farm on the main road near Salisbury Cove, where Lewis and Amy Magdalene Garland had retired. The team then stayed together, for Clementine Walter lived with Farrand in her house. The charming white clapboard cottage with peaked roofs had three major rooms—two bedrooms with a sitting room between them—that faced the back, and the tripartite rear facade reflected this arrangement. Each of the three rooms had French doors that opened onto its own section of the garden terrace. Outside the bedrooms, perennials from Reef Point were planted in rectangular beds with annuals around the edges, and heather mixed with lavender thrived along a serpentine path leading from a millstone by the sitting room door. The gardening continued, with a subdued palette of pink, lavender, and gray outside Farrand's window, and brighter colors—red, yellow, and orange—outside Clementine Walter's. The balustrade from the Reef Point vegetable garden with carved oak leaves formed an elegant barrier between the garden and the wild cherries and fields beyond.
Farrand brought all of her favorites from Reef Point, including the Hydrangea petiolaris, which thrives today more than ever, covering the whole back of the barn. And her beloved single roses are crammed in wherever possible. Donald Smith remembers well his visits to her at Garland Farm, where she surrounded herself, just as she did at Reef Point, with myriad vases each holding a single rose. Even her local dressmaker, Mary H. Barron, continued to serve her at Garland Farm, although there was no more need for dresses like the one she made for Farrand's sojourn to Boston in the 1930s to take tea with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. “The Scotch tweeds she brought with her each summer for suits,” Barron recollected, “were so rough the briar burrs were still in them.” Most of her suits were in a mixture of black, white, and gray, although there was one exceptional soft purple tweed, and all of the blouses matched the jacket linings and were made with sleeves full enough so that when she pointed, the fabric would not fall back and reveal a bare arm. In later years, she was never without her distinctive black ribbon choker.
When Beatrix Farrand died on February 27, 1959, her service, by her own request, was attended only by Robert Patterson and the small loyal band at Garland Farm. Her ashes were scattered, like her husband's. But the garden at Garland Farm, her only truly private garden, has survived. The Goff family, who lived there between 1970 and 1993, were meticulous in overseeing it. Helena E. Goff, who was president first of the Bar Harbor Garden Club, and later of the Garden Club Federation of Maine, Inc., took on the mantle of responsibility to maintain Farrand's last garden, with occasional visits from Amy Garland. When the house was sold after the death of his parents, Jerome I. Goff became guardian of Farrand's last remaining papers in the house, including her treasured collection of seed packets from botanic gardens and plant societies around the world. The current resident of the cottage, Virginia Dudley Eveland, has engaged two local women landscape gardeners to maintain the gardens in pristine condition, including the fenced-in rock garden in front with its profusion of ginger and other Far Eastern-style plantings. Although the Garland Farm garden is small, a review of the plant labels indicates that all the important ones are there—a microcosm of the much larger world Beatrix Farrand inhabited.
The memory of Reef Point Gardens as it was, though, is guaranteed only by the written record. Publishing the bulletins as a collection is tantamount to re-creating in depth the multifaceted endeavor of Reef Point, which was supported by a devoted staff whose standard of excellence gave her joy. Read together, they constitute a descriptive account that both restores the gardens in their visual form to the mind's eye and summarizes the knowledge and experience of a lifetime.
Beatrix Farrand lived by a Latin motto from Psalm 119 inscribed first in the hallway at Reef Point and later at her Garland Farm cottage: Intellectum da mihi et vivam (Give me understanding, and I shall live). Her own intellect is at the center of the bulletins' texts, and her goal was simply to impart knowledge that would increase the reader's appreciation of gardens and natural landscapes. “The added happiness to life given by an interest in outdoor beauty and art has a very distinct bearing on a community,” she wrote in her 1939 prospectus for Reef Point. There is also in these essays an echo of a frequent expression found in her letters from Maine: “At last I have reached home again…” For within the pages of the bulletins, the gates to Reef Point Gardens are always open.
Introduction, The Bulletins of Reef Point Gardens, The Island Foundation, Bar Harbor, Maine (Sagapress, 1997)
The Private World of a Great Gardener: Rachel Lambert Mellon
UPPERVILLE, VIRGINIA—“Part of creating is understanding that there is always more to do; nothing is ever completely finished,” says Rachel Lambert Mellon, whose landscape designs grace such varied places as the White House, Jacqueline Onassis's summer home on Martha's Vineyard, and Hubert de Givenchy's chateau, Le Jonchet, in France.
In the same tradition as an earlier landscape designer, Beatrix Farrand, Mellon is one of those inherently talented women, who, though not formally trained, has read her way through the subject and observed and learned in her travels both horticulture and landscape design. Recalling their work together at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library on Boston Harbor, I. M. Pei says, “Mrs. Mellon has the combination of sensitivity and imagery with technical knowledge that you only find among the best professionals.” It was she who suggested for the library grounds the dune grass that now bends in the wind—symbolic of the Cape Cod terrain where the president loved to walk.
This past year Mellon has been occupied overseeing the completion of her own new garden library, a building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes on the grounds of Oak Spring, the farm here, southwest of Washington, where she lives with her husband, Paul Mellon, the art patron and philanthropist. The library houses her extensive collection of botanical and gardening books amassed over the years, which she considers her working library.
Oak Spring, a U-shaped complex of whitewashed buildings with trees espaliered against the walls, is the residence that the Mellons consider “home.” Like their other properties—city houses in New York, Washington, and Paris, country houses in Cape Cod and Antigua—Oak Spring has a distinctive garden, designed by Mrs. Mellon, this one in a series of parterres in the French style. Crab apple trees square off one area, and a single cordon of McIntosh apple trees border the cool beauty of blue-and-white flower beds. Nearby is a vegetable garden planted in perpendicular rows edged in boxwood. The garden slopes gently, and descending on either side is the main house, with the peaked roofs of the linked structures, giving the impression of a small white village.
Settled into a hillside, beyond an orchard, is the new whitewashed field-stone library with the pitched shed roof silhouetted against the sky. In his design, Barnes sought to convey a vernacular farm building in a contemporary geometric form. The entire facade facing southwest is an immense sundial with steel gnomon and strokes. The building includes the main book room, underground stacks, a book-processing room, a kitchen, and a cubical tower, which is Mellon's workroom and where her collection of botanical porcelain will be installed.
Inside, the white walls are awash with light and shadow from strategically placed square windows, one of Barnes's signature motifs. “I wanted a modern exterior with large openings to let the outside in,” Mellon confirms.
Between the library and the main house, a pleached arbor of crab apple trees leads to the double greenhouse where Mellon experiments with unusual and rare plants. Working greenhouses they are, but Mellon has added her touch: the storage shelves of the entryway are concealed by trompe l'oeil doors depicting other shelves arrayed with garden paraphernalia. Not the least of which, hanging on a “hook,” is the riding raincoat from her days at Foxcroft School, which she still wears.
One area of the greenhouse is reserved for her miniature herb trees, a form that she originated thirty years ago in this country. Using rosemary, thyme, myrtle, or santolina, she grows them from small slips. “They are living objects,” she says, “and although they have a medieval quality, they complement a contemporary interior as well.”
Her miniature herb trees sit on trestle tables
