Beatrix farrand6/19/2023 Farrand designed the Asian garden for John and Abby Rockefeller in Seal Harbor, Maine, the block-long backyard of what is now the Morgan Library for J. ![]() She was known to use the train car as her office and would have associates board at Penn Station and upon finishing their business of the day disembark at whatever station was next. When Farrand took on the project, in 1921, her career was at its prime and saw her shuttling to site visits from Long Island to Newport to Maine. It is a garden to be active in, not one simply to stroll through or admire from afar like the pannier-skirt-wide central axes of the Versailles parterres. ![]() Nothing is static, yet there is also the calm clarity of Farrand herself. Dumbarton Oaks would be Farrand’s masterpiece, a 30-year project she would later describe as the “most deeply felt and best loved” of her career.Īrranged along a steep grade, Dumbarton Oaks wends and winds through a series of outdoor rooms, where symmetry and asymmetry are juggled with deftness-from the controlled sunrise hues of the over 900 blooms in the formal rose garden to the acre-wide salvo of golden Forsythia, from the ebullient pastel palette of the larkspurs and alliums stippling the herbaceous border to restrained boxwood and yew bordered walks. (Way’s The Garden as Art: Beatrix Farrand at Dumbarton Oaks will be released next spring.) These New Women included performers, athletes, professionals, and society women who rode bicycles and adventured outdoors.īliss, the wife of diplomat Robert Woods Bliss, also embodied this new paradigm, and so it was natural that she chose Farrand to transform Dumbarton Oaks, the Blisses’ hilltop estate and 53-acre tract, formerly farmland, at the northern edge of Georgetown. It is also a tribute to a quintessentially American notion of womanhood-the Gibson girl, who “emerged at the end of the 19th century possessing the self-confidence, individuality, and independence of a generation ready to conquer the world,” writes the scholar Thaisa Way in her 2009 book Unbounded Practices: Women, Landscape Architecture, and Early Twentieth Century Design. “We both said this is probably the last time this kind of shoot is going to happen.” “There was a certain nostalgia,” admits Coddington. This shoot, with Vodianova as Farrand, model Karen Elson as her close friend and patron Mildred Bliss, and the actor Aldis Hodge as David Williston, the pioneering Black landscape artist who was Farrand’s peer, has a valedictory air. Some of the most memorable shoots have starred the model Natalia Vodianova, who under Coddington and Leibovitz’s direction has embodied heroines ranging from Alice in Wonderland to Edith Wharton. “There’s nothing more to be said about Beatrix if you spoke to Annie.”)Ĭoddington and Leibovitz have spent close to two decades creating fashion fantasias for Vogue, which will be anthologized in Wonderland, Leibovitz’s forthcoming volume of fashion images for Phaidon. ![]() “Even though she was well-to-do, she knew she wanted to do something.” (“She’s obsessed with her,” says Coddington. Her gardens have been photographed at their peak especially for this book, and these lush illustrations are complemented by beautiful watercolor wash renderings of her designs, now preserved at the library of the University of California at Berkeley.“I was so intrigued with her story,” says Leibovitz. Perhaps her best-known work is the extensive garden at Dumbarton Oaks, originally a private residence and now a research institute of Harvard University.ĭeeply influenced by the English landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll, Farrand was known for broad expanses of lawn with deep swaths of borders planted in a subtle palette of foliage and flowers. ![]() Many of her clients were members of the highest echelon of society with estates in Newport, the Berkshires, and Maine, but Farrand ultimately became a consultant for university campuses, including Yale and Princeton, and for public gardens, including the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden and the Rose Garden at The New York Botanical Garden. New photography of lush gardens in bloom will appeal to all who love landscape and gardening.īorn into a prominent New York family (she was the niece of Edith Wharton), Farrand eschewed the traditional social life of the Gilded Age to pursue her passion for landscape and plants. This definitive study of one of the most important figures in American landscape design, written by a respected and widely published landscape architecture historian, will be an important contribution to the field.
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