Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June/July 1986 | Volume 37, Issue 4
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June/July 1986 | Volume 37, Issue 4
When Beatrix Farrand arrived to work on a garden, clients knew they were in the presence of someone extraordinary. Friends called her Queen Elizabeth, and she sat regally swathed in lap robes, dressed primly in English tweeds, as her chauffeur guided the Fierce-Arrow touring car up the drive. In the twenties and thirties a garden by Farrand was believed to open social doors for its owner, and the people who hired her—people with such names as J. P. Morgan, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Mr. Edward Whitney, Mrs. Woodrow Wilson—were accustomed to the best.
Her actual achievements have for years been buried under this image of Farrand as society gardener to the very rich; only recently has her reputation as one of the best of American landscape designers begun to be restored.
Beatrix Farrand was in fact an exacting professional in a field where women were tolerated only if they more or less promised to remain amateurs. No matter how large or small, from her twenty-six-acre design at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., to the yard of J. P. Morgan’s town house in New York City, she was a perfectionist who brought to all her projects a magical sense of the appropriate.
Between 1896 and 1945 she designed more than 176 gardens. Not all were country estates; she also planned the campuses of Princeton, Yale, the University of Chicago, and Oberlin. Her career coincided with the glory days of landscape gardening in America, when the new rich wanted settings to add tone to their wealth. Those days ended with the leveling effects of the personal income tax, followed by the two world wars. Along with the vast gardens that, unattended, went quickly to seed, the many landscape designers who created them have long been neglected.
But in recent years, the early-twentieth-century masters of the American garden have been rediscovered. Farrand was one of the first to reemerge, partly because of her brilliant sensibility and the sheer volume of her work, but also because more of her projects have survived than those of the other landscape designers of her day. Still in existence are Dumbarton Oaks; Eyrie, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller garden in Seal Harbor, Maine; and the basic campus plans for Princeton and Yale.
Beatrix Cadwalader Jones (1872–1959) was born to a prominent New York family. Her father, Frederic Jones, oldest brother of the novelist Edith Wharton, inherited money and spent his life abroad enjoying it. Mary Rawle Jones, a Philadelphia debutante, had entertained William Thackeray at home and visited Lincoln in the White House. Beatrix as a child traveled often to Europe, usually with her uncle John Cadwalader, a lawyer, who delighted in taking young “Trixie” on Scottish