Beatrix Jones Farrand

American landscape architect

• Born: June 19, 1872
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: February 27, 1959
• Place of death: Bar Harbor, Maine

The first woman in the United States to become a professional landscape architect, Farrand was instrumental in the popularizing of a natural style of landscape design. She also cofounded the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Early Life

Beatrix Jones Farrand (FAHR-ahnd) was born Beatrix Cadwalader Jones in were chosen to a wealthy, socially prominent family. Her parents were Frederick Rhinelander Jones and Mary Cadwalader Rawle. They divorced by the time Beatrix was twelve. Her aunt was the novelist Edith Jones Wharton, a keen gardener with whom Beatrix had a close relationship.

Farrand, (she acquired the name through marriage) was the only child of divorced parents at a time when divorce was a social disgrace. The divorce forced her mother to earn money creatively in ways acceptable to polite society. She became a part-time literary agent for her former sister-in-law Edith Wharton and organized charity projects that people in her social circles supported. As a result, Farrand grew up with at least two examples of enterprising women who made socially acceptable professional places for themselves. Like all girls of her social circle, Farrand was tutored at home and received no formal education of any kind. As part of her education, she traveled to Europe with members of her mother’s and father’s families.

At the age of twenty-one and not yet married, Farrand realized that she needed to find a way to support herself. Through family connections, she had met Charles Sprague Sargent, the first director of the Boston Arnold Arboretum. After a social visit in the Sargent home in 1893, she expressed an interest in landscape gardening and began to study with Sargent. From him she learned botany, how to survey, and how to stake out a piece of ground. At that time, Sargent was laying out the grounds of the Arboretum with Frederick Law Olmsted. Consequently, Farrand had an opportunity to observe some stages of the formation of a major project by the preeminent American landscape architect.

Farrand was advised to travel widely to study gardens. For that purpose, she visited the Columbian Exposition grounds in Chicago, for which Olmsted had created the site plan. The year 1895 was spent studying gardens in Italy and England. The hedged and walled garden rooms at Sissinghurst in England became useful models for her career. While in England, she met Gertrude Jekyll, the leading figure in promoting the informal cottage garden style. Jekyll promoted the use of native plants and was well known for her use of harmonious plant color and arrangement. The lessons Farrand learned from Jekyll included the need to observe the differences in plant forms, to treat those forms as groups as well as use them against other plant forms, and never to treat a plant as a specimen to be looked at individually the plant must fit the total scheme. Farrand also visited the Penshurst estate gardens, where classical concepts were used that emphasized strong structure and geometric regularity in the garden layout. Both of these approaches, the classical and the more natural, governed her design philosophy throughout her career.

Life’s Work

Farrand returned to New York City in 1895 and opened an office on the top floor of her mother’s house. She immediately began to receive commissions to design gardens for private homes in suburban New York City and in the New England area. Since these clients were from the same social background as Farrand, she was an ideal choice. None of the gardens from these early years remain. Surviving plans and photographs, however, give some idea of her accomplishments. In these documents, it is possible to follow the evolution of her gardening design theory, based on what she observed in Europe. An experimental attitude can also be observed in her work.

Within three years, she was considered a nationally important figure in the field. In 1899, Farrand, the only woman among eight men, helped to found the American Society of Landscape Architects, the first such professional group in this country.

The formative years of her career were over by about 1912, when she began to receive large-scale public commissions to design for college campuses. In 1916, she married Max Farrand, a professor of history at Yale University. It was also during this period that she began work on the two private commissions for which she is best known: Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. (1921-1947), and the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller garden at Seal Harbor, Maine (1926-1950). These gardens still exist, and Dumbarton Oaks is open to the public. During her long period of association with these gardens, Farrand acted as adviser on maintenance and designed changes.

The Rockefeller garden, a walled and regular formal garden, includes informal and harmonious flower plantings with a surrounding border of trees and shrubs to display a collection of Asian sculpture. Farrand made two subsequent major revisions. Dumbarton Oaks is a more complex work. The estate is a country house within the city of Washington, D.C., which was used as a home and a place for entertaining by a career diplomat, Robert Woods Bliss, and his wife. At Dumbarton Oaks, Farrand worked out her philosophy for more formal gardens as individual hedged rooms near the house. The farther away they are from the house, the less formal the gardens are, until, at the bottom of the hilled site, naturalistic gardens, parklike in character, end along a stream. Working with constantly changing contours, Farrand skillfully constructed terraces, steps, and walkways that enhanced the experience of negotiating changing grades. When the property was given to Harvard University in the 1940’s for a museum, research library, and public garden, Farrand made the changes necessary to turn a private garden into a public one.

In 1914, Farrand developed her own home, Reef Point, near Bar Harbor, Maine, and its extensive grounds into an experimental garden with a horticulture research library. She and her husband had intended this to be a permanent research facility, but lacking funds to support it, Farrand dismantled it in 1955. Max Farrand helped to develop a collection of rare botany and horticulture volumes as well as books of a more functional nature.

The Princeton University campus was a design project of 1912, and until 1943, Farrand advised on design upkeep, changes, and enlargements. She performed in the same capacity of designer and long-term adviser for Yale University (1922-1945) and the University of Chicago (1929-1936). She provided designs for smaller campuses, such as Oberlin, Hamilton, Vassar, and Occidental College, but did not perform the long-term advisory role. The campus designs required trees, shrubs, walkways, and open lawns, capitalizing on terrain to create the naturalistic semirural atmosphere that became fashionable as campuses grew and were expanded from the time of the Civil War. At Princeton and Yale, where Farrand’s designs are the most extensive, she began by designing plantings for residential colleges. She invented the tree moat for these designs. The moat was a dry ditch, close to a building, planted with trees. The effect is an intimate, romantic one. She also created tree and shrub nurseries on campus to provide cheaper plants for future needs and replacements. These nurseries also experimented with plant material to meet changing needs.

For Edith Wilson, the wife of President Woodrow Wilson, Farrand designed the lawns and gardens for the White House in Washington, D.C., between 1913 and 1916. There are, unfortunately, few drawings to reveal what the design was, and no other documentation exists.

Max Farrand became the first director of the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino, California, in 1927. At the same time, Beatrix Farrand was offered the position of curator of the art collection. When she discovered that very little would be expected of her, she turned the offer down. Farrand, however, designed the landscaping for the new Director’s House on the library grounds.

After 1927, Beatrix Farrand maintained offices in New York City (the principal one), Reef Point, and San Marino. This arrangement meant traveling even more than she had done before. Initially, she hoped that enough commissions would develop in California to warrant a permanent move there. Not enough work developed, however, to justify giving up her established offices. Farrand did receive a commission to design a Humanities Garden for the California Institute of Technology in neighboring Pasadena, a design that is still structurally intact. She created a classical olive grove in a courtyard, which complemented the Mediterranean architecture of the campus. Clearly, she enjoyed the opportunity to experiment with plants that were new to her. From 1938 until her death in 1959, she acted as a consultant for the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, working in tandem with another landscape designer, Lockwood De Forest. The two designers used naturalistic plantings and public walkways that emphasized the vistas. The site was on varied terrain, and Farrand’s design concepts enhanced the change of grade with wide, easy-to-negotiate steps.

During the 1930’s, Farrand landscaped an English estate, Dartington Hall in Devon. One of the owners was an American friend, Dorothy Elmhirst, who commissioned Farrand when she could not find a landscaper who was sympathetic to her wishes. The designs for the two-thousand-acre estate included roads, walks, terraces, lawns, varied flower beds, an outdoor theater, and wooded areas. She also made suggestions for the placement of several new buildings. The initial designs date from 1933, and Farrand advised on further plans until 1939, when war broke out.

Farrand continued to work for two decades, devoting her final years to the gardens of her own home at Reef Point. She died there on February 27, 1959.

Significance

Farrand is sometimes referred to as the American Gertrude Jekyll, which is not quite accurate. Landscape architects were, to some extent, divided into two theoretical groups: the naturalists and the formalists. Jekyll fell squarely into the naturalist camp. Farrand’s great synthesizing skills, however, allowed her to pull these two divergent approaches together to produce landscape designs that were in keeping with the developing trends of the twentieth century. Her career spanned the early years of the profession in the United States, through two world wars and the Great Depression. She witnessed sweeping changes during these years, which required her to scale back the size of her private commissions and forced her to move more into public ones. She produced an enduring style based on readily available material that could incorporate future changes. She maintained her belief in laying out a strong pattern in the garden plan, which was formed by shrubs and trees, and using that regular background for her harmonious flower choices and naturalistic plant material. This approach was always adapted to the particular site.

Farrand’s gardens and campuses have been much admired ever since they were first constructed. Paradoxically, her name was not much known in the interval between her death and the 1970’s, when popular interest in landscape gardening began a resurgence. Since that time, her influence has been strong.

Bibliography

Balmori, Diana, Diane Kostial McGuire, and Eleanor M. McPeck. Beatrix Farrand’s American Landscapes: Her Gardens and Campuses. Sagaponack, N.Y.: Saga Press, 1985. This book confines its investigations to Farrand’s American work in the public arena. It does, however, contain an appendix listing all her private American commissions. A short, thorough biography is included. The work complements an exhibition of material relating to Farrand’s work.

Filler, Martin. “Concerto in Brick Major.” House and Garden 175, no. 1 (January, 2006): 50. An article about Dumbarton Oaks that includes a description of Farrand’s landscaping.

McGuire, Diane Kostial, ed. Beatrix Farrand’s Plant Book for Dumbarton Oaks. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1980. Contains “An Attempted Evocation of a Personality” by Mildred Bliss, the owner of Dumbarton Oaks, with whom Farrand worked over many years to create her largest, best-known, still-surviving private commission.

McGuire, Diane Kostial, and Lois Fern, eds. Beatrix Jones Farrand: Fifty Years of American Landscape Architecture. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982. This comprehensive volume contains papers given at the eighth annual Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture. Each paper highlights a particular aspect of Farrand’s life and career. A chapter on the large body of working papers and manuscripts left by Farrand is included.

Raver, Anne. “Beatrix Farrand’s Secret Garden.” The New York Times, November 27, 2003, pp. F1-F8. Reports on the efforts to raise funds for preserving Farrand’s gardens at the Garland Farm in Maine.

Salon, Marlene. “Beatrix Jones Farrand, Pioneer in Gilt-Edged Gardens.” Landscape Architecture 67 (1977): 69-77. Outlines the types of designs Farrand produced for the homes of her wealthy clients. It does not include any material on the one non-American design in this group, Dartington Hall.