Swan House and Atlanta History Center

Years ago when my mother came to visit us, we went to the Swan House in Buckhead and visited it. A couple of weeks ago, on a sunny day, Jim and I decided to go back to the Swan House gardens and see if anything had changed. We did not go inside the house but we saw a new museum on the grounds had been built, one of the largest history museum in the Southeast. The whole complex sits on 33 acres in north Atlanta. This house was built in 1928 by an heir to a cotton brokerage fortune, Mr. Edward Inman. His wife lived on the property until 1965 and then it was sold to the Atlanta History Center with most of its original 18th to 20th century's antiques and furnishings. The house was named the Swan House because Mrs. Inman was fascinated by these birds and had the birds represented in many rooms (wall paper, many object d'art, etc.)


The architect, Philip T. Shutze who had studied extensively in Rome, Italy, chose a classical Italian style for the house. The rear of the house is quite impressive also.


On the grounds, behind the Swan House, you can walk down a trail, come to a waterfall and little pond set in a garden containing benches
and life size metal sculptures of animals.

Continuing up the trail one arrives very shortly at the Tullie Smith Farm. This plantation house was built in 1840 and moved from nearby DeKalb County to this site. The Tullie Smith Farm consists of a farmhouse, a vegetable, herb and flower garden, a separate open-hearth kitchen, a smokehouse, a barn complete with animals, a rural pioneer log cabin and a blacksmith shop.



Click on the picture of the barn, upper right, where two sheep are eating. There are three Gulf Coast breed sheep living in this barn (one of the oldest breed in the United States). The two ewes are named Poppy and Peaches and the ram is named Napoleon.

The farm is more representative of the type of plantation houses there were in the South in that era rather than the lavish antebellum type plantations seen in the movies. The original owners of the farm, The Robert Smith Family, had 800 acres around their farm of which 200 acres were cultivated, including cotton.



Back tracking to the Swan House Gardens we walk by many Georgian indigenous wild flowers and native species of plants


and arrive at the formal boxwood gardens bordering a classical fountain.



Further still, we go around a stone elephant and keep walking along the shaded paths. It is hard to imagine that the vibrant Buckhead businesses and international restaurants and hotels are just a few blocks away.

Dogwoods in and around Atlanta

There are many native dogwood trees (Cornus florida is the Latin name for this native tree) flowering in and around Atlanta. Actually the lovely dogwood blossoms herald spring in Georgia . It is such a pleasure to drive along the roads where so many varieties of dogwoods can be seen, bearing clouds of white or various shades of pink blossoms. Here is a southern mansion with a dogwood tree, on the left behind the azalea bushes, starting to bloom




A dogwood tree, in full bloom, is a lovely sight. This year the dogwood trees look especially nice, with gorgeous colors..

These dogwood trees seem to be covered with snowflakes -

Such delicate and fragile blossoms - (click on any picture to enlarge it)













The dogwood trees are loved both by humans for their elegance and beauty and by wild birds for their seeds in the fall. Unfortunately, a couple of weeks ago, two of our wild dogwood trees went down during the last storm which had up to 60 miles an hour wind.

Swarm of bees in the azalea bush

Many years ago I was given a small pot with a pink azalea in it. We planted it in the back yard and never fertilized it nor pruned it. Now it is about 12 feet high and each spring is covered with radiant blossoms like a resplendent giant pink cloud.






A few days ago, my husband, Jim, was reading on the porch and heard an unusual sound which came from the azalea bush. He called me to come outside and we observed what we guessed to be hundreds of honey bees swirling around the bush and then settling inside the foliage of the bush itself.

After finding the Beekeeper Association in the phone book, I contacted Bee’s Honeybee Removal and Cindy Bee herself (that is her real name) came with all her accoutrement to gently remove our honeybees and give them a good home where they will provide some good honey with all her other 1000's of honeybees.

She gave us a quick course in honeybee (apis mellifera) habits. Honeybees are very social and create elaborate hives where they work together in 3 groups called castes: queens, drones and workers. Each hive has one queen honeybee laying about 1500 eggs a day for up to 8 years. The worker honeybees called “field bees” gather pollen, nectar, water and a sticky plant resin used in the building of the hive. When the hive is overflowing with nectar, pollen and baby bees, the worker bees “panic”. They feed royal jelly to the fresh eggs in order to create a new queen honeybee and starve the old queen honeybee, which subsequently leaves the hive, accompanied by a large number of her loyal followers. She lands nearby and all the honeybees flying with her come and form a living “bee” ball around her – which is what we saw in our azalea bush. Cindy Bee efficiently led the honeybees into the frames of her nuc box and very few remained. When asked, Cindy said that this swarm had about 30,000 honeybees or more. Our guess of “hundreds” was pretty far off the mark.

We have another azalea bush, white, which flowered a few days later, but no great numbers of honeybees came this time. We’d like to plant a couple more azalea bushes but there are so many varieties – thousands of them – that it will be hard to make a choice.

Rancho Los Cerritos

My daughter, Celine, gave us a 2009 calendar of Long Beach; the March page showed a backyard pathway at Rancho Los Cerritos, which we did not know, and decided to visit. So yesterday we went to Rancho Los Cerritos, (click on this site as it is very informative) which is about 4 miles from Celine’s condo. Coincidentally, yesterday was the spring special event, “Visitors from the Past” with tour guides in period costumes explaining the history of the 164 year old ranch. Our tour guide was representing Sarah Bixby Smith, a niece of the owners. This guide was an older lady speaking as if she remembered everything on the ranch as she had been there as Sarah, a little girl in the 1870.

The ranch is located near a country club and the area is so beautiful and green. At first the Tibahangna Native Americans lived there. Then a Spanish soldier, Manuel Nieto, received a land grant of 300,000 acres which was subdivided later. One of his descendants received the Rancho Los Cerritos area then sold in 1843 the 27,000 acres to Massachusetts born John Temple (and part of this land became Long Beach). All of this interesting history is on the link above. We took many photographs of the formal gardens (first planted in the 1840’s and ‘50s) and containing beautiful flowers and wonderful old trees. There is also a little pond with a frog fountain.

Introduction

The purpose of this blog is to write about past events in my life, from my early childhood to present, not in order, but at random, as the spirit strikes me. Over time, and before I forget many details, I plan to talk about my parents, my childhood and all the countries I visited. It will be good for my little grandchildren (Langston and Desmond, 2 years+ and 9 months in April 2009) to hear about a very different childhood than their own. I am a totally inexperienced blogger but I’ll endeavor to learn and to write clearly. English is my 3rd language (after French and Italian) and some of the sentences maybe awkward and the grammar not what it should be, but my goal is not to write the Great American Memoir. I am tolerant and not adverse to different viewpoints and spirited debates and shall enjoy receiving comments.