Of Gardens. Paula Deitz
two-level walled enclosure of concentric rectangular borders provides one of the richest garden experiences in America today. The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden, as it is now called, continued under the stewardship of David and Peggy Rockefeller. They reinstated the central greensward in its present form, and Peggy Rockefeller monitored the borders imaginatively by introducing new perennials and annuals.
Although no longer as complete as the Rockefellers', the garden Farrand designed at The Haven in Northeast Harbor for Gerrish H. Milliken and his wife, Agnes, beginning in 1925, possesses a special aura today. Agnes Milliken was a close friend of Beatrix Farrand and consulted with her on matters concerning Reef Point; it was she who aided Farrand in the acquisition of Gertrude Jekyll's papers in the late 1940s. In designing the Millikens' garden, Farrand incorporated, more than in any other private commission, many of the themes that made Reef Point so distinctive. Looking out today over a field of purple heathers to glimpses of blue water between stands of pointed firs—and to white sails that appear and disappear behind the trees—one gets an exact sense of what she sought as perfection for Maine. Now owned by Gerrish H. Milliken, Jr., and his wife, Phoebe, the garden comes the closest to how Reef Point itself must have appeared in its prime. Along the entrance path to the rambling shingle house, there is another Reef Point touch: borders of heliotrope by the porch and white nicotiana along the path, the former with a heavenly fragrance by day, the latter radiant by night. Like her own terraces of native single roses at Reef Point, there is a long rose path leading to an open terrace and a vine-covered pergola with modified Tuscan columns, where Agnes Milliken would take tea in the afternoons. These pergolas also became a characteristic feature of Farrand's gardens on Mount Desert Island.
Following Max Farrand's death in 1945, his wife began taking measures to adapt Reef Point architecturally for its future. Robert Patterson was the architect, and in 1946 he completed the Gardener's Cottage for the Garlands, employing many of Rotch & Tilden's decorative motifs from the main house. Beatrix Farrand describes other renovations and additions in the bulletins themselves, including the new Garden Club House given by the Garden Club of Mount Desert, of which Farrand was the founder in August 1923. By the summer of 1947, the establishment was at a peak of activity: books and papers were catalogued daily; herbarium specimens were collected and pressed; new species arrived to be recorded and planted; and, of course, visitors were coming on a regular basis. In the end, over fifty thousand people visited Reef Point on its open days. On one occasion, young sailors from a warship in dock came for tea and cakes in the garden. Despite the depression and World War II, Reef Point survived in a mode that combined the most advanced thinking in scientific and educational techniques with a kind of gracious Edwardian summer life.
Donald E. Smith, a gardener at Reef Point during summers in the early 1950s while he was a horticulture student at the University of Maine, recalls the routines as everyone did his or her tasks in the garden overseen by Amy Garland. Often Farrand surveyed the scene from her balcony. “She always wore Harris tweeds even in the summer and walked around the gardens with a cane and a shawl over her shoulders,” he said. “She was very erect, very pleasant though stern, but we got along fine.” Clementine Walter was the first one out in the early morning to hear the bird calls, and even Farrand herself kept track of the birds' nests, especially a mockingbird's in the Alberta spruce. After his early training, Smith went on to work at Dumbarton Oaks, where he eventually became superintendent. Now in retirement, he lives in his wife's family's house down the street from Reef Point.
The event that caused a slow but not so subtle transition in this way of life came suddenly on October 17, 1947, when a fire that began smoldering in a cranberry bog spread fiercely with the wind to devastate the town of Bar Harbor and many of its elegant summer cottages. Although Reef Point was not affected physically, and daily life appeared to go on as usual, the character of the town began to change. Visitors more and more came as tourists in search of amusement rather than with notebooks in hand to look and learn. At that time, Farrand wrote in her report to the board, “Those who see the garden's visitors from the windows occasionally wish that fashionable scarlet coats would not pause too long minutes in front of lavender and pale pink flowers—but mercifully fashions change.”
The Garlands, too, were getting older and becoming less active. In her search for someone with experience who could take over Amy Garland's responsibilities in the garden, Farrand sought the advice of, among others, Thomas H. Everett, the chief horticulturist of the New York Botanical Garden. Everett, an Englishman, was on a speaking engagement at Wisley when he met Kenneth Beckett and subsequently recommended him to Farrand. Beckett came to Reef Point for six months during the season of 1954; and in the annual report of that period, Farrand praised him for his excellent propagating work in the greenhouse. But he never felt at home in Bar Harbor and eventually returned to England. During her California stay the following winter, Farrand, then eighty-two, took realistic stock of her position. Costs were mounting, no guarantees could be made on a perpetual tax exemption or on the status of Reef Point Gardens as a foundation until after her death (Bar Harbor had lost much of its tax base as a result of the fire), and finally, and even more urgent, she feared the deterioration of the gardens.
From Farrand's perspective in the early spring of 1955, if Reef Point Gardens with its ephemeral nature could not be maintained to her standards, she would rather see it destroyed. As usual, she made the courageous decision and took action immediately by writing to Robert Patterson to set the wheels in motion. Some of her colleagues, including the lawyers, were incredulous, but Farrand was as determined now to put an end to the Gardens as she had been to create it. Together, the house and the gardens were sold for $6,500 to Patterson, who maintained a desperate hope that the gardens could be saved. There was no way of knowing then that Reef Point Gardens was ahead of its time by only fifteen or twenty years. A renewed interest in landscape architecture and environmental issues—the greening of America—got a fresh start in the 1970s on the heels of the consciousness-raising Earth Day celebrations. And the first major review of Farrand's work came in May 1980 at a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks.
Having made her decision, Farrand began to disperse possessions to friends. The young David Rockefellers, who badly needed furniture for their new houses, went to see her. “We told her of our plight,” recalled David Rockefeller, “and she gave us first crack. We took almost 90 percent of what she had.” Now scattered among many homes, they have become treasured mementos of the family's long friendship. Several pieces of fine glassware and furniture also went to the Milliken family. (And just how fine they were was proven with time. One Milliken daughter finally decided to sell the Philadelphia Chippendale wing chair with elaborate hairy paw feet which she had stored in her barn for many years. When it came on the block at Sotheby's in January 1987, it went for $2.75 million, thereby setting a record for the most expensive piece of furniture ever sold at auction. It had been ordered from the maker Thomas Affleck by General John Cadwalader, Farrand's ancestor, and the carving was attributed to James Reynolds.)
The heart of Reef Point, as Farrand called it, was the 2,700-volume horticultural library, along with its collection of documents and garden prints, and the herbarium. When Farrand acquired the archives of Gertrude Jekyll, with over three hundred garden plans, plant lists, and photograph albums, she called her “one of England's best horticultural writers and artist gardeners of the last hundred years.” The Reef Point collection also included a donation made by Mary Rutherfurd Kay, a Connecticut garden architect, of her own notes, books, and valuable slides. Farrand was painfully aware that even were the collections to remain in the house, the conditions were damp and the facilities not fireproof. During the forties and early fifties, after receiving an honorary degree from Smith College in 1936, she donated to the Smith library over three hundred horticulture and landscape architecture books and many volumes each of more than one hundred periodicals in the same fields. One rare book, in John Evelyn's 1693 English translation, was The Compleat Gard'ner; or, Directions for cultivating and right ordering of fruit-gardens and kitchen-gardens by Jean de La Quintinye, the gardener of Louis XIV's kitchen garden at Versailles. In addition, she gave the college almost eight hundred literary titles, among which Jane Austen figured prominently. From 1932 to 1942, the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was an affiliated graduate school of Smith College.
As the future home for her collections, Farrand sought an institution offering courses in “landscape