nearly two hundred commissions—with unswerving determination and efficiency.
During the winters, until she married in 1913, Beatrix Farrand lived with her mother at 21 East 11th Street. Like the gateposts of Reef Point, the five-story brick town house with its high stoop makes real the comings and goings of that early professional life, which began in a top floor office as early as 1895. (Eventually, her office was moved to 124 East 40th Street.) Often, while she worked upstairs, Henry James was their houseguest below. “My liveliest interest attends her on her path,” he once wrote in a letter to Beatrix's mother.
On April 7, 1917, Mary Cadwalader Jones signed over Reef Point to her daughter by deed of gift, and from this point on Beatrix and Max Farrand began building a personal institution that married their scholarly and horticultural interests. In reviewing any one project in her range of accomplishments (which included university campuses such as Princeton and Yale and private gardens for the Rockefellers and J. P. Morgan—and for the White House during the Woodrow Wilson administration), the researcher is always struck by the single-mindedness of the correspondence and reports, implying an exclusivity, as if nothing else could have mattered in her life at the time. But the reality is that Reef Point was the permanent underlying warp of the tapestry on which the weft of her other gardens was woven. Because their winter residence shifted from New Haven, where Max Farrand was professor of history at Yale, to San Marino, California, where he was appointed the first director of the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, Reef Point became the main home for their libraries and art works as well as their gardens.
Like creative innovators of any century who are said to be ahead of their time, the Farrands conceived of a long-range plan for Reef Point which promoted ecological objectives that today are de rigueur for any institution concerned with land use. Founded in 1939, the Reef Point Gardens Corporation established a study center “to broaden the outlook and increase the knowledge of a small group of hand-picked students who are in training to become landscape architects.” Beyond the gardens and library of Reef Point, Beatrix Farrand noted that Mount Desert Island offered other laboratories for the study of New England flora and “the ecological adaptation of plants to the environment.” These included Acadia National Park, along with its issues of design and management, and the private gardens of the area, over fifty of them designed by Farrand herself.
In the history of garden design, the influence of Reef Point Gardens as a personal expression of horticultural taste and design may be compared with such other pivotal gardens as Gertrude Jekyll's Munstead Wood and William Robinson's Gravetye Manor, both of which Beatrix Farrand visited in England. It was modern in the sense that its design did not allude to any historical style but was instead an enhancement or an elaboration of the natural features of Maine, such as the native bunchberry (Cornus canadensis), for example, which grew in dappled sunlight at the entrance to a wood. But her gardens also possessed components necessary to a botanic garden: systematic classification of plants of a single species; an herbarium of almost eighteen hundred pressed plants, created for scientific study; and micro-environments specific to the coast of Maine, such as a bog filled with purplish pitcher-plants. With the gardens charted into sections and the plants labeled, the scientific scope of Reef Point—yielding a disciplined design with its own harmonies of color, texture, and form—was akin to those early botanic gardens founded by professors and physicians at medieval universities.
To give the illusion of a larger terrain as in eighteenth-century English landscape gardens, Farrand devised a circuit of curvilinear paths that intersected the straight axial paths radiating toward the views. Guests were conducted along a preordained route so that the gardens unfolded in a succession of experiences: the vine gardens on the house; the rose terraces with the single varieties that were her passion; the rhododendrons and laurels on the way to the vegetable enclosure with its espaliered fruit trees; the perennial beds across the turf from the rock gardens; and past the pink azaleas, holly hedges, and heathers to the bog. Surrounding these areas were stands of red and white spruce, planted in tight clusters as barriers to the severe winds, while others were allowed to grow freestanding to retain the spread of their “youthful outlines.” And twin Alberta spruce, one of her signature choices, stood as sentinels at the head of the paths leading to the bay. From the shore, this skyline appeared like “the great army of the pointed firs, darkly cloaked and standing as if they waited to embark,” which Maine novelist Sarah Orne Jewett described so memorably in The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).
Within the gardens were certain Arts and Crafts style ornaments reflecting not so much indigenous crafts but the work of others like herself, in particular Eric Ellis Soderholtz, whose tastes were formed on European travels. Born in Sweden, Soderholtz was an architectural draftsman and photographer in Boston who had made a survey of ancient art and architecture during a Grand Tour of southern Europe. After settling near Bar Harbor in West Gouldsboro, he devised a method of fashioning classical oil jars and amphorae out of reinforced concrete that could withstand the harsh elements. Hand finished, sometimes on a wheel, with slight pigment and incised ornamentation, these dramatic containers still grace many gardens in the area. (Lunaform, a craft studio in Sullivan, Maine, carries on this technique and also reproduces Soderholtz's original designs.) Two of his oil jars were positioned on either side of the main pathway at Reef Point, and his birdbath in a bed of heather was the central feature of the lower garden. In addition to rustic benches placed strategically throughout the gardens for the views, there was one formal bench positioned under the eaves of the entryway. With multiple spindles turned on a lathe, its elaborate structure blended with the architecture of the house and its vine-covered walls. In reproduction, it is known as the Reef Point bench.
Although their lives were very different, Farrand created a seaside garden that can be seen in direct relation to the flower beds Celia Thaxter cultivated next to her porch on Appledore Island off the southern coast of Maine. (In Farrand's files is a note she once scribbled to herself about Thaxter's 1894 book, My Island Garden.) Farrand may have crisscrossed the country and traveled abroad to design gardens for clients on a grand scale, with walled enclosures and formal garden rooms linked by naturalized plantings to woodland and wilderness areas beyond. But at Reef Point, she did what she loved most by creating a Maine garden of apparent simplicity where families of plants laid out in drifts meshed with others in a studied asymmetry. In addition to designing and constantly rearranging the plantings, she planned every aspect of the daily life at Reef Point, preparing for the big day when the establishment would stand on its own. The truth is that the pinnacle reached at Reef Point during this period was its great moment.
The annual reports she presented to her board of directors are the behind-the-scenes companion narrative to the bulletins. They included horticultural developments, the titles of books acquired for the library, and lists of seeds received from botanic gardens around the world as well as of plants culled from wilderness areas such as Mount Katahdin in Maine. In them, she never failed to thank the Garlands, her secretary, Isabelle Stover, and her French personal maid and expert flower arranger, Clementine Walter, who greased the wheels of an enterprise that valued the perfection of the domestic arrangements as much as the gardens.
The influence of Beatrix Farrand's life is still fresh in Maine, where the younger generation in her time have become leaders in the community, one that is still divided in a friendly way between local residents and summer people. David Rockefeller, who was a child when Farrand designed his mother's garden in Seal Harbor, recalls her as “the epitome of a New England grande dame in a long dark dress and hat—tall, erect, austere, sure of herself, opinionated and frightening to most people.” And he remembers walking in her heather garden and how beautiful and completely unpretentious it was. The Rockefeller family still houses the four-wheeled buckboard carriage David's father, John D. Jr., drove through Acadia National Park with Farrand at his side. Beginning in the late 1920s, they made these excursions together to inspect the plantings and the design of the bridges along the fifty-seven miles of carriage roads that were his imaginative contribution to the park. Farrand responded to these outings with closely typed “Road Notes,” offering suggestions in her usual no-nonsense language, with the names of appropriate trees and plants—sweet fern, wild roses, sumac, goldenrod,
