I’ve been running around like a maniac this week, so for now I’m just going to post a little taste of good things to come. When the Teas Nursery sold their property on Bellaire a while back, we were fortunate enough to acquire their large trove of historical materials. (We’re extremely grateful to the Teas family for this.) Among the many treasures are several reminders of the long relationship between the Teas Nursery and the Rice Institute.
This is Elizabeth, hard at work and still smiling.
We have several fantastic students working in the Woodson this summer. One of them–the wonderful Elizabeth–is currently working through several boxes of old slides and negatives from the Teas collection. This is hard labor, my friends, that requires a lot of squinting and the ability to speculate both freely and rationally. She’s good at it. Yesterday she brought me several great slides related to the Rice campus that I’ll post about soon, so I was pretty happy. But then she really outdid herself and reappeared with a very old negative. This is frankly impressive. It’s hard to look at negatives for very long, even harder to make sense of them. And this one was indeed quite interesting to me. It’s something I haven’t seen before, and it’s also funny. It made me laugh because the person who took the picture, being a nurseryman, was more interested in the shrub in front of what I wanted to see.
Click on it to enlarge, then click again to zoom in. It's hard to believe this image was just resurrected yesterday. Kind of makes you wonder what you have in your closet.
That’s a sign encouraging people to “Boost for Rice” by attending their home football games. I’m not sure where it was, although it looks to be the middle of nowhere. I’m also not sure what year it was taken, but I think there’s enough visible information to figure it out. Nice shrub, though.
Bonus picture: Tools of the trade.
