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. Tutored privately, Beatrix Farrand developed early on a keen sense of observation and taste as well as a distinct writing style that rendered her ideas and opinions as clearly as if she had drawn them in a detailed plan. Like many Maine summer residents, she returned to view the autumn color in a ritual not without its melancholy side. Among pressed leaves and sketches for the alignment of trees, she wrote, “I noticed the coloring of the leaves more beautiful than ever…this season before we left.” Despite Maine's harsh climate, nature always conspires to make one's day of departure the most inviting.
Since the majority of Farrand's voluminous writings are in the quasi-public form of reports to or correspondence with clients, these journal entries provide a rare opportunity to look over her shoulder in a private moment. Her descriptions of gardens prove to what degree observation was the foundation of her education. During the early 1890s, she was guided in this technique during her training in horticulture and landscape gardening at Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum under the tutelage of Charles Sprague Sargent, its first director. The source of Professor Sargent's oft-quoted advice to her—“make the plan fit the ground and not twist the ground to fit a plan”—is found here in the final bulletin, an autobiographical account intended as her obituary. She continued to forge links with the Arboretum over the years, frequently seeking advice on the specific identification of plants, which were carefully packed and mailed from Bar Harbor to Jamaica Plain.
In traveling abroad, Beatrix was often in the company of her aunt Edith Wharton, her father's sister, who in 1904 published her own travel impressions in the quintessential Italian Villas and Their Gardens, many years after her niece's journal was written. During this period, the specifics of European gardens recorded by professionals and Grand Tour travelers became the new grammar of American estate gardens as designed by Beatrix Farrand and her contemporaries. Although the divorce of Beatrix's parents may have altered the path of her life in New York society, the dynamic relationship among the three women—the vivacious mother, the daughter, and the aunt, only ten years Beatrix's senior—provided the catalyst for a secure, confident, and independent life. Being different was in a sense also liberating. Her cousin and adviser, John Lambert Cadwalader, a lawyer and founder of the New York Public Library, was also part of the family equation. His picture was placed over a mantle at Reef Point, where Beatrix Farrand once showed it to a young friend, saying, “He is the person I have been closest to in my life.” Cadwalader encouraged her early on to a career in landscape gardening, which
