on her travels and proceeded to interpret her ideas in the fifty estate gardens she designed during her career, including Winterthur, the du Pont estate in Wilmington, Delaware, and many on Long Island. Essentially Coffin's estate grounds used circulation routes and sight lines to form a plan of grand vistas, intimate walkways, and gradual descents to draw one away from the house for an aesthetic experience in controlled nature that did not relate directly to the domestic environs. One architectural element leads to another—a trellis of Ionic columns, to a rose arbor walk, to French parterres—until one arrives back at the house. On a large scale, Coffin applied her circulation routes to the campus of the University of Delaware, equivalent in scope to the work of landscaping the great grounds of country houses in England.
Annette Hoyt Flanders succeeded in reducing the scale of estate garden designs to make them compatible with the smaller gardens that were her specialty, such as the one she completed in 1929 for fellow Smith College alumnae Ellen Holt and Elizabeth H. Webster. “A momentary pause,” she called it, amidst the grandiose mountain scenery in Tryon, North Carolina. A white-and-green garden, it resembles Vita Sackville-West's white garden at Sissinghurst Castle. The plan called for three symmetrical rectangular beds of myrtle surrounded by an “ivy hedge” and, along the borders, plantings of white dogwood, white azalea, and white gardenia—all within an eighty-footlong terrace on a mountain slope. Flanders traveled so widely that it was not always possible for her to return to the small out-of-the way gardens she designed, and so she admonished Webster, “Remember, Betty, this is architecture; it must be kept to scale.” Webster maintained it until she was well over a hundred years old.
Flanders completed her own studies in landscape architecture at the University of Illinois in 1928 and received the gold medal of the Architectural League of New York in 1932 for an eighty-five-acre pink-and-green garden in the French style for Mr. and Mrs. Charles. E. F. McCann at Oyster Bay, Long Island. In addition to residential work, she specialized in industrial plants, recreational development, and exhibition gardens. She lectured widely on gardening, and when she moved her office from the Sherry Building in New York back to Milwaukee, her hometown, in 1940, she conducted a landscape school on the premises.
In October 1981, Wave Hill, a New York City cultural institution in Riverdale, sponsored a conference, “American Women & Gardens, 1915-1945,” as the inaugural event in its new American Garden History program headed by landscape designer and historian Leslie Rose Close. The conference was accompanied by an exhibition featuring the architectural drawings and planting plans of prominent women landscape architects of that period who specialized in implementing the look of the private estate. Also included were vintage photographs of the gardens, many by the prominent photographer Mattie Edwards Hewitt.
The Wave Hill exhibition, a discriminating selection of documentary evidence, accurately conveyed the dimensions of these careers—and successful ones they were. It also underscored the problem of there being no repository for these valuable plans, most of which come from the original clients or their descendants. Because much of the available material had been stored in damp cellars, it was too decomposed to be included.
In addition to being a source of ideas for contemporary study, the preservation of drawings and archival material is essential to recapture the original form and scale of older gardens that now barely resemble their originals. For example, one 1920s photograph in the exhibition portrayed an East Hampton garden, designed by New Yorker Ruth Bramley Dean, which gained notoriety years later as the dilapidated Grey Gardens of Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter. Working with the photograph, the current owners, Benjamin Bradlee and Sally Quinn of Washington, D.C., are now restoring the garden's pergola according to Dean's design.
Public designs were also highlighted in the exhibition as part of the repertory of these women, one of whom, Marjorie Sewell Cautley, designed a planting plan for one of the early “garden city” developments in Radburn, New Jersey. Exact specifications on her 1931 drawing of the entrance perspective for the Phipps Court Garden Apartments in Long Island City demonstrate her concern for balance and scale: “Tree lilacs, 10 feet tall; specimen elms, 40 feet high.”
Cornell graduate Helen Bullard (not represented in the exhibition) was a landscape architect who worked almost exclusively in the public domain. During her five years with the Long Island State Park Commission, she designed flower gardens around the Jones Beach bathhouses. This position and her work as director of the annual program for flower planting in the city's parks—300,000 bulbs for spring alone—prepared her for participation in planning one of the biggest commissions around New York at that time, the 1939 World's Fair grounds. She realized that “with modern buildings we cannot depend on classic forms,” meaning straight beds and pattern gardens. Instead, she elaborated in a 1938 interview, “We have no precedents to follow, but, in general, the plan will be designed in directional lines to give the feeling of motion.” The color scheme for the fair was red, yellow, and blue, and the flower beds were planted to contrast with the nearby buildings. And again, it took horticultural expertise to select both well-known varieties and exotic plants for the long-blooming season of a Long Island summer.
Women were equally successful on the West Coast, where the California landscape designer Florence Yoch, working with her associate Lucille Council, was changing her style from making exact copies of Mediterranean gardens in the 1920s to more abstract forms in the 1930s. In 1952, she designed the courtyard for Robinson's department store on Wiltshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, which is still a lush background for glamorous fashion shows.
George Cukor, the film director, remembers her as “a most distinguished woman” whom he greatly esteemed as “the artist who cut my garden right out of the side of a hill.” So much did he admire her work that he commissioned her to build a complete Italian Renaissance garden in the studio as the set for his 1936 MGM film of Romeo and Juliet. The tall cypresses and blossoming trees, the planted urns and the reflecting pool, the balcony in the distance—it endures forever on the silver screen, no maintenance at all, and yet always fresh and always in pale moonlight.
Venerable as these women were, they and their golden era must not be glamorized at the expense of those working now, who have followed their lead. Alice Recknagel Ireys, a 1936 graduate of the Cambridge School who also studied with Flanders, concluded the Wave Hill conference. In speaking of her own work, she described design principles that have formed the critical transition in American garden history between the great estate era and the explosion of suburban and town gardens after World War II. By scaling down and reconfiguring broad terraces, flower walks, and parterres, she confers on modest properties the same sense of privilege and gracious outdoor living that had once been the preserve of country estates. In her designs, she makes a great virtue of the serpentine line to give the illusion of length and breadth.
Vistas and walkways now relate directly to the house itself, and terraced areas are created for outdoor living. Swimming pool design was the innovation of the 1940s. She predicts that, with the two-income family, property sizes will increase again, only these will feature the natural look of woodland walks and dry streams.
In general, she believes the public now knows what a landscape architect is, and most of her clients come to her by word of mouth. According to Ireys, a landscape architect in residential work must have these five qualities: imagination, an understanding of family patterns, sensitivity to detail, a sense of color, and a love of growing things. Hers was the voice of continuity.
Metropolis, December 1982
Beatrix Farrand and The Bulletins of Reef Point Gardens
“WRITTEN WORDS and illustrations outlive many plantations.” This was Beatrix Farrand's farsighted view in 1955 when she acknowledged that her cherished gardens at Reef Point could no longer be maintained to her satisfaction. The Bulletins of Reef Point Gardens essentially bears out the truth of that statement. Written by Farrand and her colleagues over a period of ten years, the bulletins preserve what she referred to finally as the less important “out-of-door
