, was an avid photographer of flower and wild-flower scenery, and frequently took me (and my cousins) on nature walks.
Shortly after the second world war, my grandparents C_ purchased an old cottage and about a 1/2 acre of land in Jefferson, N.H., at the end of a dirt road that ran along a farmer's hay pasture. Jefferson and the immediate area were where my mother's family originated in the late 19th century and where my mother lived as a child.[*] In my childhood, I still had aunts and uncles living there, in large old houses, that seemed strangely foreboding to me as a child and always smelled stuffy with a quality I associate with elderly persons.
Three or so miles from the cottage was the Waumbec Inn, a summer mountain resort house, consisting of three main buildings, a golf house, a rooming cottage (the Cherry Mountain House), several employees buildings, and lovely cottages for the owners and managers. The grounds were beautifully planted with flower beds and the assemblage of buildings was situated at the edge of a twelve-hole (eighteen-hole?) golf course.
Eventually, the summer following my junior year of college, when I was twenty, I would work at the Waumbec as a greens-keeper.
When my grandparents bought the cottage, which Uncle C_ named "the Christmas Cottage," the building was delapitated. There were no [indoor] toilets. I remember going into the fields, on our first summer trips, with toilet paper and shovel.
When was this? 1947? 1948? I was five, six years old.
The cottage was repaired in the late 1940s: partial foundation buttressed, picture window to the south and a view of the Presidentials added, floor furnace added. Uncle C_, the youngest of my mothers family, unmarried and living with my grandparents, generally oversaw the rebuilding. He frequently, as often as a half-dozen weekends a summer--took us children (me and my mother's brothers children) to the cottage.
How old was C_ then? He is about 57 years now, so he must have been 23 or 24 in 1947. He hadn't served in the military in the war, staying at home to help run the Plymouth Inn.
While we were at the cottage, the Waumbec was the center of C_'s social life. I recall a few occasions when he took us children (we were a little older then, perhpas ten or eleven--so this is 1952 or 1953) to eat in the Inn dining room. This was my earliest fancy dining experience, with tie required, even of us children (and clean hands with clean nails, I recall this being stressed).
C_ almost always took us on long "nature-walks." Into the forests nearby, or--frequently--on the grounds of the hotel, in the evening after golfers had left, to view the flowers and sunset.
C_ was articulate and artistic in his nature appreciation. He loved to talk, gossip, and write--letters mainly. His sensitivity in this way was so great, that even as a young teenager I was aware than many persons in my rural home town believed something was "different" about C_, meaning they believed he was queer or homosexual. But I also knew this was not true, and shared, even in these years, a dim understanding of his several long-term romances with two of Plymouth's attractive young women (whose names I cannot now remember) who were not yet married in their mid-twenties.
C_ photographed, on [for] slides, many summer scenes of flowers, and I can recall several long (and boring, to my child's mind) winter-evening slide shows at the Plymouth Inn dining room. With an adult audience exclaiming appreciation with audible "oh's" and "ahs" of the colorful slides. Appreciation was sharpened by the bleak, cold, snowy, New Hampshire winter outside the Inn's doors.
__________
[ * Actually, my grandparents and my mother and her older brother were born in Massachusetts. My grandfather moved his family to Jefferson, N.H., at least as early as the 1920s, when he took a job managing a small hotel here. Possibly Uncle C_ was born in Jefferson.]
Recent Comments