Trees

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Good Manners

Dunn 2

Paisley Rabbit agrees with Mr. Badger on a commission to design a tree house.

Dunn 1

Paisley writes thank-you notes to the guests of the party celebrating the completion of her tree house in Paisley Rabbit and the Treehouse Contest (2018) by Steve Richardson, illustrated by the amazing Chris Dunn.

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The King’s Table

King's Table

The forest of Fontainebleau and the Château de Fontainebleau once belonged to the kings of France. In all, 34 sovereigns, from Louis VI, the Fat, (1081–1137) to Napoleon III (1808–1873), spent time there.

The King’s Table at Fontainbleau was used once a year when royalties were brought to officers of the King. L’Abbé Guilbert, in Bourgs et Forêt de Fontainebleau, writes:

“The place of the Table du Roi on the edge of this forest near Melun is one of the places that we have to visit the first of May of each year… around a large stone table. Users of the Forest are called in turn to pay homage and pay their fee as follows: The Abbess of Lys near Melun, or someone from her, a cooked ham and two bottles of wine; the miller from the Moulin des Poignes in the Faubourg de Saint Liesne in Melun, a ham and two bottles of wine; the baker from the Four à ban du Roy in the town of Melun, a big cake; the fishermen having fished on the Loing and the Seine, in the extent of the control of Fontainebleau, a dish of the most beautiful fish; the master of high works of Melun, a large cake and two denarii; finally, each newlywed and the new inhabitants of Petit Clos, a cake and five denarii.”

The last of these festivals probably took place on May 1, 1789. The present King’s Table was built in 1723; the legs were broken during the French Revolution but rebuilt in 1854. The elm trees shown in the postcard are long gone, and the table has been moved to a site nearby. It is a protected national monument.

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Facade

Platt

Perspective view of garden facade, residence for Harold and Edith Rockefeller McCormick, Lake Forest, Illinois, 1908, by Charles Adams Platt, on a Pomegranate postcard from the collection of the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York.

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Linnaea

Linnaea_borealis

“We went from the upper edge of the field above the house into a smooth, brown path among the dark spruces. The hot sun brought out the fragrance of the pitchy bark, and the shade was pleasant as we climbed the hill. William stopped once or twice to show me a great wasps’ nest close by, or some fishhawks’ nests below in a bit of swamp. He picked a few sprigs of late-blooming linnaea as we came out upon an open bit of pasture at the top of the island, and gave them to me without speaking, but he knew as well as I that one could not say half he wished about linnaea.”

— From The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) by Sarah Orne Jewett

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The Lost World

lost

“The woods on either side were primeval, which are more easily penetrated than woods of the second growth… How shall I ever forget the solemn mystery of it? The height of the trees and the thickness of the boles exceeded anything which I in my town-bred life could have imagined, shooting upwards in magnificent columns until, at an enormous distance above our heads, we could dimly discern the spot where they threw out their side-branches into Gothic upward curves which coalesced to form one great matted roof of verdure, through which only an occasional golden ray of sunshine shot downwards to trace a thin dazzling line of light, amidst the majestic obscurity. As we walked noiselessly amid the thick, soft carpet of decaying vegetation the hush fell upon our souls which comes upon us in the twilight of the Abbey…”

— From The Lost World (1912) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; illustration by Harry Rountree