where to plant them: “On the south and west sides of the road opposite the view young spruce should be used, and later on, as pitch pine is available. The north slope of the hill could be gradually planted with these giving a splendid Chinese effect to this superb northern prospect. These pitch pine will never intrude on the view any more than they do on the Shore Drive where they add a great picturesqueness to the position (November 4, 1930).”
Throughout these notes, she urged Rockefeller “to vary the road planting in height and quality and type of material, as these varieties are usually shown in natural growth.” In a sense, like the eighteenth-century British landscape designer William Kent, Farrand leaped the fence of Reef Point and saw the whole landscape as a native garden. When her directions were not followed, she expressed displeasure, particularly when trees were planted in straight lines. Nevertheless she wrote to Rockefeller in 1933, “Again I want to thank you for the way in which you are so consistently upholding my judgments and helping with the ease of carrying on the work to which I look forward as one of the great pleasures of the Island days.” He, on the other hand, found pleasure in the results: “For the first time [I] could understand why you are so partial to wild cherries and pear trees. The blossoms certainly are lovely.”
Every six months, Farrand forwarded a detailed accounting of the number of drives and days in the field in addition to office consultations and stenography. With a few exceptions, the amount owed was always the same: “No charge.” Rockefeller, of course, was deeply appreciative and enjoyed their teamwork “in the public interest” for the “beautification of Acadia National Park.” “I do not know when I have spent an entire half day in so carefree and enjoyable a manner as last Sunday afternoon,” he wrote in May 1929 early on in their long road correspondence. “To feel that I could talk as frankly as I did about park matters, with the perfect assurance that nothing that was said would go further, added much to my satisfaction and sense of freedom in the talk.”
The collaboration was a close and dedicated one. Toward the end of the correspondence in 1941, and at the season's end, the two tried unsuccessfully to make a rendezvous for a final carriage ride up Day Mountain. Rockefeller responded with the courtly congeniality that characterized their rapport. “What ever happens to the world,” he wrote, “Day Mountain will be standing next summer and I much hope we can drive up it then.” Throughout their long association, however, neither abandoned a formality and reserve instinctive to them both. One August, Farrand wrote: “It was only with what I thought great self-control that I passed you the other day on your way homeward from an evidently brisk walk. I wanted to stop and say how do you do to you and to tell you what a pleasure it has been to work over the lodges and their surroundings [in the park].” Horticulturists on the island have observed what may still be traces of her handiwork in such selections as the American bittersweet (Celastrus scandens) around the bridges that serve as overpasses for the carriage roads, now being restored after years of neglect.
Involving though their work in Acadia was, their main project together, which entailed hundreds more letters written between 1926 and 1950, was the garden Farrand designed for Rockefeller's wife, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, in a spruce forest below The Eyrie, their hilltop house in Seal Harbor. One of Farrand's major designs, The Eyrie garden is still in family hands. Although Farrand worked directly with Abby Rockefeller, the correspondence confirming verbal arrangements was always with her husband. In 1921, the couple had traveled to China for the opening of the Peking Union Medical College, which was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Culturally, the voyage was a galvanizing event in their life. Yellowing newspaper articles in a scrapbook at the Rockefeller Archive Center show the tiled pagoda-style roof of the college entrance, which confirms the influence of this architecture on the structures of the garden. Inside a pink stucco wall coped with yellow tiles from the Forbidden City, the contours and harmonies of mossy woodland settings for sculptures from the Far East are juxtaposed with a Maine interpretation of an English flower garden in brilliant seaside hues. Passing from cool green paths through a Moon Gate into a two-level walled enclosure of concentric rectangular borders provides one of the richest garden experiences in America today. The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden, as it is now called, continued under the stewardship of David and Peggy Rockefeller. They reinstated the central greensward in its present form, and Peggy Rockefeller monitored the borders imaginatively by introducing new perennials and annuals.
Although no longer as complete as the Rockefellers', the garden Farrand designed at The Haven in Northeast Harbor for Gerrish H. Milliken and his wife, Agnes, beginning in 1925, possesses a special aura today. Agnes Milliken was a close friend of Beatrix Farrand and consulted with her on matters concerning Reef Point; it was she who aided Farrand in the acquisition of Gertrude Jekyll's papers in the late 1940s. In designing the Millikens' garden, Farrand incorporated, more than in any other private commission, many of the themes that made Reef Point so distinctive. Looking out today over a field of purple heathers to glimpses of blue water between stands of pointed firs—and to white sails that appear and disappear behind the trees—one gets an exact sense of what she sought as perfection for Maine. Now owned by Gerrish H. Milliken, Jr., and his wife, Phoebe, the garden comes the closest to how Reef Point itself must have appeared in its prime. Along the entrance path to the rambling shingle house, there is another Reef Point touch: borders of heliotrope by the porch and white nicotiana along the path, the former with a heavenly fragrance by day, the latter radiant by night. Like her own terraces of native single roses at Reef Point, there is a long rose path leading to an open terrace and a vine-covered pergola with modified Tuscan columns, where Agnes Milliken would take tea in the afternoons. These pergolas also became a characteristic feature of Farrand's gardens on Mount Desert Island.
Following Max Farrand's death in 1945, his wife began taking measures to adapt Reef Point architecturally for its future. Robert Patterson was the architect, and in 1946 he completed the Gardener's Cottage for the Garlands, employing many of Rotch & Tilden's decorative motifs from the main house. Beatrix Farrand describes other renovations and additions in the bulletins themselves, including the new Garden Club House given by the Garden Club of Mount Desert, of which Farrand was the founder in August 1923. By the summer of 1947, the establishment was at a peak of activity: books and papers were catalogued daily; herbarium specimens were collected and pressed; new species arrived to be recorded and planted; and, of course, visitors were coming on a regular basis. In the end, over fifty thousand people visited Reef Point on its open days. On one occasion, young sailors from a warship in dock came for tea and cakes in the garden. Despite the depression and World War II, Reef Point survived in a mode that combined the most advanced thinking in scientific and educational techniques with a kind of gracious Edwardian summer life.
Donald E. Smith, a gardener at Reef Point during summers in the early 1950s while he was a horticulture student at the University of Maine, recalls the routines as everyone did his or her tasks in the garden overseen by Amy Garland. Often Farrand surveyed the scene from her balcony. “She always wore Harris tweeds even in the summer and walked around the gardens with a cane and a shawl over her shoulders,” he said. “She was very erect, very pleasant though stern, but we got along fine.” Clementine Walter was the first one out in the early morning to hear the bird calls, and even Farrand herself kept track of the birds' nests, especially a mockingbird's in the Alberta spruce. After his early training, Smith went on to work at Dumbarton Oaks, where he eventually became superintendent. Now in retirement, he lives in his wife's family's house down the street from Reef Point.
The event that caused a slow but not so subtle transition in this way of life came suddenly on October 17, 1947, when a fire that began smoldering in a cranberry bog spread fiercely with the wind to devastate the town of Bar Harbor and many of its elegant summer cottages. Although Reef Point was not affected physically, and daily life appeared to go on as usual, the character of the town began to change. Visitors more and more came as tourists in search of amusement rather than with notebooks in hand to look and learn. At that time, Farrand wrote in her report to the board, “Those who see the garden's visitors from the windows occasionally wish that fashionable scarlet coats would not pause too long minutes in front of lavender and pale pink flowers—but mercifully fashions change.”
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