Beatrix Farrand (1872 – 1959)
Story Highlights
In honor of Women's History Month, Outdoor Dreams is celebrating the life and career of landscape gardener and architect Beatrix Farrand.
Beatrix Farrand is one of the most accomplished persons recognized in both the first decades of the landscape architecture profession and the centuries of landscape garden design arts and accomplishments. Her career included commissions to design about 110 gardens for private residences, estates, country homes, public parks, botanic gardens, college campuses, and the White House. Additionally, Farrand was one of the founding eleven members, and the only woman, of the American Society of Landscape Architects.
Early Life
Beatrix Cadwalader Jones was born on June 19 into a family among whom she liked to claim were "five generations of gardeners." She was the niece of novelist Edith Wharton and a lifelong friend of acclaimed author Henry James, who called her 'Trix'.
Beatrix and her mother spent summers at her family’s summer home, Reef Point Estate, on Mount Desert Island in Bar Harbor, Maine. It was there that she learned to love the outdoors, especially plants and trees. While still a teenager she took over the management of the Reef Point gardens.
Early Mentor
Charles Sprague Sargent
At age twenty, Beatrix had the good fortune to meet the botanist Charles Sprague Sargent, who was a Harvard professor of horticulture and the founding director of the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, Massachusetts.
Though landscape architecture had been an exclusively male industry, Sargent was impressed by Beatrix's knowledge and enthusiasm for plants. Farrand began apprenticing under Sargent, and soon moved into his family home as his favorite pupil so that her studies could continue uninterrupted.
Fun Fact: It was Sargent who taught her that she should seek to “make the plan fit the ground and not twist the ground to fit a plan.” This design quality is one of the defining characteristics of Farrand's work.
Landscape Design Career
Beatrix began practicing landscape architecture in 1895, working from the upper floor of her mother's brownstone house on East Eleventh Street in New York. Since women were excluded from public projects, her first designs were residential gardens, beginning with some for neighboring Bar Harbor residents. With the help of her mother and with her aunt's social connections, she was introduced to prominent people, which led to working on a variety of significant projects. Within three years she was so prominent in her field that she was chosen the only woman among the founders of the American Society of Landscape Architects, although she preferred the British term "landscape gardener".
NOtable works
Princeton
Through her elite clientele and apprenticeship with Charles Sargent, Farrand was invited to help with the landscape planning and care of Princeton University.
Making the campus her canvas, Farrand was Princeton's first consulting landscape architect, creating a living artwork using vines, the solidity of trees, and the impact of concentrated color as her palette. From 1912 to 1943, Farrand coaxed, dictated, and oversaw the shaping of the University's grounds - from the Graduate College to the main campus. Farrand often focused on native plants and trees, choosing varieties that bloom in spring or fall when the university is in session.
Fun Fact: Intensely devoted to her work, she was said to have followed undergraduates as they walked around campus to see where they were beginning to wear paths through the grass, after which she would decide to place a path directly there.
Notable Works
The White House
While at Princeton, Farrand met Woodrow Wilson and his first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson. When Wilson became president, the First Lady hired Farrand to design the White House’s East Colonial Garden (now redesigned as the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden). She also designed the West Garden, which is now the White House Rose Garden.
Notable Works
Harkness Memorial State Park
Harkness Memorial State Park is a historic preservation area with botanical garden and recreational features located on Long Island Sound in the town of Waterford, Connecticut.
The park was the former summer home of philanthropists Edward and Mary Harkness. From 1918 to 1929, Farrand made extensive improvements to the grounds, adding numerous formal gardens. The estate was left to the state by Mary Harkness in 1950 and became part of the state park system in 1952.
Notable Works
Dumbarton Oaks
One of Farrand's seminal works was at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in the Georgetown district of Washington, D.C. for Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss. Her design was inspired by her European ventures, especially from the Italian Renaissance gardens, and consisted of establishing a sophisticated relationship between the architectural and natural environments, with formal terraced gardens stepping down a steep slope and transitioning to a more naturalistic aesthetic approaching the creek.
Notable Works
The Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden
Initially designed by Farrand in 1916, this garden was not completed until decades later. Iron shortages during World War I made the completion of the fence and gazebo, central design features of the garden, impossible. In the mid-1980s Garden Board member Beth Strauss saw the original designs and showed them to David Rockefeller, who then generously supported the completion of Farrand’s fully realized designs in 1988. The garden is named after his wife, Peggy, a horticulturist and conservationist who loved roses.
Notable Works
Other works include:
The initial site and planting plan for the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. in 1899.
In 1912, she designed the walled residential garden, Bellefield, for Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Newbold in Hyde Park, New York (now a part of the Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site).
She received the commission from J. Pierpont Morgan to design the grounds of Morgan's residence in New York City (later the site of the Morgan Library & Museum), and continued as a consultant for thirty years (1913–43).
She would design for numerous college campuses including a 23-year consulting relationship with Yale, where she met her husband Max Farrand (a history professor there).
She enjoyed long stewardship at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden (pictured) in Seal Harbor, Maine, which was inspired by her comprehensive study of designs and patterns in Beijing’s Forbidden City to honor the Rockefellers’ passion for East Asian art.
Later Life: A Return to Reef Point
In 1917, Reef Point Estate, the childhood home that inspired her, was deeded to Beatrix by her mother. In 1935 following her mother’s death, Farrand and her husband Max set about turning Reef Point into a horticultural study center. The Farrands spent their summers at Reef Point and together, began creating their visionary educational enterprise: Reef Point Gardens.
This property played an instrumental role in Beatrix Farrand’s life and her dedication to the estate was a lifelong and heartfelt endeavor. In 1946 Farrand began publishing the Reef Point Bulletins in an attempt to explain the undertakings at Reef Point Gardens with the primary focus on the horticulture of the property. The species in the garden were documented, their growth and habits often closely logged and graphed. Plant choices for specific conditions were under intensive study. Along with this publication, throughout the grounds and gardens of the estate, Farrand created a large library and collection of educational materials.
Perhaps in part because of the remoteness of location, scholarly use of Reef Point Gardens did not achieve the level Farrand desired. After a wildfire on the island and facing a lack of funding to complete and ensure the continued operation of a center, Farrand made the difficult decision in 1955 to discontinue the preparations, dismantle the garden, sell the property, and use the proceeds to fund her remaining years.
The Reef Point property was sold to Robert W. Patterson, her long-trusted architect and Reef Point board member. Farrand donated the contents of her library, a large collection of fine art prints, horticulture books, and design drawings to the Department of Landscape Architecture at University of California, Berkeley to continue her goal of spreading landscape design knowledge and education. Additionally, with financial support from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Farrand's plants were rescued and eventually supplied the material for two future gardens in Northeast Harbor (the Asticou Azalea Garden and Thuya Garden), where they still bloom today.
Farrand spent the last three years of her life at Garland Farm, the home of her friends Lewis and Amy Magdalene Garland, on Mount Desert Island, Maine. It was here that she created her final garden, an intimate space in keeping with the size of the property. At age 86 Farrand died at the Mount Desert Island Hospital on February 28, 1959.
The Garland Farm was purchased by the Beatrix Farrand Society with the mission "to foster the art and science of horticulture and landscape design, with emphasis on the life and work of Beatrix Farrand". It plans to continue Reef Point's original educational mission as well as to preserve Garland Farm and Beatrix Farrand's final garden.
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