File:American homes and gardens (1908) (17530267384).jpg

Title: American homes and gardens
Identifier: americanhomesgar51908newy (find matches)
Year: 1905 (1900s)
Authors:
Subjects: Architecture, Domestic; Landscape gardening
Publisher: New York : Munn and Co
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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34 AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS January, 1908 eucalyptus trees, and then the vineyard, loaded with white, red and purple grapes. There is a charm about this island home, with its peculiar environments, difficult to explain; completely isolated, hardly suspected by passing ships, and only visited by passing yachts, it is a haven of rest and beauty. There is a peculiar fascination in the life on the great Southern California vineyards, and they are a Mecca for thousands of visitors during the sea- son. As the summer wanes the vineyard takes on an appearance of renewed activity, with the arrival of the bands of pickers, generally Mexicans, who camp out on some corner of the land. In the morn- ing the Chinese boss brings out a great number of boxes holding so many pounds, and each picker be- gins filling his as rapidly as possible. Every once in a while a team comes around to collect them, and the counter, on a big white horse, ac- companies it to take the count. The sight is an interesting one, with the men in picturesque sombreros, the women in fancy colored shawls, and the babies lying by the roadside, laughing at the tall eucalyptus plumes that wave and nod in the seeds almost form small mountains, of quite some bulk. The rolling country reaching back to the Sierras, about the vineyards at Pomona, is beautiful in the extreme. In Southern California the vineyards lie mostly in the San Gabriel and other large valleys, and from there we have the finest views of one of the strangest contrasts in America. The valleys are robed in all the vestments of summer's rich
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The Vintage at Pasadena, California -Mexican Grape Pickers at the Brigden Vineyard 2—Grapes Going to the Crusher on Endless Chain strong west winds, like thmgs alive, as they truly are. The picking sometimes goes on steadily for several weeks, while the great loads of grapes are being hauled to the winery and led by an endless chain device into the press- room, where the juice is extracted. One can always tell the big winery by the rich odor or perfume of the crushed grapes, and near some of them the piles of rejected stems, skins and verdure, the mesa above the vineyard is gorgeous, ablaze with the poppy or cup of gold that has traced a path of fiery color from Santa Barbara to the desert beyond San Jacinto, and back of this, apparently so near that you can almost touch it, rises the wall of the Sierra Madre, 6,000 feet in the blue, with sentinel peaks of San Antonio, San Jacinto, and San Bernardino, five or six thousand feet higher. Their summits are white with winter, and standing in the vineyard I can see the snow blowing up the slope of San Antonio, then whirled aloft into the air like some gigantic wraith, to drift away and be lost in the warm air rising from the summer land below. Winter and eternal spring are face to face in the Southern vineyard. Many vineyards produce only raisin grapes, and in cer- tain localities hundreds of acres of these are to be seen.

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