Her great legacy along with the magnificent gardens she designed at Dumbarton Oaks is The Plant Book, which she wrote for Harvard beginning in 1940, when they received the garden from the owners. A unique creation in the history of the landscape design, this very important book describes in great detail her design thinking for each area and then her recommendations for future maintenance. In it, she demonstrates the important role of plants in the creation and future life of the garden. After it was written, this amazing document languished forgotten for 40 years in a box in the basement at Dumbarton Oaks until it was rediscovered and published in 1980. Finally it could be used as was originally intended. As a professional public garden designer, I feel strongly that the present day landscape architecture profession would be greatly enhanced if all practitioners were required to read and absorb the lessons in this book.
Mrs. Farrand spent many years developing her own gardens and horticultural library at Reef Point in Bar Harbor, Maine, hoping they would eventually become a public garden and educational center. When it became clear after the Great Fire of 1947 that the town of Bar Harbor was not willing to support the creation of this advanced educational idea, in 1955 Mrs. Farrand had her house and its gardens destroyed. Fortunately, many of the plants were saved and used in two lovely public gardens in Northeast Harbor, Maine, for us all to continue to enjoy. Beatrix Farrand died in 1959 at her last garden, Garland House, in Bar Harbor.
What makes Mrs. Farrand’s work so remarkable — particularly at Dumbarton Oaks — is that the beauty of this unique place is based on a combination of things: an understanding of landscape history; its splendid design; the proportions and the rhythms of the plantings; and her mastery of structures and materials. She remains a great inspiration to us all.
* Lynden B. Miller presents “Portraits in Design: Beatrix Farrand as Mentor” on March 15, 2015.
Register for the program here at the National Building Museum
Works Cited
1. Jane Brown, Beatrix: The Gardening Life of Beatrix Jones Farrand 1872-1959 (New York: Viking Adult, 1955), 198.
2. Beatrix Farrand, "The Garden as a Picture (1907)," in The Collected Writings of Beatrix Farrand, ed. Carmen Pearson (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England: 2009), 75.
3. Beatrix Farrand, "Vocations for the Trained Woman (1910)," in The Collected Writings of Beatrix Farrand, ed. Carmen Pearson (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England: 2009), 92.
4. Diana Balmori, "Beatrix Farrand at Dumbarton Oaks: The Design Process of a Garden," in Beatrix Farrand: Fifty Years of American Landscape Architecture, Dumbarton Oaks, ed. Diane Kostial McGuire and Lois Fern (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1982), 103.
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