lost communities – an old flower garden
Do you ever see an old flower garden, no house in sight, growing alone, expanding and reseeding where it can?
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On our drives to find old one room school houses in the landscape, we often find bits of domesticated flowers, indicating a home once flourished there. Sometimes these old gardens are all that is left of a rural community.
I have seen first hand, how many small rural communities in New Brunswick are little more than memories.
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A good example of this is Fredericksburg near Stanley in York County. Today it is a pleasant rural landscape with three or four homes. In 1866 Fredericksburg was a farming settlement with approximately 12 families. This information comes from an information-packed website from the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick: ‘Place Names of New Brunswick: Where is Home? New Brunswick Communities Past and Present’. By typing the name of a community, you can discover information about original land grants, the size of a community in the eighteen hundreds, how many families lived there, the population and whether there was a post office, store, or church. http://archives.gnb.ca/exhibits/communities/Home.aspx?culture=en-CA
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I am sorry these are not better photos, but the colour among all the green shows the remnants of a flower garden that someone once loved.
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Musk Mallow (Malva moschata) …
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Common Foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) …
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Some more Foxglove and blue Bachelors Button (Centaurea cyanus) …
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Lupin (Lupinus perennis). I don’t know the identity of the white flowers, but they make a lovely overall ‘bouquet’!
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Have you seen any abandoned flower gardens? Do you wonder what stories they would tell?
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Copyright 2016 Jane Tims
nichepoetryandprose 
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malyloup
September 18, 2016 at 5:36 am
Tres belle, mais dangereux!
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jane tims
September 18, 2016 at 7:46 am
Communities lost
But those pictures
Serve the memory well
At any cost:) 🍸
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kutukamus
August 25, 2016 at 5:50 pm
A very poetic response! Thank you!
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jane tims
August 25, 2016 at 11:52 pm
I always wonder!
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seedbud
August 25, 2016 at 8:57 am
You are so observant, I imagine you see abandoned gardens lots! Jane
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jane tims
August 25, 2016 at 11:36 am
I used to think about this quite a bit when we used to take the “short cut” when heading east, before the new TCH was built. All that abandoned farmland. Our kids wondered what people did who still lived there, which showed the disconnect from a fading way of life. We’re all part of a continuum, but we don’t all have the opportunity of seeing it.
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Jane Fritz
August 24, 2016 at 11:00 am
Since I started looking for one room schools I have been on the lookout for abandoned buildings. What we leave behind says something about our inability to ‘keep up’. History is about so much more than battles and politics!
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jane tims
August 24, 2016 at 11:28 am