Photo courtesy of Beatrix Jones Farrand Collection, 1955-2, Environmental Design Archives, College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley. Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872-1959), one of the finest landscape architects of her generation, was a charter member of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Although active in the ASLA throughout her long and distinguished career, she always referred to herself as a landscape gardener. Robert Patterson, a close professional associate, said that Farrand thought the word architect “should be left to the designer of buildings.” She was born in New York City, the only child of Mary Cadwalader Rawle and Frederick Rhinelander Jones, who separated in 1887 and divorced in 1896. Farrand’s early life cannot have been entirely happy, but neither was it dull. Tutored at home, as many young girls of her social class were, she often traveled abroad with her mother and with her father’s sister, Edith Wharton. Her mother, in response to reduced financial circumstances, acted as part-time literary agent for her sister-in-law and kept within her immediate circle of friends some of the best literary and artistic minds of the period including Brooks and Henry Adams, Henry James, and John La Farge. Farrand’s uncle, John Lambert Cadwalader, a distinguished lawyer and a founder of the New York Public Library, is said to have recognized in his niece an early talent for landscape design and an “indomitable will.” He later remarked, “Let her be a gardener of for that matter anything she wants to be. What she wishes to do will be well done.” Farrand first planned a career in music, but the decisive moment with respect to her ultimate choice of profession probably occurred in 1892, when by her own account “a fortunate meeting with Mary Sargent (wife of Charles Sprague Sargent) changed the course of a young woman’s life.” Soon after this meeting, Farrand came to live for several months at Holm Lea, the Sargents’ estate at Brookline, Massachusetts. During this period, Farrand studied horticulture and the basic principles of landscape design under Sargent at the Arnold Arboretum. Although she later developed her own philosophy of design, she always followed Sargent’s sound advice “to make the plan fit the ground and not twist the ground to fit the plan.” It was Sargent who encouraged Farrand to become a professional. After a European garden tour in 1895, Farrand returned to New York City and studied civil engineering with private tutors. A year later she opened a landscape architecture office in her mother’s house on East 11th Street. Working initially within the immediate circle of family friends, she received her first major commission that same year from William Garrison of Tuxedo, New York. In 1899, Farrand joined ten other distinguished professionals to establish the American Society of Landscape Architects. She was the only woman among the founders. 
Beatrix Jones Farrand Collection, 1955-2, Environmental Design Archives, College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley. Farrand’s earliest designs were formal in character but reflected the influence of William Robinson, the English landscape architect and author of The Wild Garden (1870). She also shared with Gertrude Jekyll, the celebrated contemporary British landscape gardener, a subtle and harmonious approach to color based on Impressionist theory. Robert Patterson, her lifelong associate, later wrote that Farrand’s work had a “freedom of scale, a subtle softness of line and an unobtrusive asymmetry.” Her designs combined horticultural impressionism and the best elements of classical European gardening. Unfortunately, none of Farrand’s earliest gardens survive, although evidence of her approach may be gleaned from drawings preserved at the University of California. Several major projects executed after her marriage to Max Farrand in 1913, including the country estate of Willard Straight in Old Westbury, New York, have been destroyed. However, one of Farrand’s most successful gardens, designed for Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in Seal Harbor, Maine (1925-1950), is still well preserved and maintained by the Rockefeller family. Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, Farrand’s finest surviving work. Beginning in 1921 and over the next twenty-six years, Farrand transformed for clients Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss what had been a farm into on of the most imaginative gardens in this country. The entire composition reflects her clear understanding of the topographic subtleties of the site. Lending complexity to the whole is the principle of asymmetry. The formal Georgian Revival house was placed deliberately off-axis, with its principal terraces extending to the east and descending to informal wooded areas below. Dumbarton Oaks is everywhere marked by a richness of architectural detail, and imaginative choice of materials, delicacy, and restraint—qualities associated with all of Farrand’s best work. 
Beatrix Jones Farrand Collection, 1955-2, Environmental Design Archives, College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley. Among her private clients Farrand gained a reputation for thoroughness and certainty of approach. This reputation also extended to her campus work, for, unlike many of her female colleagues, Farrand secured a large number of commissions outside the residential sector. Beginning in 1916, she designed the graduate college gardens at Princeton University. At Yale, between 1922 and 1945, she designed the Memorial Quadrangle, Silliman College Quadrangle, and the Marsh Botanical Garden. Her other campus commissions include those for the University of Chicago (1919-1936) and Vassar (1926-1927), Hamilton (1024), and Oberlin (1939-1946) colleges. Farrand devoted her final years to the creation of Reef Point Gardens in Bar Harbor, Maine, a project she and her husband had begun in 1937. Designed for both scholarly and experimental purposes, the project ultimately included an extensive library, a test garden of native flora, and the herbarium. In 1955, Farrand, concerned about the survival of Reef Point, transferred the contents of her library and the herbarium, as well as professional plans and correspondence, to the university of California at Berkeley. She died at Bar Harbor four years later. By Eleanor M. McPeck, from Pioneers of American Landscape Design (a project of the National Park Service Historic Landscape Initiative, Library of American Landscape History, Catalog of Landscape Records in the Unites States at Wave Hill, and the Cultural Landscape Foundation), Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA and Robin Karson eds. McGraw-Hill, 2000. |
Last updated: February 17, 2023