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Chapter One: Landscape Architects and Designers
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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Landscape Architects and Designers 0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 6 8/10/10 1:44:44 PM 7 Facing page: Hervé Abbadie, 50 Avenue Montaigne, Paris. W Designing Women: In-Depth View of Twentieth-Century Women Landscape Designers when edith wharton went abroad in 1902 to write Italian Villas and Their Gardens, she felt she was better known for her knowledge of seventeenth - and eighteenth-century architecture than for her novels. Reading this work gives the sense of how the American eye perceived the Italian garden and translated it selectively into the American estate garden. “In the modern revival of gardening,” Wharton wrote, “the garden-lover should not content himself with a vague enjoyment of old Italian gardens, but should try to extract from them principles which may be applied at home.” One who followed her advice quite literally was her niece, the landscape gardener Beatrix Farrand, who took meticulous notes in her travels abroad and used these motifs and others of her own in the 176 landscapes she designed between 1897 and 1950. One of the twelve founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1899, she is the acknowledged dean of women landscape architects. From her New York office, she set a pattern professionally for the generation of women landscape designers who followed and attained a kind of celebrity status during the 1920s and 1930s as they traveled around the country designing estate gardens and public projects . Despite this fact, very little mention has been made of their work in the standard histories of landscape architecture. Along with Farrand, many of these women were influenced by the writings and gardens of Gertrude Jekyll, the English landscape gardener, and they adhered to her theories on natural gardens and the compatibility of color and 0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 7 8/10/10 1:44:44 PM [44.213.80.174] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:56 GMT) c h a p t e r o n e 8 texture and how to use color like a wash in an Impressionist painting, by gradual changes in shade rather than abrupt contrasts. (In 1948, Farrand, who had met Gertrude Jekyll on her travels, purchased her papers from the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and they now reside along with Farrand’s archive at the College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley.) Many of Farrand’s most ambitious commissions went on for decades. In the East, two of these have been maintained in the intended style: Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, 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...