Of Gardens. Paula Deitz
Frenchman Bay and beyond to the procession of hump-backed islands called the Porcupines.
In a line with other rambling Shore Path cottages—as Maine summer houses are called after the early hotel guest cottages—the Reef Point cottage was built in 1883, one of twenty-two buildings designed in Bar Harbor by the Boston firm of Rotch & Tilden, which specialized in a combination of flat log and shingle construction with turrets, high gables, and dormer windows as well as wide verandas. By the time the house was completed, Beatrix's parents were already separated and the property signed over to her mother. Although the land is now divided among five residents, the configuration of the perimeter has remained surprisingly intact. To all appearances, it is possible to walk to the end of Hancock Street in the silence of a summer afternoon and stand in front of the granite gate pillars and finials of Reef Point under towering white spruce as though nothing had changed. A curved entrance drive leads to the picturesque Gardener's Cottage, one of the few buildings to survive the demolition of the gardens. A short stroll along the lichen-covered, white cedar boundary fence on the Shore Path gives a sense of the dramatic views across the water, which determined the axes of the fanned-out garden paths.
Preserved among Beatrix Farrand's papers at the University of California, Berkeley, is a bound journal from her early twenties with the printed title Book of Gardening, in which she recorded from October 10, 1893, to May 31, 1895, her observations about horticulture and garden design both in America and abroad, mostly in Italy and Germany. In addition to noting her critical impressions of a visit to the grounds at Fairsted, Frederick Law Olmsted's office and residence in Brookline, Massachusetts, and of gardens at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, she expressed in early entries her appreciation of the details that made Reef Point and Maine a magical place and the center of her life.
“The scarlet trumpet honeysuckle over the porch has small bunches of scarlet berries all over it which make it as effective as in the blooming season.” This description of what she later called “vertical flower beds” is of a piece with the bulletin she wrote sixty years later on climbing plants. Tutored privately, Beatrix Farrand developed early on a keen sense of observation and taste as well as a distinct writing style that rendered her ideas and opinions as clearly as if she had drawn them in a detailed plan. Like many Maine summer residents, she returned to view the autumn color in a ritual not without its melancholy side. Among pressed leaves and sketches for the alignment of trees, she wrote, “I noticed the coloring of the leaves more beautiful than ever…this season before we left.” Despite Maine's harsh climate, nature always conspires to make one's day of departure the most inviting.
Since the majority of Farrand's voluminous writings are in the quasi-public form of reports to or correspondence with clients, these journal entries provide a rare opportunity to look over her shoulder in a private moment. Her descriptions of gardens prove to what degree observation was the foundation of her education. During the early 1890s, she was guided in this technique during her training in horticulture and landscape gardening at Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum under the tutelage of Charles Sprague Sargent, its first director. The source of Professor Sargent's oft-quoted advice to her—“make the plan fit the ground and not twist the ground to fit a plan”—is found here in the final bulletin, an autobiographical account intended as her obituary. She continued to forge links with the Arboretum over the years, frequently seeking advice on the specific identification of plants, which were carefully packed and mailed from Bar Harbor to Jamaica Plain.
In traveling abroad, Beatrix was often in the company of her aunt Edith Wharton, her father's sister, who in 1904 published her own travel impressions in the quintessential Italian Villas and Their Gardens, many years after her niece's journal was written. During this period, the specifics of European gardens recorded by professionals and Grand Tour travelers became the new grammar of American estate gardens as designed by Beatrix Farrand and her contemporaries. Although the divorce of Beatrix's parents may have altered the path of her life in New York society, the dynamic relationship among the three women—the vivacious mother, the daughter, and the aunt, only ten years Beatrix's senior—provided the catalyst for a secure, confident, and independent life. Being different was in a sense also liberating. Her cousin and adviser, John Lambert Cadwalader, a lawyer and founder of the New York Public Library, was also part of the family equation. His picture was placed over a mantle at Reef Point, where Beatrix Farrand once showed it to a young friend, saying, “He is the person I have been closest to in my life.” Cadwalader encouraged her early on to a career in landscape gardening, which she pursued for over fifty years—completing 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