Beatrix Farrand - Landscape Design Career

Landscape Design Career

She began practicing landscape architecture at the age of 25, working from the upper floor of her mother's brownstone house on East Eleventh Street in New York. Her first designs were residential gardens for neighboring Bar Harbor residents. With the help of her mother and her aunt's (Edith Wharton's) social connections she was introduced to many prominent people, which led to working on a variety of significant projects on America's East Coast, Midwest, and California, and England.

Farrand did the initial site and planting planning 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. In addition to being the earliest extant example of her residential designs, this exquisite walled garden, now restored, is the only known pairing of works by the two most famous designers of that era—Farrand and the architects McKim, Mead & White—who remodeled the Newbolds' eighteenth century house.

For the White House the first Mrs. Wilson, Ellen Loise Axson Wilson, had commissioned Beatrix Farrand to design the East Colonial Garden (now the redesigned Jacqueline Kennedy Garden) and the West Garden (now the redesigned White House Rose Garden) in 1913. After Mrs. Wilson's August 1914 death the project languished until the second Mrs. Wilson, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, had their installation restarted and completed in 1916. She received the commission from J. Pierpont Morgan to design the Morgan Library grounds in New York City, and continued as a consultant for thirty years (1913–1943).

Her most notable work was at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in the Georgetown district of Washington, D.C. for Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss (1922–1940). Her design was inspired by her European ventures, especially from the Italian Renaissance gardens, and consisted of an establishing a sophisticated relationship between the architectural and natural environments, with formal terraced gardens stepping a down steep slope and transitioning to a more naturalistic aesthetic approaching the creek. Dumbarton Oaks is considered one of the best American neo-classicist gardens.

In 1927 her husband accepted the position as the first Director of The Huntington Library (1927–1941) in San Marino near Pasadena and Los Angeles, California. They moved to California but Farrand had trouble building a clientele in that state. William Hertrich had long standing dominion of the Botanical Gardens at the Huntington. The landscape designers Florence Yoch and Louise Council, and Lockwood DeForest Jr., among others, were already well established there. Her few projects came via friends, such as the Bliss winter and retirement estate, 'Casa Dorinda', in Montecito, California and the patronage of Mildred Bliss's mother, Anna Blakely Bliss, for the nearby Santa Barbara Botanic Garden project. In the Los Angeles area she had several commissions each with astronomer George Ellery Hale and architect Myron Hunt. With the latter she worked on projects at Occidental College and the California Institute of Technology (CalTech).

Farrand commuted cross-country by train for her eastern projects, such as the design and supervision of the Chinese inspired garden at 'The Eyrie' for Abby Aldrich Rockefeller on Mount Desert Island in Seal Harbor, Maine (1926–35). This was the era of the automobile, and in her designs Farrand applied principles learned earlier from Frederick Law Olmsted's drives at the Arnold Arboretum and the Biltmore Estate of George Washington Vanderbilt II. John D. Rockefeller sought out and funded Farrand to design planting plans for subtle carriage roads at Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, Maine, near her Reef Point home (c.1930). Their use continues at the Park.

Extant Farrand private gardens in the eastern U.S. are: the Bliss family's Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.; the Harkness summer home 'Eolia' in Waterford, Connecticut (1918–1924) - now preserved as the Harkness Memorial State Park; and the Rockefellers' estate 'The Eyrie' in Seal Harbor, Maine. Henry James introduced her to Theodate Pope Riddle, "one of her most fascinating clients" who owned the estate 'Hill-Stead' (1913) - now preserved as the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut.

The Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, for California native plants, represents her talent in Santa Barbara, California. In England her evolving major project, 'Dartington Hall', was for Dorothy Whitney Straight Elmhirst in Devon (1932–37). The Reef Point Collection of her library, drawings and herbarium specimens are archived in the Environmental Design Archives at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley (U.C. Berkeley) campus, except for the Dumbarton Oaks documents located at the library there, and the Arnold Arboretum drawings in their archives, both under the stewardship of Harvard.