Of Gardens. Paula Deitz
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 phase” of her gardens. One of the premier landscape gardeners of the twentieth century, Beatrix Farrand (1872-1959) created at Reef Point, her family's summer residence, a private showcase of native and naturalized plantings that evolved into the only botanic garden then in the state of Maine.
The idea for the Reef Point Gardens bulletins originated with her husband, Max Farrand, a distinguished author and professor of constitutional history. With his “disciplined scholar's mind,” wrote Beatrix Farrand, he “felt that publication was an essential part of the gardens' work.” Prior to his death in 1945, he even suggested a list of topics and approved a selection of material submitted, and the Max Farrand Memorial Fund became the official publisher of the bulletins. Along with Reef Point's extensive horticultural library, documents collection, and herbarium, the bulletins became an equal partner in the Gardens' mission. Distributed to botanic gardens, arboreta, and libraries worldwide and sold to local visitors for ten cents a copy, they were shaped over the years to contain the essence of the entire landscape. At the time of their publication, everyone associated with Reef Point Gardens had high hopes for its future as a public garden and educational center, organized specifically to expose students of landscape architecture to horticultural expertise and design. Now the bulletins are what remain of a horticultural adventure that came to an end in 1955.
In addition to the landscape gardener herself, four other writers are represented in this collection. Amy Magdalene Garland (1899-1996), who became the chief horticulturist of Reef Point, was born in Bishop's Waltham in Hampshire, England. She arrived in New York City just after World War I to work for Farrand's mother, Mary Cadwalader Jones, as a domestic in her Greenwich Village house. In time, she married Lewis A. Garland, the handyman and chauffeur at Reef Point, and developed into a trusted collaborator in maintaining and documenting the plant collection.
Robert Whiteley Patterson (1905-1988), a 1927 graduate of Harvard College, returned to the university in 1932 to study landscape architecture at the Graduate School of Design. He first went to Maine in 1934 as a designer and planner for Acadia National Park and met Beatrix Farrand at that time. Later, he maintained an office at Reef Point as her associate.
Marion Ida Spaulding (1908-1994) was a landscape architect who completed her degree at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1947. She worked at Reef Point for long periods between 1946 and 1952 to create the herbarium and map the gardens into sections for record-keeping purposes. Later, settling in New Hampshire, she became the resident designer at Mt. Gun-stock Nursery in Gilford and was also associated with the Laconia Housing and Redevelopment Authority.
And finally, Kenneth A. Beckett (b. 1929), a young Englishman, spent six months as a skilled gardener and propagator at Reef Point in 1954 after receiving his Royal Horticultural Society Diploma from the Wisley School of Horticulture. He eventually became a prominent garden writer in Britain, and among his more than forty publications is the popular Royal Horticultural Society Encylopaedia of House and Conservatory Plants. Now living in Norfolk, he looks back on the two bulletins he wrote for Farrand as his first ambitious work.
Although the name Reef Point visually connotes an isolated property projecting out into one of the myriad bays along the rugged coast of Maine, the original two-acre plot purchased in 1882 by Frederic Rhinelander Jones, Beatrix's father, was actually located in the middle of Bar Harbor, the then newly fashionable summer community on Mount Desert Island. Expanded by later purchases to six acres, Reef Point lies between Hancock Street and Atlantic Avenue, two side streets that run perpendicular to the Shore Path. Like Newport's oceanside Cliff Walk, Bar Harbor's Shore Path is a long