Book review: Beatrix Farrand
Posted in Shop/Book Reviews on November 19 2009, by Plant Talk
Designer of NYBG’s Rose Garden a Real “Artist and Hero”
John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.
In Beatrix Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes, Judith Tankard avoids the pitfall of turning a historical figure into a waxwork and brings to life this pioneering woman who was one of the first important American landscape gardeners. As someone who designed an important feature of The New York Botanical Garden, the magnificent Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden, Beatrix Farrand (1872–1959) is of particular interest to us here.
Hers is a great “little Old New York” story. Farrand’s aunt was Edith Wharton, she herself was one of Mrs. Astor’s “Four Hundred,” and Henry James was often a household guest, so she could have coasted. Instead, to a great talent Farrand added diligent study and travel, hard work, a facility for networking, and—for that time and place—a kind of courage. The commissions she attracted after 1900 included some of the most notable country places of that era: Crosswicks in Pennsylvania; the Fahnestock estate in Lenox, Massachusetts; Bellefield, the Newbold family property in Hyde Park, New York; and a slew of blue-blooded landscapes on Long Island.
The author’s chapter on Farrand’s assignment at The New York Botanical Garden is especially noteworthy. This involved creating an elegant design for a public rose garden out of a tricky site while developing a collection of roses that would have aesthetic and educational merit. The ups ands downs and ups of this rose garden reflect in a way NYBG’s own story, and of the difficulties that make landscape gardening such a complicated art, as time takes its toll. But time also tells, and in a volume that contains pages of marvelous photography, this garden is beautifully pictured, here and now, in its current state of grandeur.
This was the first of several public garden commissions and collegiate landscapes that along with Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, Reef Point Gardens in Bar Harbor, Maine, and the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor, Maine, Beatrix Farrand created at the pinnacle of her career. She assembled an important library of horticultural books and photographs, wrote about plants and gardens in her Reef Point Bulletins, and refined her art with some late work, especially at her own charming home on Mount Desert Island in Maine: Garland Farm. Her combination of garden making in both the public and private realms is truly admirable.
We are fortunate to have Judith Tankard’s well-researched, well-photographed, and beautifully produced volume on the life and career of a real garden artist and hero. We are doubly fortunate that Ms. Tankard will be at Shop in the Garden on Saturday, November 21, which is also Member’s Day, to sign copies of Beatrix Farrand from 3 to 4 p.m. See you there!
