Beatrix Cadwalader Farrand was a landscape gardener and landscape architect in the United States.
Background
was born in New York City, the daughter of Frederick Rhinelander Jones, gentleman of leisure, and Mary Cadwalader Rawle. As a child she became interested in gardens at her grandparents' country house in Newport, Rhod Island, and at Reef Point, her parents' residence in Bar Harbor, Maine, where, at the age of eleven, she participated in designing new plantings for the grounds.
Her aunt, the novelist Edith Wharton, an expert in gardening and an amateur historian of landscape architecture (she had written Italian Villas and Their Gardens), may have played an important role in awakening Jones's interest in horticulture and landscape architecture. In any case, Wharton definitely served as a role model for her niece at a time when most well-to-do women did not pursue careers.
After her parents' divorce Jones lived with her mother. Mary Jones was said to have presided over a salon attended by society figures and friends, including Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, and, of course, Edith Wharton, for whom she was agent and bookkeeper.
Education
As a young woman Jones was a pupil of Charles Sprague Sargent, botanist and first director of the Arnold Arboretum in Boston.
Sargent suggested that she study landscape gardening and provided her first clients. As a supplement to her horticultural training, he urged her to study European garden design and landscape painting, and to observe and analyze natural beauty. Years of travel and independent study helped prepare Jones for professional practice. (At the time, there were no schools of landscape architecture. ) She visited and studied the great gardens and landscapes of Italy, France, Germany, Holland, England, and Scotland.
During these years the most important influence on her development was her discovery of the work of Gertrude Jekyll, the English landscape gardener one generation her senior. Jekyll had synthesized the formal and informal schools of English garden design. Gardens that changed gradually from formal architectonic extensions of the house to informal woodland gardens and herbaceous flower borders of delicately blended colors were her trademarks. Jones visited many of Jekyll's gardens, adopted many of her techniques, and eventually purchased her landscape plans and drawings.
Career
In 1897 Jones opened a landscape architectural practice in Manhattan. Throughout her career she devoted herself mainly to garden design, the layout of private estates, and campus planting design.
Her large-scale projects, concentrated in the Northeast and particularly in Long Island, New York, and Bar Harbor, Maine, were designed and built mainly between 1910 and 1930. Her work is characterized by thoughtful siting and arrangement, sensitivity to proportion and detailing, and an approach to planting design characterized in part by the use of native species and the application of ecological principles in the development of plant schemes for special site conditions.
In 1912 a chance meeting with Mrs. Moses Taylor Pyne led to Jones's first campus consulting work at Princeton. Yale, Vassar, Hamilton, and the University of Chicago were among the colleges and universities that subsequently commissioned her work.
In 1922, commissioned by Mildred Bliss, Farrand began work on the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D. C. She later described this project as "the most deeply felt of a fifty years' practice. " Her design ability was matched by broad knowledge of the literature of the field, and she was retained by Mrs. Bliss to assemble a collection of rare books for the garden library at Dumbarton Oaks. In the 1940's the number of her commissions decreased and she served as landscape consultant to the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden and the Arnold Arboretum, as well as dedicating herself to the development and management of Reef Point, her family's summer home, as a botanical garden and library open to the public.
In 1945, after her husband's death, she established the Max Farrand Memorial Fund to help carry out her work. One explanation for her efforts to ensure a permanent future for Reef Point was her disillusionment with the lack of knowledge of plant materials among the new generation of landscape architects. The project was abandoned in 1955, partly because of a lack of students in landscape design in the vicinity of Reef Point.
Farrand died at Bar Harbor.
Achievements
In 1899 she was a founder of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Of the eleven charter members, she was the only woman and the only one to have signed plans and drawings "landscape gardener. " The word "architect, " she maintained, should be reserved for designers of buildings. Her social standing provided Jones with instant recognition and a ready supply of famous and wealthy clients, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr. , J. P. Morgan, and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, for whom she designed a flower garden at the White House in 1916.
Religion
Years of travel and independent study helped prepare Jones for professional practice.
In 1899 she was a founder of the American Society of Landscape Architects.
Membership
She was a member of the American Society of Landscape Architects.
Connections
On December 17, 1913, she married Max Farrand, an American history professor at Yale. After his appointment as director of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, they lived for twelve years in that state; she frequently traveled to the East and to England to work on the reconstruction of the grounds of Dartington Hall.
Father:
Frederick Rhinelander Jones
mother
Mary Cadwalader Rawle
friends :
Lewis and Amy Magdalene Garland
friend
Henry James
She was the niece of Edith Wharton and lifelong friend of Henry James.
