Of Gardens. Paula Deitz
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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, also met Jekyll 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