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Beatrix Farrand (1872 - 1959)

© Michael Morrissey

The works of famous architects are worth preserving. This includes the works of Landscape architects. A well designed garden, lawn or walkway is just as important as a well designed building, façade or doorway. Beatrix Farrand is one of this country’s most notable landscape architects. Her commissions, numbering over 200 by the end of her life, are the envy of any architect, landscape or otherwise. Many of her original designs remain today, while some are being implemented for the first time. Old designs never realized are now finding life 120 years after their inception.

She began her career in a room in her mother’s New York City brownstone. She began by designing gardens for the well to do residence of the area. In 1897 she completed work in the Seal Harbor cemetery in Maine. In that same year she also worked in New York’s exclusive Tuxedo Park. At 27 she was a Charter Fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects. Not surprisingly she was the Society’s first and only woman fellow. Beatrix went on to work for such notable families as the Whitney’s, Markoe’s, Harris’s and Pierpont’s. She created memorable formal and walled gardens for these families both at their weekend homes – Oyster Bay, Chestnut Hill – and at their Manhattan residencies.

In 1912 Beatrix designed a landscape plan for Princeton University’s Graduate College in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1913 Beatrix met Max Farrand and by December of that same year they married. In 1914 she became Princeton’s supervising landscape architect.

Beatrix designed the White House’s East Garden for President Woodrow Wilson. In 1916 Beatrix designed a rose garden for the New York Botanical Gardens (although the plans lay dormant until 1989). In 1923 she began work as a landscape gardener at Yale University. She worked in the same capacity on the campus at Oberlin College.

In 1922 she began drawing plans for the Bliss family at Dumbarton Oaks, which turned out to be her greatest work. Dumbarton Oaks is located in the residential Georgetown section of Washington DC. The Federal-style house was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss in 1920. Surrounding the building on three sides (north, south, and east) are ten acres of formal gardens all designed by Beatrix Farrand. The gardens are open to the public and well worth the trip.

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