Beatrix Farrand

At 86 years old, Beatrix Farrand physical status not available right now. We will update Beatrix Farrand's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

She began practicing landscape architecture in 1895, working from the upper floor of her mother's brownstone house on East Eleventh Street in New York.: 26  Since women were excluded from public projects, her first designs were residential gardens, beginning with some for neighbouring Bar Harbor residents.: 57  With the help of her mother and with her aunt Edith Wharton's social connections, she was introduced to prominent people, which led to working on a variety of significant projects. Within three years she was so prominent in her field that she was chosen the only woman among the founders of the American Society of Landscape Architects, although she preferred the British term "landscape gardener".: 35

Farrand did the initial site and planting planning for the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. in 1899.: 54  In 1912, she designed the walled residential garden, Bellefield, for Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Newbold in Hyde Park, New York (now a part of the Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site). In addition to being the earliest extant example of her residential designs, this exquisite walled garden, now restored, is one of the only known pairings of works by two prominent designers of that era—Farrand and the architects McKim, Mead & White — who remodeled the Newbolds' eighteenth-century house. She collaborated with the firm of McKim, Mead & White in the construction of service buildings at Dumbarton Oaks.

For the White House, the first Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, Ellen Loise Axson Wilson, had commissioned Beatrix Farrand to design the East Colonial Garden (now redesigned as the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden) and the West Garden (now the redesigned White House Rose Garden) in 1913. After Mrs. Wilson's August 1914 death the project languished until the second Mrs. Wilson, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, had its installation restarted and completed in 1916. She received the commission from J. Pierpont Morgan to design the grounds of Morgan's residence in New York City (later the site of the Morgan Library & Museum), and continued as a consultant for thirty years (1913–43).: 204–216

Her most notable work was at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in the Georgetown district of Washington, D.C. for Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss (1922–1940). Her design was inspired by her European ventures, especially from the Italian Renaissance gardens, and consisted of establishing a sophisticated relationship between the architectural and natural environments, with formal terraced gardens stepping down a steep slope and transitioning to a more naturalistic aesthetic approaching the creek.: 138–42, 152–58, 196–200

In 1928 her husband accepted the position as the first Director of The Huntington Library (1927–41) in San Marino, California.: 143, 177  They moved to California, but Farrand had trouble building a clientele in that state.: 144–45  William Hertrich had long standing dominion of the Botanical Gardens at the Huntington. The landscape designers Florence Yoch and Louise Council, and Lockwood DeForest Jr., among others, were already well established there. Her few projects came via friends, such as the Bliss winter and retirement estate, Casa Dorinda, in Montecito, California and the patronage of Mildred Bliss's mother, Anna Blakely Bliss, for the nearby Santa Barbara Botanic Garden project. In the Los Angeles area, she had several commissions each with astronomer George Ellery Hale and architect Myron Hunt. With the latter she worked on projects at Occidental College and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).: 146, 195, 203–04

Farrand commuted cross-country by train for her eastern projects, such as the design and supervision of the Chinese inspired garden at 'The Eyrie' for Abby Aldrich Rockefeller on Mount Desert Island in Seal Harbor, Maine (1926–35). This was the era of the automobile, and in her designs Farrand applied principles learned earlier from Frederick Law Olmsted's drives at the Arnold Arboretum and the Biltmore Estate of George Washington Vanderbilt II. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. sought out and funded Farrand to design planting plans for subtle carriage roads at Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, Maine, near her Reef Point home (c.1930).: 208  Their use continues at the Park.

Extant Farrand private gardens in the eastern U.S. are: the Bliss family's Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.; the Harkness summer home 'Eolia' in Waterford, Connecticut (1918–1924), now preserved as the Harkness Memorial State Park; and the Rockefellers' estate 'The Eyrie' in Seal Harbor, Maine.: 204, 208  She also collaborated with Edith Wharton on landscape and garden design for The Mount, Wharton's home in Lenox, Massachusetts, which is open to visitors from May–October. Henry James introduced her to Theodate Pope Riddle, "one of her most fascinating clients", who owned the estate 'Hill-Stead' (1913), now preserved as the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut.: 87  In 1942, with Walter Macomber, she designed the gardens at Green Spring, near Alexandria, Virginia.

The Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, for California native plants, represents her talent in Santa Barbara, California. In England, her evolving major project, 'Dartington Hall', was for heiress Dorothy Payne Elmhirst in Devon (1932–37).: 149–52, 216  The Reef Point Collection of her library, drawings and herbarium specimens are archived in the Environmental Design Archives at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley (U.C. Berkeley) campus, except for the Dumbarton Oaks documents located at the library there, and the Arnold Arboretum drawings in their archives, both under the stewardship of Harvard.: 188–89, 198–201, 209

In 2014, Farrand was recognized for her work designing the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at New York Botanical Garden, a winning site of Built by Women New York City, a competition launched by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation during the fall of 2014 to identify outstanding and diverse sites and spaces designed, engineered and built by women.

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