porches that have survived are now being restored. On East 92nd Street in Manhattan, there are still two wooden houses with porches set cheek by jowl, remnants of an earlier era when New Yorkers, too, sat outside in the evenings. As I walk by them these early summer days, they touch off an image of another two houses I know—two plain white ones on a rise, overlooking a bay dotted with islands, in a town called Sunset, in Maine. Every nice evening now, their residents are sure to be sitting out on the porches in black rocking chairs, silhouetted against the white. They are satisfied spectators of an annual display: the sun going down over the water on the longest days of the year.
New York Times, June 28, 1979
Facing page: Walker Evans, Detail of a Frame Hou.se in Ossining, New York, 1931.
Designing Women: In-Depth View of Twentieth-Century Women Landscape Designers
WHEN EDITH WHARTON went abroad in 1902 to write Italian Villas and Their Gardens, she felt she was better known for her knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century architecture than for her novels. Reading this work gives the sense of how the American eye perceived the Italian garden and translated it selectively into the American estate garden. “In the modern revival of gardening,” Wharton wrote, “the garden-lover should not content himself with a vague enjoyment of old Italian gardens, but should try to extract from them principles which may be applied at home.”
One who followed her advice quite literally was her niece, the landscape gardener Beatrix Farrand, who took meticulous notes in her travels abroad and used these motifs and others of her own in the 176 landscapes she designed between 1897 and 1950. One of the twelve founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1899, she is the acknowledged dean of women landscape architects. From her New York office, she set a pattern professionally for the generation of women landscape designers who followed and attained a kind of celebrity status during the 1920s and 1930s as they traveled around the country designing estate gardens and public projects. Despite this fact, very little mention has been made of their work in the standard histories of landscape architecture.
Along with Farrand, many of these women were influenced by the writings and gardens of Gertrude Jekyll, the English landscape gardener, and they adhered to her theories on natural gardens and the compatibility of color and texture and how to use color like a wash in an Impressionist painting, by gradual changes in shade rather than abrupt contrasts. (In 1948, Farrand, who had met Gertrude Jekyll on her travels, purchased her papers from the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and they now reside along with Farrand's archive at the College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley.)
Many of Farrand's most ambitious commissions went on for decades. In the East, two of these have been maintained in the intended style: Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, D.C., formerly the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bliss and now part of Harvard University, and Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s Eyrie Garden on Mount Desert Island in Maine. The Dumbarton Oaks garden is the more architectural and European in influence, with its walls and stairways joining intimate terraced gardens—each with a different floral motif—to various fountains and pools.
On the other hand, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller 1930 Eyrie Garden was specifically designed for summer. In the midst of moss-laden woods, a Chinese wall surrounds secluded woodland settings for sculpture from the Far East and, in contrast, a central, rectangular sunken flower garden, a Maine interpretation of Jekyll's style taking advantage of the brilliant seaside hues of annuals and perennials.
Because of her expertise in architectural design and horticulture, Farrand brought to each plan the specific balance required for the terrain and climate. The plant materials she worked with were usually indigenous to the region, and she selected trees, shrubs, and vines for shades of greens, autumnal reds, and seasonal blooms, and for the texture of leaves. Her designs began with formal elements that eventually merged at the edges with natural landscapes that were selectively planned for effect. She believed that formality gave the illusion of space to small properties; for large ones, she introduced a studied asymmetry: although there were strong axes, where one most expected resolution in the design, there would, instead, be subtle dissolution. In the same fashion, formal terraced enclosures would open up to natural landscapes, as at Dumbarton Oaks, where woodlands were cleared to reveal the wild North Vista beyond.
Farrand took into consideration the taste of her clients, as is evidenced by her voluminous correspondence, in particular her letters to J. P. Morgan's office during the years she landscaped the grounds of the J. Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. While only remnants of scraggly wisteria still grow on the wooden posts linked by chains just north of the library, the intended effect of wisteria festooned along chains linking columns garlandlike is still maintained to perfection at Dumbarton Oaks. This technique of using ornamental vines as complements to architecture was a hallmark of her work, especially at Princeton and Yale, where her wall gardens on university buildings enhanced the architecture with the warmth associated with the Ivy League.
Unlike a building, whose construction may eventually be seen as complete, a garden on paper becomes a garden in reality only after a period of growth and maturity and from then on requires continual maintenance and restoration to retain the original form and scale. So crucial to design was the control of maintenance that Farrand billed her clients in two ways: accounts payable in advance for gardeners' and nurseries' bills, and a periodic retainer for herself as overseer of design and maintenance.
As Farrand and other women landscape architects hired women as draftsmen and assistants, the need for professional studies became imperative. This led to the founding of the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture for Women, established in 1915 by two Harvard professors, the institution with which the school eventually merged in 1942. The curriculum was distinguished by a balance between architecture and horticulture in the belief that an integrated design depended on form as well as on texture and color—a balance not always achieved in current training. Despite the difficulty women had in finding positions—the assumption being that either they disrupted office morale or could not supervise construction—by 1930, 83 percent of the Cambridge graduates were engaged professionally.
Acknowledging the success of her generation of women landscape architects, Ellen Biddle Shipman told a reporter in 1938: “Until women took up landscaping, gardening in this country was at its lowest ebb. The renaissance was due largely to the fact that women, instead of working over their boards, used plants as if they were painting pictures and as an artist would.” Exaggerated as this may sound, the women proved themselves and their talents adaptable and expanded into parkway, industrial park, and housing development design when the lucrative residential work was on the wane. Their training in design and engineering even qualified the next generation for military service in World War II, where they worked in cartography, camouflage, and geographic model making.
Shipman's own talents in both engineering and horticulture were evident in her design for the seven-mile lakeshore boulevard in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, which featured a combination of flowering trees, willows, and evergreens to vary the colors and shade of green according to the season. Her own office comprised five or six women and one construction man always out on the job. She designed mostly American- or English-style gardens on an intimate scale and, like Farrand, kept in her charge, as much as possible, the gardens she planned in order to monitor their growth. She moved extensively through the South, particularly in Texas, where she created estate gardens during the oil-boom years. Outstanding among her plans was Longue Vue Gardens in New Orleans, with its oak-tree allée leading up to the house. Her influence was wide, and one contemporary landscape designer, Rachel Lambert Mellon, who sought her advice more than once, prizes Shipman's handwritten directions for making grass steps.
Marion Cruger Coffin, a 1904
