Of Gardens

Selected Essays

Paula Deitz

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812206968
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Paula Deitz has delighted readers for more than thirty years with her vivid descriptions of both famous and hidden landscapes. Her writings allow readers to share in the experience of her extensive travels, from the waterways of Britain's Castle Howard to the Japanese gardens of Kyoto, and home again to New York City's Central Park. Collected for the first time, the essays in Of Gardens record her great adventure of continual discovery, not only of the artful beauty of individual gardens but also of the intellectual and historical threads that weave them into patterns of civilization, from the modest garden for family subsistence to major urban developments. Deitz's essays describe how people, over many centuries and in many lands, have expressed their originality by devoting themselves to cultivation and conservation.During a visit to the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor, Maine, Deitz first came to appreciate the notion that landscape architecture can be as intricately conceived as any major structure and is, indeed, the means by which we redeem the natural environment through design. Years later, as she wandered through the gardens of Versailles, she realized that because gardens give structure without confinement, they encourage a liberation of movement and thought. In Of Gardens, we follow Deitz down paths of revelation, viewing "A Bouquet of British Parks: Liverpool, Edinburgh, and London"; the parks and promenades of Jerusalem; the Moonlight Garden of the Taj Mahal; a Tuscan-style villa in southern California; and the rooftop garden at Tokyo's Mori Center, among many other sites.Deitz covers individual landscape architects and designers, including André Le Nôtre, Frederick Law Olmsted, Beatrix Farrand, Russell Page, and Michael Van Valkenburgh. She then features an array of parks, public places, and gardens before turning her attention to the burgeoning business of flower shows. The volume concludes with a memorable poetic epilogue entitled "A Winter Garden of Yellow."

Designing Women: In-Depth View
of Twentieth-Century Women Landscape Designers

WHEN EDITH WHARTON went abroad in 1902 to write Italian Villas and Their Gardens, she felt she was better known for her knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century architecture than for her novels. Reading this work gives the sense of how the American eye perceived the Italian garden and translated it selectively into the American estate garden. “In the modern revival of gardening,” Wharton wrote, “the garden-lover should not content himself with a vague enjoyment of old Italian gardens, but should try to extract from them principles which may be applied at home.”

One who followed her advice quite literally was her niece, the landscape gardener Beatrix Farrand, who took meticulous notes in her travels abroad and used these motifs and others of her own in the 176 landscapes she designed between 1897 and 1950. One of the twelve founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1899, she is the acknowledged dean of women landscape architects. From her New York office, she set a pattern professionally for the generation of women landscape designers who followed and attained a kind of celebrity status during the 1920s and 1930s as they traveled around the country designing estate gardens and public projects. Despite this fact, very little mention has been made of their work in the standard histories of landscape architecture.

Along with Farrand, many of these women were influenced by the writings and gardens of Gertrude Jekyll, the English landscape gardener, and they adhered to her theories on natural gardens and the compatibility of color and texture and how to use color like a wash in an Impressionist painting, by gradual changes in shade rather than abrupt contrasts. (In 1948, Farrand, who had met Gertrude Jekyll on her travels, purchased her papers from the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and they now reside along with Farrand's archive at the College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley.)

Many of Farrand's most ambitious commissions went on for decades. In the East, two of these have been maintained in the intended style: Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, D.C., formerly the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bliss and now part of Harvard University, and Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s Eyrie Garden on Mount Desert Island in Maine. The Dumbarton Oaks garden is the more architectural and European in influence, with its walls and stairways joining intimate terraced gardens—each with a different floral motif—to various fountains and pools.

On the other hand, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller 1930 Eyrie Garden was specifically designed for summer. In the midst of moss-laden woods, a Chinese wall surrounds secluded woodland settings for sculpture from the Far East and, in contrast, a central, rectangular sunken flower garden, a Maine interpretation of Jekyll's style taking advantage of the brilliant seaside hues of annuals and perennials.

Because of her expertise in architectural design and horticulture, Farrand brought to each plan the specific balance required for the terrain and climate. The plant materials she worked with were usually indigenous to the region, and she selected trees, shrubs, and vines for shades of greens, autumnal reds, and seasonal blooms, and for the texture of leaves. Her designs began with formal elements that eventually merged at the edges with natural landscapes that were selectively planned for effect. She believed that formality gave the illusion of space to small properties; for large ones, she introduced a studied asymmetry: although there were strong axes, where one most expected resolution in the design, there would, instead, be subtle dissolution. In the same fashion, formal terraced enclosures would open up to natural landscapes, as at Dumbarton Oaks, where woodlands were cleared to reveal the wild North Vista beyond.

Farrand took into consideration the taste of her clients, as is evidenced by her voluminous correspondence, in particular her letters to J. P. Morgan's office during the years she landscaped the grounds of the J. Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. While only remnants of scraggly wisteria still grow on the wooden posts linked by chains just north of the library, the intended effect of wisteria festooned along chains linking columns garlandlike is still maintained to perfection at Dumbarton Oaks. This technique of using ornamental vines as complements to architecture was a hallmark of her work, especially at Princeton and Yale, where her wall gardens on university buildings enhanced the architecture with the warmth associated with the Ivy League.

Unlike a building, whose construction may eventually be seen as complete, a garden on paper becomes a garden in reality only after a period of growth and maturity and from then on requires continual maintenance and restoration to retain the original form and scale. So crucial to design was the control of maintenance that Farrand billed her clients in two ways: accounts payable in advance for gardeners' and nurseries' bills, and a periodic retainer for herself as overseer of design and maintenance.

As Farrand and other women landscape architects hired women as draftsmen and assistants, the need for professional studies became imperative. This led to the founding of the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture for Women, established in 1915 by two Harvard professors, the institution with which the school eventually merged in 1942. The curriculum was distinguished by a balance between architecture and horticulture in the belief that an integrated design depended on form as well as on texture and color—a balance not always achieved in current training. Despite the difficulty women had in finding positions—the assumption being that either they disrupted office morale or could not supervise construction—by 1930, 83 percent of the Cambridge graduates were engaged professionally.

Acknowledging the success of her generation of women landscape architects, Ellen Biddle Shipman told a reporter in 1938: “Until women took up landscaping, gardening in this country was at its lowest ebb. The renaissance was due largely to the fact that women, instead of working over their boards, used plants as if they were painting pictures and as an artist would.” Exaggerated as this may sound, the women proved themselves and their talents adaptable and expanded into parkway, industrial park, and housing development design when the lucrative residential work was on the wane. Their training in design and engineering even qualified the next generation for military service in World War II, where they worked in cartography, camouflage, and geographic model making.

Shipman's own talents in both engineering and horticulture were evident in her design for the seven-mile lakeshore boulevard in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, which featured a combination of flowering trees, willows, and evergreens to vary the colors and shade of green according to the season. Her own office comprised five or six women and one construction man always out on the job. She designed mostly American- or English-style gardens on an intimate scale and, like Farrand, kept in her charge, as much as possible, the gardens she planned in order to monitor their growth. She moved extensively through the South, particularly in Texas, where she created estate gardens during the oil-boom years. Outstanding among her plans was Longue Vue Gardens in New Orleans, with its oak-tree allée leading up to the house. Her influence was wide, and one contemporary landscape designer, Rachel Lambert Mellon, who sought her advice more than once, prizes Shipman's handwritten directions for making grass steps.

Marion Cruger Coffin, a 1904 Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, also met Jekyll on her travels and proceeded to interpret her ideas in the fifty estate gardens she designed during her career, including Winterthur, the du Pont estate in Wilmington, Delaware, and many on Long Island. Essentially Coffin's estate grounds used circulation routes and sight lines to form a plan of grand vistas, intimate walkways, and gradual descents to draw one away from the house for an aesthetic experience in controlled nature that did not relate directly to the domestic environs. One architectural element leads to another—a trellis of Ionic columns, to a rose arbor walk, to French parterres—until one arrives back at the house. On a large scale, Coffin applied her circulation routes to the campus of the University of Delaware, equivalent in scope to the work of landscaping the great grounds of country houses in England.

Annette Hoyt Flanders succeeded in reducing the scale of estate garden designs to make them compatible with the smaller gardens that were her specialty, such as the one she completed in 1929 for fellow Smith College alumnae Ellen Holt and Elizabeth H. Webster. “A momentary pause,” she called it, amidst the grandiose mountain scenery in Tryon, North Carolina. A white-and-green garden, it resembles Vita Sackville-West's white garden at Sissinghurst Castle. The plan called for three symmetrical rectangular beds of myrtle surrounded by an “ivy hedge” and, along the borders, plantings of white dogwood, white azalea, and white gardenia—all within an eighty-footlong terrace on a mountain slope. Flanders traveled so widely that it was not always possible for her to return to the small out-of-the way gardens she designed, and so she admonished Webster, “Remember, Betty, this is architecture; it must be kept to scale.” Webster maintained it until she was well over a hundred years old.

Flanders completed her own studies in landscape architecture at the University of Illinois in 1928 and received the gold medal of the Architectural League of New York in 1932 for an eighty-five-acre pink-and-green garden in the French style for Mr. and Mrs. Charles. E. F. McCann at Oyster Bay, Long Island. In addition to residential work, she specialized in industrial plants, recreational development, and exhibition gardens. She lectured widely on gardening, and when she moved her office from the Sherry Building in New York back to Milwaukee, her hometown, in 1940, she conducted a landscape school on the premises.

In October 1981, Wave Hill, a New York City cultural institution in Riverdale, sponsored a conference, “American Women & Gardens, 1915-1945,” as the inaugural event in its new American Garden History program headed by landscape designer and historian Leslie Rose Close. The conference was accompanied by an exhibition featuring the architectural drawings and planting plans of prominent women landscape architects of that period who specialized in implementing the look of the private estate. Also included were vintage photographs of the gardens, many by the prominent photographer Mattie Edwards Hewitt.

The Wave Hill exhibition, a discriminating selection of documentary evidence, accurately conveyed the dimensions of these careers—and successful ones they were. It also underscored the problem of there being no repository for these valuable plans, most of which come from the original clients or their descendants. Because much of the available material had been stored in damp cellars, it was too decomposed to be included.

In addition to being a source of ideas for contemporary study, the preservation of drawings and archival material is essential to recapture the original form and scale of older gardens that now barely resemble their originals. For example, one 1920s photograph in the exhibition portrayed an East Hampton garden, designed by New Yorker Ruth Bramley Dean, which gained notoriety years later as the dilapidated Grey Gardens of Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter. Working with the photograph, the current owners, Benjamin Bradlee and Sally Quinn of Washington, D.C., are now restoring the garden's pergola according to Dean's design.

Public designs were also highlighted in the exhibition as part of the repertory of these women, one of whom, Marjorie Sewell Cautley, designed a planting plan for one of the early “garden city” developments in Radburn, New Jersey. Exact specifications on her 1931 drawing of the entrance perspective for the Phipps Court Garden Apartments in Long Island City demonstrate her concern for balance and scale: “Tree lilacs, 10 feet tall; specimen elms, 40 feet high.”

Cornell graduate Helen Bullard (not represented in the exhibition) was a landscape architect who worked almost exclusively in the public domain. During her five years with the Long Island State Park Commission, she designed flower gardens around the Jones Beach bathhouses. This position and her work as director of the annual program for flower planting in the city's parks—300,000 bulbs for spring alone—prepared her for participation in planning one of the biggest commissions around New York at that time, the 1939 World's Fair grounds. She realized that “with modern buildings we cannot depend on classic forms,” meaning straight beds and pattern gardens. Instead, she elaborated in a 1938 interview, “We have no precedents to follow, but, in general, the plan will be designed in directional lines to give the feeling of motion.” The color scheme for the fair was red, yellow, and blue, and the flower beds were planted to contrast with the nearby buildings. And again, it took horticultural expertise to select both well-known varieties and exotic plants for the long-blooming season of a Long Island summer.

Women were equally successful on the West Coast, where the California landscape designer Florence Yoch, working with her associate Lucille Council, was changing her style from making exact copies of Mediterranean gardens in the 1920s to more abstract forms in the 1930s. In 1952, she designed the courtyard for Robinson's department store on Wiltshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, which is still a lush background for glamorous fashion shows.

George Cukor, the film director, remembers her as “a most distinguished woman” whom he greatly esteemed as “the artist who cut my garden right out of the side of a hill.” So much did he admire her work that he commissioned her to build a complete Italian Renaissance garden in the studio as the set for his 1936 MGM film of Romeo and Juliet. The tall cypresses and blossoming trees, the planted urns and the reflecting pool, the balcony in the distance—it endures forever on the silver screen, no maintenance at all, and yet always fresh and always in pale moonlight.

Venerable as these women were, they and their golden era must not be glamorized at the expense of those working now, who have followed their lead. Alice Recknagel Ireys, a 1936 graduate of the Cambridge School who also studied with Flanders, concluded the Wave Hill conference. In speaking of her own work, she described design principles that have formed the critical transition in American garden history between the great estate era and the explosion of suburban and town gardens after World War II. By scaling down and reconfiguring broad terraces, flower walks, and parterres, she confers on modest properties the same sense of privilege and gracious outdoor living that had once been the preserve of country estates. In her designs, she makes a great virtue of the serpentine line to give the illusion of length and breadth.

Vistas and walkways now relate directly to the house itself, and terraced areas are created for outdoor living. Swimming pool design was the innovation of the 1940s. She predicts that, with the two-income family, property sizes will increase again, only these will feature the natural look of woodland walks and dry streams.

In general, she believes the public now knows what a landscape architect is, and most of her clients come to her by word of mouth. According to Ireys, a landscape architect in residential work must have these five qualities: imagination, an understanding of family patterns, sensitivity to detail, a sense of color, and a love of growing things. Hers was the voice of continuity.

Metropolis, December 1982

Beatrix Farrand and The Bulletins of Reef Point Gardens

“WRITTEN WORDS and illustrations outlive many plantations.” This was Beatrix Farrand's farsighted view in 1955 when she acknowledged that her cherished gardens at Reef Point could no longer be maintained to her satisfaction. The Bulletins of Reef Point Gardens essentially bears out the truth of that statement. Written by Farrand and her colleagues over a period of ten years, the bulletins preserve what she referred to finally as the less important “out-of-door phase” of her gardens. One of the premier landscape gardeners of the twentieth century, Beatrix Farrand (1872-1959) created at Reef Point, her family's summer residence, a private showcase of native and naturalized plantings that evolved into the only botanic garden then in the state of Maine.

The idea for the Reef Point Gardens bulletins originated with her husband, Max Farrand, a distinguished author and professor of constitutional history. With his “disciplined scholar's mind,” wrote Beatrix Farrand, he “felt that publication was an essential part of the gardens' work.” Prior to his death in 1945, he even suggested a list of topics and approved a selection of material submitted, and the Max Farrand Memorial Fund became the official publisher of the bulletins. Along with Reef Point's extensive horticultural library, documents collection, and herbarium, the bulletins became an equal partner in the Gardens' mission. Distributed to botanic gardens, arboreta, and libraries worldwide and sold to local visitors for ten cents a copy, they were shaped over the years to contain the essence of the entire landscape. At the time of their publication, everyone associated with Reef Point Gardens had high hopes for its future as a public garden and educational center, organized specifically to expose students of landscape architecture to horticultural expertise and design. Now the bulletins are what remain of a horticultural adventure that came to an end in 1955.

In addition to the landscape gardener herself, four other writers are represented in this collection. Amy Magdalene Garland (1899-1996), who became the chief horticulturist of Reef Point, was born in Bishop's Waltham in Hampshire, England. She arrived in New York City just after World War I to work for Farrand's mother, Mary Cadwalader Jones, as a domestic in her Greenwich Village house. In time, she married Lewis A. Garland, the handyman and chauffeur at Reef Point, and developed into a trusted collaborator in maintaining and documenting the plant collection.

Robert Whiteley Patterson (1905-1988), a 1927 graduate of Harvard College, returned to the university in 1932 to study landscape architecture at the Graduate School of Design. He first went to Maine in 1934 as a designer and planner for Acadia National Park and met Beatrix Farrand at that time. Later, he maintained an office at Reef Point as her associate.

Marion Ida Spaulding (1908-1994) was a landscape architect who completed her degree at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1947. She worked at Reef Point for long periods between 1946 and 1952 to create the herbarium and map the gardens into sections for record-keeping purposes. Later, settling in New Hampshire, she became the resident designer at Mt. Gun-stock Nursery in Gilford and was also associated with the Laconia Housing and Redevelopment Authority.

And finally, Kenneth A. Beckett (b. 1929), a young Englishman, spent six months as a skilled gardener and propagator at Reef Point in 1954 after receiving his Royal Horticultural Society Diploma from the Wisley School of Horticulture. He eventually became a prominent garden writer in Britain, and among his more than forty publications is the popular Royal Horticultural Society Encylopaedia of House and Conservatory Plants. Now living in Norfolk, he looks back on the two bulletins he wrote for Farrand as his first ambitious work.

Although the name Reef Point visually connotes an isolated property projecting out into one of the myriad bays along the rugged coast of Maine, the original two-acre plot purchased in 1882 by Frederic Rhinelander Jones, Beatrix's father, was actually located in the middle of Bar Harbor, the then newly fashionable summer community on Mount Desert Island. Expanded by later purchases to six acres, Reef Point lies between Hancock Street and Atlantic Avenue, two side streets that run perpendicular to the Shore Path. Like Newport's oceanside Cliff Walk, Bar Harbor's Shore Path is a long public walkway that skirts the rocky coastal ledges and overlooks Frenchman Bay and beyond to the procession of hump-backed islands called the Porcupines.

In a line with other rambling Shore Path cottages—as Maine summer houses are called after the early hotel guest cottages—the Reef Point cottage was built in 1883, one of twenty-two buildings designed in Bar Harbor by the Boston firm of Rotch & Tilden, which specialized in a combination of flat log and shingle construction with turrets, high gables, and dormer windows as well as wide verandas. By the time the house was completed, Beatrix's parents were already separated and the property signed over to her mother. Although the land is now divided among five residents, the configuration of the perimeter has remained surprisingly intact. To all appearances, it is possible to walk to the end of Hancock Street in the silence of a summer afternoon and stand in front of the granite gate pillars and finials of Reef Point under towering white spruce as though nothing had changed. A curved entrance drive leads to the picturesque Gardener's Cottage, one of the few buildings to survive the demolition of the gardens. A short stroll along the lichen-covered, white cedar boundary fence on the Shore Path gives a sense of the dramatic views across the water, which determined the axes of the fanned-out garden paths.

Preserved among Beatrix Farrand's papers at the University of California, Berkeley, is a bound journal from her early twenties with the printed title Book of Gardening, in which she recorded from October 10, 1893, to May 31, 1895, her observations about horticulture and garden design both in America and abroad, mostly in Italy and Germany. In addition to noting her critical impressions of a visit to the grounds at Fairsted, Frederick Law Olmsted's office and residence in Brookline, Massachusetts, and of gardens at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, she expressed in early entries her appreciation of the details that made Reef Point and Maine a magical place and the center of her life.

“The scarlet trumpet honeysuckle over the porch has small bunches of scarlet berries all over it which make it as effective as in the blooming season.” This description of what she later called “vertical flower beds” is of a piece with the bulletin she wrote sixty years later on climbing plants...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue - The Lure of the Porch in Summer: Privacy and Pleasure
• Chapter One - Landscape Architects and Designers
• Chapter Two - Parks and Public Places
• Chapter Three - American
• Chapter Four - British
• Chapter Five - French
• Chapter Six - Japanese
• Chapter Seven - Flower Shows
• Epilogue - A Winter Garden of Yellow
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Photography Credits