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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 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 library, the intended effect of wisteria festooned along chains linking columns garlandlike is still maintained to perfection at Dumbarton Oaks. This technique of using ornamental vines as complements to architecture was a hallmark of her work, especially at Princeton and Yale, where her wall gardens on university buildings enhanced the architecture with the warmth associated with the Ivy League.

Unlike a building, whose construction may eventually be seen as complete, a garden on paper becomes a garden in reality only after a period of growth and maturity and from then on requires continual maintenance and restoration to retain the original form and scale. So crucial to design was the control of maintenance that Farrand billed her clients in two ways: accounts payable in advance for gardeners' and nurseries' bills, and a periodic retainer for herself as overseer of design and maintenance.

As Farrand and other women landscape architects hired women as draftsmen and assistants, the need for professional studies became imperative. This led to the founding of the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture for Women, established in 1915 by two Harvard professors, the institution with which the school eventually merged in 1942. The curriculum was distinguished by a balance between architecture and horticulture in the belief that an integrated design depended on form as well as on texture and color—a balance not always achieved in current training. Despite the difficulty women had in finding positions—the assumption being that either they disrupted office morale or could not supervise construction—by 1930, 83 percent of the Cambridge graduates were engaged professionally.

Acknowledging the success of her generation of women landscape architects, Ellen Biddle Shipman told a reporter in 1938: “Until women took up landscaping, gardening in this country was at its lowest ebb. The renaissance was due largely to the fact that women, instead of working over their boards, used plants as if they were painting pictures and as an artist would.” Exaggerated as this may sound, the women proved themselves and their talents adaptable and expanded into parkway, industrial park, and housing development design when the lucrative residential work was on the wane. Their training in design and engineering even qualified the next generation for military service in World War II, where they worked in cartography, camouflage, and geographic model making.

Shipman's own talents in both engineering and horticulture were evident in her design for the seven-mile lakeshore boulevard in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, which featured a combination of flowering trees, willows, and evergreens to vary the colors and shade of green according to the season. Her own office comprised five or six women and one construction man always out on the job. She designed mostly American- or English-style gardens on an intimate scale and, like Farrand, kept in her charge, as much as possible, the gardens she planned in order to monitor their growth. She moved extensively through the South, particularly in Texas, where she created estate gardens during the oil-boom years. Outstanding among her plans was Longue Vue Gardens in New Orleans, with its oak-tree allée leading up to the house. Her influence was wide, and one contemporary landscape designer, Rachel Lambert Mellon, who sought her advice more than once, prizes Shipman's handwritten directions for making grass steps.

Marion Cruger Coffin, a 1904 Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, also met Jekyll on her travels and proceeded to interpret her ideas in the fifty estate gardens she designed during her career, including Winterthur, the du Pont estate in Wilmington, Delaware, and many on Long Island. Essentially Coffin's estate grounds used circulation routes and sight lines to form a plan of grand vistas, intimate walkways, and gradual descents to draw one away from the house for an aesthetic experience in controlled nature that did not relate directly to the domestic environs. One architectural element leads to another—a trellis of Ionic columns, to a rose arbor walk, to French parterres—until one arrives back at the house. On a large scale, Coffin applied her circulation routes to the campus of the University of Delaware, equivalent in scope to the work of landscaping the great grounds of country houses in England.

Annette Hoyt Flanders succeeded in reducing the scale of estate garden designs to make them compatible with the smaller gardens that were her specialty, such as the one she completed in 1929 for fellow Smith College alumnae Ellen Holt and Elizabeth H. Webster. “A momentary pause,” she called it, amidst the grandiose mountain scenery in Tryon, North Carolina. A white-and-green garden, it resembles Vita Sackville-West's white garden at Sissinghurst Castle. The plan called for three symmetrical rectangular beds of myrtle surrounded by an “ivy hedge” and, along the borders, plantings of white dogwood, white azalea, and white gardenia—all within an eighty-footlong terrace on a mountain slope. Flanders traveled so widely that it was not always possible for her to return to the small out-of-the way gardens she designed, and so she admonished Webster, “Remember, Betty, this is architecture; it must be kept to scale.” Webster maintained it until she was well over a hundred years old.

Flanders completed her own studies in landscape architecture at the University of Illinois in 1928 and received the gold medal of the Architectural League of New York in 1932 for an eighty-five-acre pink-and-green garden in the French style for Mr. and Mrs. Charles. E. F. McCann at Oyster Bay, Long Island. In addition to residential work, she specialized in industrial plants, recreational development, and exhibition gardens. She lectured widely on gardening, and when she moved her office from the Sherry Building in New York back to Milwaukee, her hometown, in 1940, she conducted a landscape school on the premises.

In October 1981, Wave Hill, a New York City cultural institution in Riverdale, sponsored a conference, “American Women & Gardens, 1915-1945,” as the inaugural event in its new American Garden History program headed by landscape designer and historian Leslie Rose Close. The conference was accompanied by an exhibition featuring the architectural drawings and planting plans of prominent women landscape architects of that period who specialized in implementing the look of the private estate. Also included were vintage photographs of the gardens, many by the prominent photographer Mattie Edwards Hewitt.

The Wave Hill exhibition, a discriminating selection of documentary evidence, accurately conveyed the dimensions of these careers—and successful ones they were. It also underscored the problem of there being no repository for these valuable plans, most of which come from the original clients or their descendants. Because much of the available material had been stored in damp cellars, it was too decomposed to be included.

In addition to being a source of ideas for contemporary study, the preservation of drawings and archival material is essential to recapture the original form and scale of older gardens that now barely resemble their originals. For example, one 1920s photograph in the exhibition portrayed an East Hampton garden, designed by New Yorker Ruth Bramley Dean, which gained notoriety years later as the dilapidated Grey Gardens of Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter. Working with the photograph, the current owners, Benjamin Bradlee and Sally Quinn of Washington, D.C., are now restoring the garden's pergola according to Dean's design.

Public designs were also highlighted in the exhibition as part of the repertory of these women, one of whom, Marjorie Sewell Cautley, designed a planting plan for one of the early “garden city” developments in Radburn, New Jersey. Exact specifications on her 1931 drawing of the entrance perspective for the Phipps Court Garden Apartments in Long Island City demonstrate her concern for balance and scale: “Tree lilacs, 10 feet tall; specimen elms, 40 feet high.”

Cornell graduate Helen Bullard (not represented in the exhibition) was a landscape architect who worked almost exclusively in the public domain. During her five years with the Long Island State Park Commission, she designed flower gardens around the Jones Beach bathhouses. This position and her work as director of the annual program for flower planting in the city's parks—300,000 bulbs for spring alone—prepared her for participation in planning one of the biggest commissions around New York at that time, the 1939 World's Fair grounds. She realized that “with modern buildings we cannot depend on classic forms,” meaning straight beds and pattern gardens. Instead, she elaborated in a 1938 interview, “We have no precedents to follow, but, in general, the plan will be designed in directional lines to give the feeling of motion.” The color scheme for the fair was red, yellow, and blue, and the flower beds were planted to contrast with the nearby buildings. And again, it took horticultural expertise to select both well-known varieties and exotic plants for the long-blooming season of a Long Island summer.

Women were equally successful on the West Coast, where the California landscape designer Florence Yoch, working with her associate Lucille Council, was changing her style from making exact copies of Mediterranean gardens in the 1920s to more abstract forms in the 1930s. In 1952, she designed the courtyard for Robinson's department store on Wiltshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, which is still a lush background for glamorous fashion shows.

George Cukor, the film director, remembers her as “a most distinguished woman” whom he greatly esteemed as “the artist who cut my garden right out of the side of a hill.” So much did he admire her work that he commissioned her to build a complete Italian Renaissance garden in the studio as the set for his 1936 MGM film of Romeo and Juliet. The tall cypresses and blossoming trees, the planted urns and the reflecting pool, the balcony in the distance—it endures forever on the silver screen, no maintenance at all, and yet always fresh and always in pale moonlight.

Venerable as these women were, they and their golden era must not be glamorized at the expense of those working now, who have followed their lead. Alice Recknagel Ireys, a 1936 graduate of the Cambridge School who also studied with Flanders, concluded the Wave Hill conference. In speaking of her own work, she described design principles that have formed the critical transition in American garden history between the great estate era and the explosion of suburban and town gardens after World War II. By scaling down and reconfiguring broad terraces, flower walks, and parterres, she confers on modest properties the same sense of privilege and gracious outdoor living that had once been the preserve of country estates. In her designs, she makes a great virtue of the serpentine line to give the illusion of length and breadth.

Vistas and walkways now relate directly to the house itself, and terraced areas are created for outdoor living. Swimming pool design was the innovation of the 1940s. She predicts that, with the two-income family, property sizes will increase again, only these will feature the natural look of woodland walks and dry streams.

In general, she believes the public now knows what a landscape architect is, and most of her clients come to her by word of mouth. According to Ireys, a landscape architect in residential work must have these five qualities: imagination, an understanding of family patterns, sensitivity to detail, a sense of color, and a love of growing things. Hers was the voice of continuity.

Metropolis, December 1982

Beatrix Farrand and The Bulletins of Reef Point Gardens

“WRITTEN WORDS and illustrations outlive many plantations.” This was Beatrix Farrand's farsighted view in 1955 when she acknowledged that her cherished gardens at Reef Point could no longer be maintained to her satisfaction. The Bulletins of Reef Point Gardens essentially bears out the truth of that statement. Written by Farrand and her colleagues over a period of ten years, the bulletins preserve what she referred to finally as the less important “out-of-door phase” of her gardens. One of the premier landscape gardeners of the twentieth century, Beatrix Farrand (1872-1959) created at Reef Point, her family's summer residence, a private showcase of native and naturalized plantings that evolved into the only botanic garden then in the state of Maine.

The idea for the Reef Point Gardens bulletins originated with her husband, Max Farrand, a distinguished author and professor of constitutional history. With his “disciplined scholar's mind,” wrote Beatrix Farrand, he “felt that publication was an essential part of the gardens' work.” Prior to his death in 1945, he even suggested a list of topics and approved a selection of material submitted, and the Max Farrand Memorial Fund became the official publisher of the bulletins. Along with Reef Point's extensive horticultural library, documents collection, and herbarium, the bulletins became an equal partner in the Gardens' mission. Distributed to botanic gardens, arboreta, and libraries worldwide and sold to local visitors for ten cents a copy, they were shaped over the years to contain the essence of the entire landscape. At the time of their publication, everyone associated with Reef Point Gardens had high hopes for its future as a public garden and educational center, organized specifically to expose students of landscape architecture to horticultural expertise and design. Now the bulletins are what remain of a horticultural adventure that came to an end in 1955.

In addition to the landscape gardener herself, four other writers are represented in this collection. Amy Magdalene Garland (1899-1996), who became the chief horticulturist of Reef Point, was born in Bishop's Waltham in Hampshire, England. She arrived in New York City just after World War I to work for Farrand's mother, Mary Cadwalader Jones, as a domestic in her Greenwich Village house. In time, she married Lewis A. Garland, the handyman and chauffeur at Reef Point, and developed into a trusted collaborator in maintaining and documenting the plant collection.

Robert Whiteley Patterson (1905-1988), a 1927 graduate of Harvard College, returned to the university in 1932 to study landscape architecture at the Graduate School of Design. He first went to Maine in 1934 as a designer and planner for Acadia National Park and met Beatrix Farrand at that time. Later, he maintained an office at Reef Point as her associate.

Marion Ida Spaulding (1908-1994) was a landscape architect who completed her degree at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1947. She worked at Reef Point for long periods between 1946 and 1952 to create the herbarium and map the gardens into sections for record-keeping purposes. Later, settling in New Hampshire, she became the resident designer at Mt. Gun-stock Nursery in Gilford and was also associated with the Laconia Housing and Redevelopment Authority.

And finally, Kenneth A. Beckett (b. 1929), a young Englishman, spent six months as a skilled gardener and propagator at Reef Point in 1954 after receiving his Royal Horticultural Society Diploma from the Wisley School of Horticulture. He eventually became a prominent garden writer in Britain, and among his more than forty publications is the popular Royal Horticultural Society Encylopaedia of House and Conservatory Plants. Now living in Norfolk, he looks back on the two bulletins he wrote for Farrand as his first ambitious work.

Although the name Reef Point visually connotes an isolated property projecting out into one of the myriad bays along the rugged coast of Maine, the original two-acre plot purchased in 1882 by Frederic Rhinelander Jones, Beatrix's father, was actually located in the middle of Bar Harbor, the then newly fashionable summer community on Mount Desert Island. Expanded by later purchases to six acres, Reef Point lies between Hancock Street and Atlantic Avenue, two side streets that run perpendicular to the Shore Path. Like Newport's oceanside Cliff Walk, Bar Harbor's Shore Path is a long public walkway that skirts the rocky coastal ledges and overlooks Frenchman Bay and beyond to the procession of hump-backed islands called the Porcupines.

In a line with other rambling Shore Path cottages—as Maine summer houses are called after the early hotel guest cottages—the Reef Point cottage was built in 1883, one of twenty-two buildings designed in Bar Harbor by the Boston firm of Rotch & Tilden, which specialized in a combination of flat log and shingle construction with turrets, high gables, and dormer windows as well as wide verandas. By the time the house was completed, Beatrix's parents were already separated and the property signed over to her mother. Although the land is now divided among five residents, the configuration of the perimeter has remained surprisingly intact. To all appearances, it is possible to walk to the end of Hancock Street in the silence of a summer afternoon and stand in front of the granite gate pillars and finials of Reef Point under towering white spruce as though nothing had changed. A curved entrance drive leads to the picturesque Gardener's Cottage, one of the few buildings to survive the demolition of the gardens. A short stroll along the lichen-covered, white cedar boundary fence on the Shore Path gives a sense of the dramatic views across the water, which determined the axes of the fanned-out garden paths.

Preserved among Beatrix Farrand's papers at the University of California, Berkeley, is a bound journal from her early twenties with the printed title Book of Gardening, in which she recorded from October 10, 1893, to May 31, 1895, her observations about horticulture and garden design both in America and abroad, mostly in Italy and Germany. In addition to noting her critical impressions of a visit to the grounds at Fairsted, Frederick Law Olmsted's office and residence in Brookline, Massachusetts, and of gardens at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, she expressed in early entries her appreciation of the details that made Reef Point and Maine a magical place and the center of her life.

“The scarlet trumpet honeysuckle over the porch has small bunches of scarlet berries all over it which make it as effective as in the blooming season.” This description of what she later called “vertical flower beds” is of a piece with the bulletin she wrote sixty years later on climbing plants. Tutored privately, Beatrix Farrand developed early on a keen sense of observation and taste as well as a distinct writing style that rendered her ideas and opinions as clearly as if she had drawn them in a detailed plan. Like many Maine summer residents, she returned to view the autumn color in a ritual not without its melancholy side. Among pressed leaves and sketches for the alignment of trees, she wrote, “I noticed the coloring of the leaves more beautiful than ever…this season before we left.” Despite Maine's harsh climate, nature always conspires to make one's day of departure the most inviting.

Since the majority of Farrand's voluminous writings are in the quasi-public form of reports to or correspondence with clients, these journal entries provide a rare opportunity to look over her shoulder in a private moment. Her descriptions of gardens prove to what degree observation was the foundation of her education. During the early 1890s, she was guided in this technique during her training in horticulture and landscape gardening at Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum under the tutelage of Charles Sprague Sargent, its first director. The source of Professor Sargent's oft-quoted advice to her—“make the plan fit the ground and not twist the ground to fit a plan”—is found here in the final bulletin, an autobiographical account intended as her obituary. She continued to forge links with the Arboretum over the years, frequently seeking advice on the specific identification of plants, which were carefully packed and mailed from Bar Harbor to Jamaica Plain.

In traveling abroad, Beatrix was often in the company of her aunt Edith Wharton, her father's sister, who in 1904 published her own travel impressions in the quintessential Italian Villas and Their Gardens, many years after her niece's journal was written. During this period, the specifics of European gardens recorded by professionals and Grand Tour travelers became the new grammar of American estate gardens as designed by Beatrix Farrand and her contemporaries. Although the divorce of Beatrix's parents may have altered the path of her life in New York society, the dynamic relationship among the three women—the vivacious mother, the daughter, and the aunt, only ten years Beatrix's senior—provided the catalyst for a secure, confident, and independent life. Being different was in a sense also liberating. Her cousin and adviser, John Lambert Cadwalader, a lawyer and founder of the New York Public Library, was also part of the family equation. His picture was placed over a mantle at Reef Point, where Beatrix Farrand once showed it to a young friend, saying, “He is the person I have been closest to in my life.” Cadwalader encouraged her early on to a career in landscape gardening, which she pursued for over fifty years—completing nearly two hundred commissions—with unswerving determination and efficiency.

During the winters, until she married in 1913, Beatrix Farrand lived with her mother at 21 East 11th Street. Like the gateposts of Reef Point, the five-story brick town house with its high stoop makes real the comings and goings of that early professional life, which began in a top floor office as early as 1895. (Eventually, her office was moved to 124 East 40th Street.) Often, while she worked upstairs, Henry James was their houseguest below. “My liveliest interest attends her on her path,” he once wrote in a letter to Beatrix's mother.

On April 7, 1917, Mary Cadwalader Jones signed over Reef Point to her daughter by deed of gift, and from this point on Beatrix and Max Farrand began building a personal institution that married their scholarly and horticultural interests. In reviewing any one project in her range of accomplishments (which included university campuses such as Princeton and Yale and private gardens for the Rockefellers and J. P. Morgan—and for the White House during the Woodrow Wilson administration), the researcher is always struck by the single-mindedness of the correspondence and reports, implying an exclusivity, as if nothing else could have mattered in her life at the time. But the reality is that Reef Point was the permanent underlying warp of the tapestry on which the weft of her other gardens was woven. Because their winter residence shifted from New Haven, where Max Farrand was professor of history at Yale, to San Marino, California, where he was appointed the first director of the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, Reef Point became the main home for their libraries and art works as well as their gardens.

Like creative innovators of any century who are said to be ahead of their time, the Farrands conceived of a long-range plan for Reef Point which promoted ecological objectives that today are de rigueur for any institution concerned with land use. Founded in 1939, the Reef Point Gardens Corporation established a study center “to broaden the outlook and increase the knowledge of a small group of hand-picked students who are in training to become landscape architects.” Beyond the gardens and library of Reef Point, Beatrix Farrand noted that Mount Desert Island offered other laboratories for the study of New England flora and “the ecological adaptation of plants to the environment.” These included Acadia National Park, along with its issues of design and management, and the private gardens of the area, over fifty of them designed by Farrand herself.

In the history of garden design, the influence of Reef Point Gardens as a personal expression of horticultural taste and design may be compared with such other pivotal gardens as Gertrude Jekyll's Munstead Wood and William Robinson's Gravetye Manor, both of which Beatrix Farrand visited in England. It was modern in the sense that its design did not allude to any historical style but was instead an enhancement or an elaboration of the natural features of Maine, such as the native bunchberry (Cornus canadensis), for example, which grew in dappled sunlight at the entrance to a wood. But her gardens also possessed components necessary to a botanic garden: systematic classification of plants of a single species; an herbarium of almost eighteen hundred pressed plants, created for scientific study; and micro-environments specific to the coast of Maine, such as a bog filled with purplish pitcher-plants. With the gardens charted into sections and the plants labeled, the scientific scope of Reef Point—yielding a disciplined design with its own harmonies of color, texture, and form—was akin to those early botanic gardens founded by professors and physicians at medieval universities.

To give the illusion of a larger terrain as in eighteenth-century English landscape gardens, Farrand devised a circuit of curvilinear paths that intersected the straight axial paths radiating toward the views. Guests were conducted along a preordained route so that the gardens unfolded in a succession of experiences: the vine gardens on the house; the rose terraces with the single varieties that were her passion; the rhododendrons and laurels on the way to the vegetable enclosure with its espaliered fruit trees; the perennial beds across the turf from the rock gardens; and past the pink azaleas, holly hedges, and heathers to the bog. Surrounding these areas were stands of red and white spruce, planted in tight clusters as barriers to the severe winds, while others were allowed to grow freestanding to retain the spread of their “youthful outlines.” And twin Alberta spruce, one of her signature choices, stood as sentinels at the head of the paths leading to the bay. From the shore, this skyline appeared like “the great army of the pointed firs, darkly cloaked and standing as if they waited to embark,” which Maine novelist Sarah Orne Jewett described so memorably in The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).

Within the gardens were certain Arts and Crafts style ornaments reflecting not so much indigenous crafts but the work of others like herself, in particular Eric Ellis Soderholtz, whose tastes were formed on European travels. Born in Sweden, Soderholtz was an architectural draftsman and photographer in Boston who had made a survey of ancient art and architecture during a Grand Tour of southern Europe. After settling near Bar Harbor in West Gouldsboro, he devised a method of fashioning classical oil jars and amphorae out of reinforced concrete that could withstand the harsh elements. Hand finished, sometimes on a wheel, with slight pigment and incised ornamentation, these dramatic containers still grace many gardens in the area. (Lunaform, a craft studio in Sullivan, Maine, carries on this technique and also reproduces Soderholtz's original designs.) Two of his oil jars were positioned on either side of the main pathway at Reef Point, and his birdbath in a bed of heather was the central feature of the lower garden. In addition to rustic benches placed strategically throughout the gardens for the views, there was one formal bench positioned under the eaves of the entryway. With multiple spindles turned on a lathe, its elaborate structure blended with the architecture of the house and its vine-covered walls. In reproduction, it is known as the Reef Point bench.

Although their lives were very different, Farrand created a seaside garden that can be seen in direct relation to the flower beds Celia Thaxter cultivated next to her porch on Appledore Island off the southern coast of Maine. (In Farrand's files is a note she once scribbled to herself about Thaxter's 1894 book, My Island Garden.) Farrand may have crisscrossed the country and traveled abroad to design gardens for clients on a grand scale, with walled enclosures and formal garden rooms linked by naturalized plantings to woodland and wilderness areas beyond. But at Reef Point, she did what she loved most by creating a Maine garden of apparent simplicity where families of plants laid out in drifts meshed with others in a studied asymmetry. In addition to designing and constantly rearranging the plantings, she planned every aspect of the daily life at Reef Point, preparing for the big day when the establishment would stand on its own. The truth is that the pinnacle reached at Reef Point during this period was its great moment.

The annual reports she presented to her board of directors are the behind-the-scenes companion narrative to the bulletins. They included horticultural developments, the titles of books acquired for the library, and lists of seeds received from botanic gardens around the world as well as of plants culled from wilderness areas such as Mount Katahdin in Maine. In them, she never failed to thank the Garlands, her secretary, Isabelle Stover, and her French personal maid and expert flower arranger, Clementine Walter, who greased the wheels of an enterprise that valued the perfection of the domestic arrangements as much as the gardens.

The influence of Beatrix Farrand's life is still fresh in Maine, where the younger generation in her time have become leaders in the community, one that is still divided in a friendly way between local residents and summer people. David Rockefeller, who was a child when Farrand designed his mother's garden in Seal Harbor, recalls her as “the epitome of a New England grande dame in a long dark dress and hat—tall, erect, austere, sure of herself, opinionated and frightening to most people.” And he remembers walking in her heather garden and how beautiful and completely unpretentious it was. The Rockefeller family still houses the four-wheeled buckboard carriage David's father, John D. Jr., drove through Acadia National Park with Farrand at his side. Beginning in the late 1920s, they made these excursions together to inspect the plantings and the design of the bridges along the fifty-seven miles of carriage roads that were his imaginative contribution to the park. Farrand responded to these outings with closely typed “Road Notes,” offering suggestions in her usual no-nonsense language, with the names of appropriate trees and plants—sweet fern, wild roses, sumac, goldenrod, and bush blueberry—listed along with directions for how and where to plant them: “On the south and west sides of the road opposite the view young spruce should be used, and later on, as pitch pine is available. The north slope of the hill could be gradually planted with these giving a splendid Chinese effect to this superb northern prospect. These pitch pine will never intrude on the view any more than they do on the Shore Drive where they add a great picturesqueness to the position (November 4, 1930).”

Throughout these notes, she urged Rockefeller “to vary the road planting in height and quality and type of material, as these varieties are usually shown in natural growth.” In a sense, like the eighteenth-century British landscape designer William Kent, Farrand leaped the fence of Reef Point and saw the whole landscape as a native garden. When her directions were not followed, she expressed displeasure, particularly when trees were planted in straight lines. Nevertheless she wrote to Rockefeller in 1933, “Again I want to thank you for the way in which you are so consistently upholding my judgments and helping with the ease of carrying on the work to which I look forward as one of the great pleasures of the Island days.” He, on the other hand, found pleasure in the results: “For the first time [I] could understand why you are so partial to wild cherries and pear trees. The blossoms certainly are lovely.”

Every six months, Farrand forwarded a detailed accounting of the number of drives and days in the field in addition to office consultations and stenography. With a few exceptions, the amount owed was always the same: “No charge.” Rockefeller, of course, was deeply appreciative and enjoyed their teamwork “in the public interest” for the “beautification of Acadia National Park.” “I do not know when I have spent an entire half day in so carefree and enjoyable a manner as last Sunday afternoon,” he wrote in May 1929 early on in their long road correspondence. “To feel that I could talk as frankly as I did about park matters, with the perfect assurance that nothing that was said would go further, added much to my satisfaction and sense of freedom in the talk.”

The collaboration was a close and dedicated one. Toward the end of the correspondence in 1941, and at the season's end, the two tried unsuccessfully to make a rendezvous for a final carriage ride up Day Mountain. Rockefeller responded with the courtly congeniality that characterized their rapport. “What ever happens to the world,” he wrote, “Day Mountain will be standing next summer and I much hope we can drive up it then.” Throughout their long association, however, neither abandoned a formality and reserve instinctive to them both. One August, Farrand wrote: “It was only with what I thought great self-control that I passed you the other day on your way homeward from an evidently brisk walk. I wanted to stop and say how do you do to you and to tell you what a pleasure it has been to work over the lodges and their surroundings [in the park].” Horticulturists on the island have observed what may still be traces of her handiwork in such selections as the American bittersweet (Celastrus scandens) around the bridges that serve as overpasses for the carriage roads, now being restored after years of neglect.

Involving though their work in Acadia was, their main project together, which entailed hundreds more letters written between 1926 and 1950, was the garden Farrand designed for Rockefeller's wife, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, in a spruce forest below The Eyrie, their hilltop house in Seal Harbor. One of Farrand's major designs, The Eyrie garden is still in family hands. Although Farrand worked directly with Abby Rockefeller, the correspondence confirming verbal arrangements was always with her husband. In 1921, the couple had traveled to China for the opening of the Peking Union Medical College, which was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Culturally, the voyage was a galvanizing event in their life. Yellowing newspaper articles in a scrapbook at the Rockefeller Archive Center show the tiled pagoda-style roof of the college entrance, which confirms the influence of this architecture on the structures of the garden. Inside a pink stucco wall coped with yellow tiles from the Forbidden City, the contours and harmonies of mossy woodland settings for sculptures from the Far East are juxtaposed with a Maine interpretation of an English flower garden in brilliant seaside hues. Passing from cool green paths through a Moon Gate into a 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 art” and discovered that there were relatively few. Finally, to begin what she called their “new life under other skies and with wider opportunities for use,” she selected the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. The College of Environmental Design Documents Collection is located in Wurster Hall, the headquarters of the Departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Today, the life in this building is extremely active and exciting, with a constant parade of student projects and exhibitions pinned to the lobby walls. Here, in an educational institution where young people address environmental issues, the heart of Reef Point beats on.

After she sold Reef Point, Charles K. Savage, a member of Farrand's board, came forward with an imaginative and ambitious solution for the future not of the gardens per se but of the rare plant collections, which he considered the finest in Maine. Savage was the owner of the Asticou Inn in Northeast Harbor. He was a special person in an unusual position. Deprived of a college education by the early death of his father, who was innkeeper before him, he sought every opportunity to educate himself in art, music, and literature. His aesthetic interests and ambitions were recognized by the intellectuals among the summer residents, who lent him books and invited him to cultural events. Finally, he developed a talent for landscape design by reading widely in the field and becoming knowledgeable in all its aspects.

In a paper simply titled “The Moving of Reef Point Plant Material to Asticou,” Savage proposed to document and then transport the Reef Point collection of azaleas, rhododendrons, laurels, and heathers, along with other plant materials, across the island to a site around a reflecting pond across the road from the Asticou Inn. Noting that “many features of the natural scenery of Mount Desert have similarities to the Japanese, particularly in the parts of the island where bold ledges, rocks and pitch pines prevail,” he was inspired to create a stroll garden in the spirit of the famous water garden at Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, which had “the same low stone slab bridge, mown lawns to the water's edge, azaleas and pines.” This proposal was made to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who paid the greatest tribute to Beatrix Farrand, his old friend and adviser, by supporting this project with an initial $5,000 to purchase the plants and with additional funds during the next few years to create the Asticou Azalea Garden and enhance the terraces and gardens at Thuya Lodge. Savage was already involved in developing the Thuya property above the Asticou Inn. This had been the home, library, and garden of the Boston landscape architect Joseph Henry Curtis, who had died in 1928.

Charles Savage and his sixteen-year-old daughter, Mary Ann, made many trips together to Reef Point with a book of paint samples and colored pencils to list the azaleas and record their colors with a color chip or pencil mark. In one letter to Rockefeller he reported, “A great deal of my thought has been given to the arrangement of the trees and shrubs in this garden—mass, line and color, as well as the progression of azalea bloom—with the hope that the effect from the road as people pass by may be, (I hope), an outstanding one.” Lewis Garland chauffeured Farrand over in the dark blue Dodge every two weeks or so to view the progress of the garden, and she would get out of the car, remove her shawl, and stand to talk with Savage for awhile.

Even the Alberta spruce were brought to the new homes. At Thuya, they have retained their natural form, while at Asticou, one has been saved by expert pruning in the Japanese style. Many of the perennials were also planted in the Thuya garden, so that together the two places have become the successors to Reef Point in an extraordinary feat of plant preservation. In early spring, when the azaleas are in bloom, the paths in the Asticou Azalea Garden wind through clouds of pastel pinks muted by melancholy mists from the sea. But Asticou is equally beautiful in summer, with its cool sand garden inspired by Ryoan-ji, also in Kyoto, and its subtle range of greens, and in autumn with its brilliant leaf colors.

Farrand's gardens also continued in a more direct way. When the main cottage at Reef Point was dismantled (her old friend and executor, Judge Edwin R. Smith, lives on in the Gardener's Cottage), Robert Patterson incorporated entire sections of its interior into a new cottage he designed for her adjoining the farmhouse at the Garland family farm on the main road near Salisbury Cove, where Lewis and Amy Magdalene Garland had retired. The team then stayed together, for Clementine Walter lived with Farrand in her house. The charming white clapboard cottage with peaked roofs had three major rooms—two bedrooms with a sitting room between them—that faced the back, and the tripartite rear facade reflected this arrangement. Each of the three rooms had French doors that opened onto its own section of the garden terrace. Outside the bedrooms, perennials from Reef Point were planted in rectangular beds with annuals around the edges, and heather mixed with lavender thrived along a serpentine path leading from a millstone by the sitting room door. The gardening continued, with a subdued palette of pink, lavender, and gray outside Farrand's window, and brighter colors—red, yellow, and orange—outside Clementine Walter's. The balustrade from the Reef Point vegetable garden with carved oak leaves formed an elegant barrier between the garden and the wild cherries and fields beyond.

Farrand brought all of her favorites from Reef Point, including the Hydrangea petiolaris, which thrives today more than ever, covering the whole back of the barn. And her beloved single roses are crammed in wherever possible. Donald Smith remembers well his visits to her at Garland Farm, where she surrounded herself, just as she did at Reef Point, with myriad vases each holding a single rose. Even her local dressmaker, Mary H. Barron, continued to serve her at Garland Farm, although there was no more need for dresses like the one she made for Farrand's sojourn to Boston in the 1930s to take tea with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. “The Scotch tweeds she brought with her each summer for suits,” Barron recollected, “were so rough the briar burrs were still in them.” Most of her suits were in a mixture of black, white, and gray, although there was one exceptional soft purple tweed, and all of the blouses matched the jacket linings and were made with sleeves full enough so that when she pointed, the fabric would not fall back and reveal a bare arm. In later years, she was never without her distinctive black ribbon choker.

When Beatrix Farrand died on February 27, 1959, her service, by her own request, was attended only by Robert Patterson and the small loyal band at Garland Farm. Her ashes were scattered, like her husband's. But the garden at Garland Farm, her only truly private garden, has survived. The Goff family, who lived there between 1970 and 1993, were meticulous in overseeing it. Helena E. Goff, who was president first of the Bar Harbor Garden Club, and later of the Garden Club Federation of Maine, Inc., took on the mantle of responsibility to maintain Farrand's last garden, with occasional visits from Amy Garland. When the house was sold after the death of his parents, Jerome I. Goff became guardian of Farrand's last remaining papers in the house, including her treasured collection of seed packets from botanic gardens and plant societies around the world. The current resident of the cottage, Virginia Dudley Eveland, has engaged two local women landscape gardeners to maintain the gardens in pristine condition, including the fenced-in rock garden in front with its profusion of ginger and other Far Eastern-style plantings. Although the Garland Farm garden is small, a review of the plant labels indicates that all the important ones are there—a microcosm of the much larger world Beatrix Farrand inhabited.

The memory of Reef Point Gardens as it was, though, is guaranteed only by the written record. Publishing the bulletins as a collection is tantamount to re-creating in depth the multifaceted endeavor of Reef Point, which was supported by a devoted staff whose standard of excellence gave her joy. Read together, they constitute a descriptive account that both restores the gardens in their visual form to the mind's eye and summarizes the knowledge and experience of a lifetime.

Beatrix Farrand lived by a Latin motto from Psalm 119 inscribed first in the hallway at Reef Point and later at her Garland Farm cottage: Intellectum da mihi et vivam (Give me understanding, and I shall live). Her own intellect is at the center of the bulletins' texts, and her goal was simply to impart knowledge that would increase the reader's appreciation of gardens and natural landscapes. “The added happiness to life given by an interest in outdoor beauty and art has a very distinct bearing on a community,” she wrote in her 1939 prospectus for Reef Point. There is also in these essays an echo of a frequent expression found in her letters from Maine: “At last I have reached home again…” For within the pages of the bulletins, the gates to Reef Point Gardens are always open.

Introduction, The Bulletins of Reef Point Gardens, The Island Foundation, Bar Harbor, Maine (Sagapress, 1997)

The Private World of a Great Gardener: Rachel Lambert Mellon

UPPERVILLE, VIRGINIA—“Part of creating is understanding that there is always more to do; nothing is ever completely finished,” says Rachel Lambert Mellon, whose landscape designs grace such varied places as the White House, Jacqueline Onassis's summer home on Martha's Vineyard, and Hubert de Givenchy's chateau, Le Jonchet, in France.

In the same tradition as an earlier landscape designer, Beatrix Farrand, Mellon is one of those inherently talented women, who, though not formally trained, has read her way through the subject and observed and learned in her travels both horticulture and landscape design. Recalling their work together at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library on Boston Harbor, I. M. Pei says, “Mrs. Mellon has the combination of sensitivity and imagery with technical knowledge that you only find among the best professionals.” It was she who suggested for the library grounds the dune grass that now bends in the wind—symbolic of the Cape Cod terrain where the president loved to walk.

This past year Mellon has been occupied overseeing the completion of her own new garden library, a building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes on the grounds of Oak Spring, the farm here, southwest of Washington, where she lives with her husband, Paul Mellon, the art patron and philanthropist. The library houses her extensive collection of botanical and gardening books amassed over the years, which she considers her working library.

Oak Spring, a U-shaped complex of whitewashed buildings with trees espaliered against the walls, is the residence that the Mellons consider “home.” Like their other properties—city houses in New York, Washington, and Paris, country houses in Cape Cod and Antigua—Oak Spring has a distinctive garden, designed by Mrs. Mellon, this one in a series of parterres in the French style. Crab apple trees square off one area, and a single cordon of McIntosh apple trees border the cool beauty of blue-and-white flower beds. Nearby is a vegetable garden planted in perpendicular rows edged in boxwood. The garden slopes gently, and descending on either side is the main house, with the peaked roofs of the linked structures, giving the impression of a small white village.

Settled into a hillside, beyond an orchard, is the new whitewashed field-stone library with the pitched shed roof silhouetted against the sky. In his design, Barnes sought to convey a vernacular farm building in a contemporary geometric form. The entire facade facing southwest is an immense sundial with steel gnomon and strokes. The building includes the main book room, underground stacks, a book-processing room, a kitchen, and a cubical tower, which is Mellon's workroom and where her collection of botanical porcelain will be installed.

Inside, the white walls are awash with light and shadow from strategically placed square windows, one of Barnes's signature motifs. “I wanted a modern exterior with large openings to let the outside in,” Mellon confirms.

Between the library and the main house, a pleached arbor of crab apple trees leads to the double greenhouse where Mellon experiments with unusual and rare plants. Working greenhouses they are, but Mellon has added her touch: the storage shelves of the entryway are concealed by trompe l'oeil doors depicting other shelves arrayed with garden paraphernalia. Not the least of which, hanging on a “hook,” is the riding raincoat from her days at Foxcroft School, which she still wears.

One area of the greenhouse is reserved for her miniature herb trees, a form that she originated thirty years ago in this country. Using rosemary, thyme, myrtle, or santolina, she grows them from small slips. “They are living objects,” she says, “and although they have a medieval quality, they complement a contemporary interior as well.”

Her miniature herb trees sit on trestle tables inside the galleried library where the bookshelves rise to the ceiling. The white linen shades on the window wall blow like sails in the wind, and the patterned floor, a hallmark of every Mellon interior, is a diagonal checkerboard in blue-gray and beige squares that blend with the paving stones of the adjoining library terraces.

Most of the interior fittings have been hand-crafted on the farm to Mellon's specifications. “All the materials relate to the earth: clay tiles, hand-woven linen, and the wood is from our own trees,” she says. The seventy-five-foot-long room, with its white stone walls and juxtaposition of old and new, has the comfort and ease of a spacious living room. Couches upholstered in off-white are scattered with botanical-print pillows from old French fabric. The homespun blue linen covering the desk chair matches the peasant dresses in a Pissarro painting next to it. Even on a gray day, the brilliant yellow of a Mark Rothko painting lights the space.

In her tower workroom, Mellon continues to design landscapes and gardens that take their inspiration from Le Nôtre, as well as from modern artists, paintings by Mondrian and Diebenkorn, and collages by Anne Ryan. Despite her active life, she has always found time to design and feels close to the long tradition established by other women landscape designers.

As a child, Mellon was fascinated by gardens. She watched the landscape man from the Olmsted company in Boston who came down to Princeton to work on the grounds of her family home. Fairy tales, especially those illustrated by Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, were beloved childhood reading. She studied prints in old books of Italian and French gardens and then built miniature ones in wooden boxes incorporating small stone steps, real soil, and tiny topiary trees from sponges, glue, wire, and wood.

“One of the first gardens I did outside the family was for the designer Hattie Carnegie,” said Mellon. “I was twenty-three then, and I went to her salon, but could not afford any of her dresses myself, though I loved them,” she tells the story. “Miss Carnegie suggested I do a garden in exchange for a coat and dress, and so I designed and planted a garden for her.”

Since then, Mellon has created numerous landscapes for private residences and for public projects. In some instances she has received payment, which she donates to a horticultural or medical cause. But most of her clients, frequently her friends, are creative personalities themselves and savor the experience of their collaboration with her.

Looking out the window of her workroom to the Virginia fields stretched out between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Bull Run Mountains, Mellon comments, “My two horizons.” “I always design a landscape with fixed horizons,” she explains, “whether it be mountains or a stone wall around a twenty-foot-square plot.” If there is no set boundary, she will create one. “On the other hand,” she says, “the sky is a free asset in design and nothing unnecessary should be planted that takes away the sky.”

She shapes the terrain and uses trees as sculpture. Trees are the bones of her garden—always systematically pruned, frequently in topiary forms or espaliered against walls—and they become the focal points from which flower, vegetable, and herb beds evolve. She selects indigenous plant material so that her planned landscapes will flourish. And she knows the forms of trees intimately and whether they cast dark shadows or dance like firelight.

On the drawing board now is the landscape design for Jacqueline Onassis's new house on Martha's Vineyard, which includes a grape arbor and an apple orchard of several varieties of apple trees with here and there a gap—”as if a few old trees had died,” Mellon explains. Mrs. Onassis and Mrs. Mellon began their close friendship by working together on the floral decorations for the White House. Mellon, given President Kennedy's suggestion for a ceremonial outdoor space at the White House, designed the now-famous Rose Garden.

Hubert de Givenchy, the designer, refers to his gardens at Le Jonchet in France, which Mellon helped him design, as “a delicate piece of embroidery,” that is, after he heeded her advice to “take out a hundred trees and straighten up the lines.” Now a row of forty linden trees runs the width of his seventeenth-century chateau. In the park she planted lapis-blue scilla underneath a hundred-year-old oak tree, filling in the exact area where the tree casts its summer shadow. When the flowers bloom then in early spring, their blueness is like a memory of that shadow.

For the small garden of the New Jersey home of Charles Ryskamp, director of the Pierpont Morgan Library, she had removed a somber wall of hemlocks around the garden in favor of a low split-cedar fence in order to treat the surrounding properties visually like a unified park. Then she planted a sugar maple that echoed one in a neighbor's yard, thereby extending his horizon to include the tree beyond.

Currently she is a consultant to River Farm, the headquarters of the American Horticultural Society on the Potomac. According to the executive vice president, Thomas W. Richards, she has begun “with plantings that give our driveway the appearance of a country road.”

Although each garden or landscape she creates is as distinctive as the person for whom it is designed, Mellon envisions them all as one immense garden of her own. And where are the horizons of this garden? As far, indeed, as her imaginative inner eye can see.

New York Times, June 3, 1982

“Make the Land Work for You”: Russell Page in America

In the United States a limited and provincial European culture was already outdated a hundred years ago by the rapid growth of a new people in a new continent. Now styles from all over the world chase each other through the American scene, to be tried, accepted, modified and then discarded.

—Russell Page, The Education of a Gardener

WHEN RUSSELL PAGE began his travels to the New World, he brought with he mental images and experiences already accumulated in a lifetime of planting and design. Once in America, he found fresh challenges and a variety of opportunities that spanned the public and private sector and that also introduced him to an intriguing array of new plant materials—and new friends. Like an itinerant salesman or a magician with a bag of tricks, he had ingenious solutions to offer from abroad; but at the same time, he embarked on an important learning process that remained in force until his death in 1985.

Page's commute to America commenced in the fifties in the years before publishing his book, The Education of a Gardener Among the more than twenty-five gardens and landscapes he designed in the United States only a handful remained as unrealized projects. In viewing drawings of this latter group in his archives at the Kalmthout Arboretum in Belgium, one realizes how his ideas on a grand scale would have permanently changed the face of many American institutions. For example, in 1966, at the behest of Mrs. Vincent Astor, he made a Beaux-Arts elevation sketch in pencil of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art embellished with elm trees and lawns, low ilex hedges, and magnolia trees surrounding spouting fountains. A railing detail of a bronze owl was modeled on an Athenian coin from 400 to 500 b.c. By the next year, the museum's director, Thomas Hoving, launched the proposal for the Metropolitan's master plan, and Page's gardenesque Fifth Avenue facade disappeared into oblivion.

Years before he advised Mrs. Albert Lasker on her gardens in Greenwich, Connecticut, she asked him to draw a new fountain to be placed at the end of the Central Park Mall in New York. The result in 1969 was a simplified version of a fantasy fountain from Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, with pink plastic parts that would have added a delicious touch of humor to the park. And, near the end of President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration in 1968, Page proposed a National Rose Garden for Washington, D.C.'s West Potomac Park, with three hundred geometrically shaped planting beds and over a hundred thousand roses, that would have been a major contribution to Lady Bird Johnson's movement to beautify the cities of America. In all of these projects from the sixties, Russell Page was ahead of American planners in his thinking about civic landscapes, but fortunately he remained on the scene into the next decades and the revival of interest in greening American cities.

In the meantime, there were his private clients, the first of whom was Mrs. William S. Paley, at her Long Island residence, Kiluna Farm. The design received its greatest accolade in a 1980 article titled “Water in a Woodland Setting” that appeared in the British magazine Country Life, written by Lanning Roper, an American who made his career in England as a garden designer and journalist. He described the large oval pool in a natural setting of trees and shrubs and the grass steps that rose gently through a wooded area under a canopy of dogwood trees. Barbara Paley's daughter, Amanda Burden, remembers walking from the house and looking over a mound and down the incline of steps to the surprise view of the still pond that reflected a rare assortment of pale orange azaleas. On the far side was a woodland walk lined with fritillaria. Regrettably, under its recent ownership the garden has reverted to a jungle of trees with little evidence remaining of its romantic setting.

Thomas and Iris Vail, who live in Hunting Valley, Chagrin Falls, Ohio, near Cleveland, first contacted Russell Page through William Paley, who was a former chairman of the Columbia Broadcasting System. Thomas Vail himself was the publisher and editor of a prestigious newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer. After a first meeting with the Vails in London, Page began to work at their home, an old stable block called “L'Ecurie” that had been moved to the top of a hill from lower in the valley where they had originally lived in it. As was Page's custom, he stayed with the Vails while he designed the garden at various stages, and in his working habits—taking long walks in the morning and then rapidly drawing in the late afternoon (always with some time out for tea)—can be found the secret to his extraordinary productivity. His focus and concentration on the land and garden at hand would yield the creative idea within a day rather than later in an office somewhere. Sometimes the moment of inspiration and decision would come when he was actually working with the bulldozer driver shaping the land, as he did in flattening the Vails' front courtyard. This efficiency made it possible for him to move quickly and unfettered between commissions, always retaining his clarity of thought for the next place.

The Vail garden, composed of eight garden areas surrounding the house, incorporates images Page had retained from various European garden traditions, and yet reduced in scale, they blended perfectly with the typically American wilderness landscape viewed in the distance. In creating a gravel courtyard, he treated the stable block as if it were a small rustic chateau, say in Normandy. One day, after driving up and down the access road with Iris Vail, he conceived the idea for an entrance allée of a double grove of clipped and pleached linden trees underplanted with myrtle. Viewing them lined up on a grid, they are as satisfying in appearance as the long rows of clipped lindens at the Palais Royal in Paris, and yet they retain a domestic flavor.

The regularity of these trees is reflected in the swimming pool garden behind the house by twin rows of clipped hawthorns and by tall hemlock hedges that enclose garden rooms with long beds of roses or lilacs planted with peonies. Reflecting their mutual interest in Spanish gardens, outside the library window he designed a rill garden with fountains at either end bubbling away to his specifications, which were always explicit on this matter. Among his drawings for this garden is a sketch of a water jet shaped in wood on a lathe to be used as the form for the final jet in beaten copper. Thanks to a rigid maintenance program, except for occasional storm damage, these gardens have matured over the years without losing any of Page's precision or inspiration. Within the last year, the Vails planted the last segment of his original plan—hemlock hedges in U-shaped patterns enclosing single dogwood trees. Thomas Vail recalls the time they planted seventy thousand white pine seedlings on open land beyond the house according to Page's directive to “make the land work for you.”

Paris was the inspiration for Russell Page's best known urban garden in America, the small enclosed terrace on East 70th Street behind the Frick Collection, the choice museum of old master paintings located in the Fifth Avenue mansion in New York City that once belonged to Henry Clay Frick. Nothing is more tantalizing or inducive to fantasy than a beautifully trimmed garden with a refreshing fountain in an enclosure that no one may enter. Passersby pause and press their faces against the iron gates to enjoy this quiet respite from the noisy streets. Because Page understood that people cannot judge distances over water, the rectangular lily pond that stretches across the central lawn creates the illusion of great depth in this shallow space. With its low green hedges, balls of box, and asymmetrically planted trees, the garden is not unlike one he designed on the rue de Varenne in Paris and evokes the same sense of catching a glimpse of a private French garden. New Yorkers consider it as one of the masterpieces of the Frick Collection.

“He regarded this garden as his calling card,” says Everett Fahy, the former director of the Frick Collection who oversaw the garden's installation in 1976 and 1977. The opportunity for the garden presented itself when the Frick purchased and dismantled the last of three town houses adjoining the museum. Although there was talk of a temporary garden and future expansion, the garden has in fact become a permanent visual amenity. Reassembling architectural fragments that had been removed from the mansion's interior during an earlier renovation, the architects were inspired by the Grand Trianon at Versailles to design a garden pavilion facade of arched niches and Ionic pilasters to surround the garden.

During the planning stage of the Frick Garden, Page was introduced to Powers Taylor of Rosedale Nurseries in Hawthorne, New York, who had already been involved in other plantings at the Frick. From this meeting came one of the most important partnerships of Page's career in America. The men would spend hours roaming the acres of gardens at Rosedale, where Page learned about the hardy plants and trees of the region. For his part, Taylor enjoyed the challenge of working within the rigid architectural framework composed by Page. At the Frick, trees—like the Sophora japonica and the Koelreuteria paniculata—were placed and rotated into position for the best view from the street. A Metasequoia commands the northeast corner, linking the lower garden with an upper planter of pear trees that were intended to conceal the Frick's library building next door. And in the niches, dark green trellises support wisteria and clematis vines.

Although the border plantings change seasonally to introduce new colors and textures, what makes the scene alluring even in winter snow are the strong forms that Page cherished in his gardens. During recent warmer winters, the beds are carpeted with blue pansies that make a strong contrast with deep evergreens like the Cryptomeria japonica ‘Lobbii' that grow in the foreground. No doubt Page also saw his enclosed design as an antidote to the rustic openness of Central Park across the street.

He used similar motifs in designing a sculpture garden in 1978 for the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio—only here the inspiration was Italian. Taking into account the museum's building in the Italian Renaissance style, he wrote in his comments, “I have therefore thought it best that the whole effect of the gardens…should reflect the garden developments which such a building might have acquired over the last three or four hundred years.” And in suggesting an eighteenth-century landscape treatment along the main facade, he cited Veronese and Giorgione as two Renaissance painters who used “romantic landscape elements in relation to classical buildings.”

In 1984, Page was finally given the opportunity of designing a monumental civic landscape when he was engaged by the Friends of the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., to select the site and design the installation for twenty-two Corinthian columns that had originally supported the east central portico of the United States Capitol building, where the presidential inaugurations take place. Although the architect B. Henry Latrobe incorporated these columns in his 1806 plan for the Capitol, their design was derived from Sir William Chambers's 1759 Treatise on Civil Architecture. Chambers himself had borrowed the motifs from a sixteenth-century Italian book illustrating the combined capitals of columns from the Temple of Jupiter Stator and the Pantheon. Carved from local sandstone, the Capitol's columns were dismantled in 1958 and replaced with marble.

In a sense, the project was like creating a ruin as grand as the Roman Forum, since the columns' formation in a rectangle with the hint of a portico suggests the remains of a grandiose building. He selected a vast knoll with a prospect overlooking the surrounding meadows, and a rill from a low bubbling central fountain in the marble floor of the structure cascades down a rise into a reflecting pool, thereby echoing the settings of other great monuments in the nation's capital. Herbs were planted in the interstices of the marble floor. Once he drew up the plan, only the first column had to be sited and the rest could be mathematically deduced, not unlike the formation of the pleached linden trees at L'Ecurie.

In many ways, all of his work—including the country houses of England—served as a prelude for his most ambitious achievement in America—the Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens at the PepsiCo World Headquarters in Purchase, New York. In an effort to pull his company together under one roof, Donald M. Kendall, who was chairman of the board and chief executive officer of PepsiCo, gave up the company's several offices in New York for a rural location, thus spearheading the creation in America of the corporate park. He had achieved two major goals before he met Russell Page—the first was the completion in 1970 of a new low-slung building of inverted ziggurats designed by the architect Edward Durrell Stone, and the second the accumulation of a major collection of contemporary sculpture that was placed both in courtyards framed by wings of the building and in an open landscape. These outdoor areas had been designed by Edward Durrell Stone, Jr.

When Kendall first saw the gardens Page designed for Augustine Edwards in Chile (where Edwards had worked for PepsiCo), he realized the greater possibilities offered by the 168 acres of former polo grounds surrounding the headquarters. They now include more than forty sculptures by twentieth-century artists. There was an opportunity in the New World for corporate America to replace the landed gentry of the Old World in the scope of cultivating the landscape. This was the ideal canvas for the kind of eighteenth-century landscape devised in England by “Capability” Brown and Humphry Repton.

When Russell Page began working at PepsiCo in 1978, the team included Powers Taylor and the Carmine Labriola Contracting Corporation. Like the historic circuits that were established in Romantic folly gardens in England, he laid out a winding “golden path” that linked the sculptures and the plantings he designed to complement their forms and sometimes their colors, as in the case of a stand of blue spruce positioned behind a red Calder. He became enamored of American trees and once wrote to a friend: “We're using American trees of course. Your Northeast has some of the most beautiful forests I've seen in my life. I'm using pines and cedars and junipers, lots of maples, liquidamber, called sweet gum here.”

But the jewel of this extravagant landscape with ornamental grass and woodland gardens were the mirror-flat rectangular lily ponds bordered by a sloping perennial garden in a right angle of the building. Richard A. Schnall, now vice president for horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden, remembers the day when Page arrived to plant this perennial bed. Schnall was working for Labriola and was at the garden to receive the order from White Flower Farm. Page directed him to lay out the plants in strict alphabetical order; and when he arrived, he began with “A,” pointed his cane for the placement, and went on to the next letter until they completed the alphabet. “He was simply the most knowledgeable plantsman I have ever known, and he could visualize exactly how the border would look in every season,” recalls Richard Schnall. On one of his PepsiCo plans, Page drew a pedimented trellised arbor taken from a drawing by Humphry Repton and wrote next to it: “I'm tired, it's raining and I am not a waterlily.” Page worked at PepsiCo to the end of his life; after he died, the corporation built the arbor with the inscription in his memory.

During most of the years Russell Page worked in America, his correspondence and plans bore the London address of his flat near Sloane Square at 12 Cadogan Gardens. This charming residential enclave around a garden is well known to American visitors who frequent the hotel around the corner at 11 Cadogan Gardens and share what must have been his own pleasure in the garden's year-round interest. One cannot help but think of him when the winter flowering cherry is in bloom and how a cloud of gray-pink blossoms would have filled his window.

When he published the new edition of The Education of a Gardener in 1983, he gave a copy to Powers Taylor with an inscription that sums up their long collaboration: “To my friend Powers Taylor, who over the years has taught me the ins and outs of making gardens in America.” It is a story simply told. For many years now, Powers Taylor and other gardeners, designers, and contractors who were devoted to Russell Page have maintained this peripatetic British garden designer's rich legacy in America.

Russell Page: Ritratti di giardini italiani, American Academy in Rome and Electa, 1998

Profile of Dan Kiley

NEARING NINETY, Dan Kiley has lost none of the irreverence (nor the long hair) he acquired at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, 1936-1938, when he rebelled against professors in the landscape architecture division who showed reams of slides turning students off European garden history. Instead, he and fellow students James Rose and Garrett Eckbo looked to the architecture department, under Walter Gropius, for inspiration and fresh breezes blowing across the Atlantic from the Bauhaus.

Kiley was raised in an old quarter of Boston, and his earliest experience of landscape was roaming alleyways between houses, crossing the Arnold Arboretum on his way to school, and ambling through Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklace of parks along the Charles River. Visits to his grandmother in New Hampshire left impressions of fragrant pine woods in summer and stark maple tree trunks above strewn leaves in the fall. As a golf caddy, Kiley retained images of modeled green courses, and as a skier, the clean ski tracks across an expanse of white snow.

When Kiley entered Harvard, he was already employed by the landscape architect Warren H. Manning, known for his grand estate gardens. Manning had been a young associate of Olmsted and was one of the founders in 1899 of the American Society of Landscape Architects. When Manning died in 1938, Kiley left Harvard to work on housing projects in Washington, D.C., with the architect Louis Kahn. During World War II, Kiley joined the new Office of Strategic Services, where he replaced Eero Saarinen as chief of design. In this capacity, he was sent to Germany in 1945 to transform the Nuremberg Palace of Justice into a court to try Nazi war criminals. It was his first trip to Europe, and it changed his life.

Reminiscing in the sunroom of his farmhouse-cum-office in East Charlotte, Vermont, he described those days “when France became my first love.” With his limited free time, he visited Versailles and the Château de Sceaux and discovered that those boring slides he had seen at Harvard had nothing to do with the breathtaking reality of André Le Nôtre's creations: the formal geometry, the allées of trees, the axial views, the terraces and fountains. He was smitten. Later, he recalls, on a more extensive European tour: “I would simply go to a railroad station in Paris and board the first train going anywhere. I felt so free spirited and connected to France, and crazy things would happen to me. I would often end up dancing with young people in a bar somewhere.”

While other young American landscape architects were seeking fresh designs in abstract land formations, Kiley immediately grasped the grids of Le Nôtre's classicism and applied them, as he says, “to the open-ended, dynamic simplicity of Modernism.” As the sleek, axial interiors of International Style buildings like Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona Pavilion merged with the landscape through glass walls, Kiley saw a harmonious way to continue the architecture through ordered plantings in private gardens and public plazas. In brief, he wanted to express the classicism in Modernism without losing the mysterious dynamics of nature—perpetual growth, seasonal transitions, flow of water, and, crucially, the effects of light and shadow.

His first modernist garden was for J. Irwin Miller of Columbus, Indiana, the manufacturer who commissioned a whole group of contemporary architects to build in Columbus, making the city a veritable museum of twentieth-century public architecture. The Miller garden reflected the same geometric grid of the 1955 house designed by Eero Saarinen, and the honey-locust allée, with the Henry Moore sculpture at its end, has become an iconic landscape in American garden history. Kiley despairs of landscape architects like Olmsted who mixed varieties of trees in clumps in the picturesque tradition, and with a wave of his hand to his own woods he demonstrates how maple trees are massed along a boardwalk path. Though he seeks to plant grids of trees close together—“the better to squeeze between them as in nature”—he has conceded to spacing them farther apart for his public work.

While Kiley has collaborated with almost every major contemporary architect in America, each landscape has been individually conceived to suit the spirit of the site. In Tampa, Florida, Harry Wolf's 1988 tower for the North Carolina National Bank, for example, is complemented by squares of the perennial grass zoysia between paved strips, a grid of Sabal palmetto and swaths of Lagerstroemia indica with brilliant pink blooms. Over the garage, a glass-bottomed canal (illuminated at night) feeds nine rills that terminate in bubbling fountains. Versailles with a difference.

For the two-acre plaza of I. M. Pei's 1986 First Interstate Bank Tower in Dallas, Texas, Kiley envisioned the cooling effects of a swamplike water forest. The geometric waterfalls of Fountain Place, as it is called, are enlivened by 263 bubbler fountains and 440 native bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) in planters. He describes landscapes like these as “dancing in space.”

In New York City, the towering trees and fountains of Rockefeller University on the East River are an urban oasis, as are the interior gardens of the Ford Foundation and the grid of trees in planters behind Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. He has traveled worldwide to design his award-winning landscapes—but best of all, he returned to his beloved Paris to add his minimalist touch to the public spaces around La Défense.

Among the many modernists in the field who have trained with Kiley is Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, the Canadian landscape architect. She can remember his Vermont office within the family house also occupied by Kiley and his wife, Anne, and their eight children in the 1950s. Kiley once told her: “Through the woods, walk softly, feel the ground.” One of Kiley's oft repeated principles is that man is nature, that design and the environment are inseparable. As he told a New York audience a decade ago: “One sets the design in motion, and it makes its own growth—an organism continually in a state of dynamic equilibrium trying to find its place in the universe.”

Gardens Illustrated, September 2001

Grounded in History: Deborah Nevins's Landscapes

BACK IN THE summer of 1988, just after the crest of the boom years, a columnist for the Independent in London conjured up the ultimate fantasy of a new stately home and pleasure ground for a figure he called the Thatcher-era millionaire. For the house design he turned to a young British architect who drew on “ancient values,” alluding to classicism without imitating it. For a garden plan, however, he tapped an American, Deborah Nevins, the New York landscape designer who during the past decade has earned a solid reputation creating lush gardens and timeless landscapes, mostly for families of the Fortune 500.

Thoroughly grounded in art history, Nevins emerged in 1976 as a curator of the exhibition “200 Years of American Architectural Drawing” at New York's Cooper-Hewitt Museum. One of the most illuminating offshoots of the Bicentennial, the show and catalogue established Nevins as a perceptive historian of architecture—a field that soon led her to the related area of landscape architecture. After stints as an adjunct professor in landscape history at Barnard College and a museum lecturer, she decided, she says, “to create landscapes rather than write about them.”

Her classic survey lecture, a grand tour of landscape history, is still part of her repertoire, though now it helps her to brief potential clients as well as architects, with whom she often collaborates. One recent afternoon Nevins set up her slides for architects at a SoHo firm near her own office. “History,” she began, “is a source, not a pattern book.” With that, she launched into a stream of images—fields divided by hedgerows, circular clearings in woodland, groves of trees, orchards, and allées—to explain a vocabulary she appropriated for her designs without ever making direct quotations. “Some of our strongest forms in landscape design,” she says, “are references to primary forms that evolved from agriculture and from community or religious practices.” As examples of plantings harking back to traditional configurations she shows a single majestic tree positioned above stone steps at Hidcote in the Cotswolds and a grove of chestnut trees in the Place Dauphine in Paris.

Nevins describes the gardens she designs, often suites of intimate open-air enclosures, as “private territories within the exterior world.” Her sensibility to regional character—both in plant selection and in formal composition—binds the private realm to its context. Proposals for new commissions are presented as a mix of site plans, relevant historic views, and photographs of indigenous flora—all mounted on fine paper in bound volumes that rival Humphry Repton's “Red Books” for sheer beauty and clarity of organization. The idea of the garden becomes as exciting as the garden itself.

By defining a progression through a series of spaces, Nevins can make even a small property appear filled with visual incident. In one Long Island garden, for example, a buttressed brick wall separates a geometric arrangement of square parterres of herbs and standard roses from an apple orchard underplanted with spring bulbs and summer wildflowers. On a New England estate, the lawn between luxuriant yet muted herbaceous borders in the Arts and Crafts manner becomes a green corridor to a simple hedge-ringed circle. At a new town in Florida, the repeated verticals of cypress trees unite several townhouse gardens by a single skyline. On a working farm in the Midwest, Nevins will plant clumps of full-grown trees in the middle of vast corn fields as confidently as “Capability” Brown deployed copses in English parks. “I love dense trees,” she allows with a smile, as if she knows her passion is self evident.

Nevins's landscapes work on several visual levels, from low rills of water and borders framed by hedges or stone walls to apple orchards with clouds of spring blossoms. Recently, Nevins has embarked on a series of garden enclosures surrounding a new Caribbean hideaway that involves an imaginative adaptation of different cultural traditions: vine-draped slat houses, a mandarin grove in continuous bloom, coral-stone paving, a lotus pond based on one in Bali, and a courtyard of citrus trees like those in Seville. Fragrance is the client's mandate, and the night air will be tinged with the scent of jasmine and stephanotis.

If a single image can sum up Nevins's landscape sensibility, it is a treasured photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson that hangs in her dining room from a collection of photographs she has amassed by selecting one a year. Having lived in France, she senses the connotations of this 1955 park scene, Près de Juvisy, France, akin to Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte in its inherent quality of formality mixed with fantasy. On one side of a hedge, two boys play on a path leading to a river, while on the other, two girls in tutus turn toward a sunlit opening like sprites. “The photograph shows how minimal forms—a hedge or a path—can create intimate spaces within the larger landscape,” Nevins says. She could just as well be talking about one of her own gardens.

House & Garden, September 1992

Private Visions: The Gardens of Michael Van Valkenburgh

AS A CURATOR himself in the 1980s of exhibitions on American landscape architecture, Michael Van Valkenburgh has explored the private garden in the twentieth century—both real and visionary. “Like the house in architecture, the garden is a succinct design statement, offering a concise view of each designer's philosophy,” he wrote at the time. In his world, the private garden is more than a setting or an appendage to a house. It is an independent laboratory of ideas, a synthesis of art and craftsmanship. If the experiment succeeds, the forms may be applied to the larger world of parks and public spaces, but the fresh inspiration belongs to the original compressed version.

“Ideas spring from our hearts and minds and are informed by history and culture and tempered with a keen knowledge of how the world is built,” is how he describes the creative confrontation with a new space. Drawings reveal the immediacy of this experience and serve as the repository of ideas which may take years to execute. He views design on the land, even with natural materials, as an artifice tempered by the dimension of time.

Van Valkenburgh's expansive imagination incorporates his knowledge of historical precedents—what he calls “revisiting ideas from the past”—and an ability to respond to the uniqueness of a site and of how it relates to a regional environment. Private gardens allow him personal control, and their scale makes possible a complete exploration of design. Sometimes he refines an experimental idea in the backyard of the gray clapboard house in Cambridge where his office is located next door to a former Laundromat that serves as the drafting room for Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.

Growing up in an agricultural community, Van Valkenburgh says, provided him with the comfort and ease to let landscapes look legible and man-made. He recalls first fantasizing about the land as a boy when he brought the cows home from pasture in the Catskills to his family's modest dairy farm in Lexington, New York. Today, his work retains what he sees as “the deliberate simplicity of that remembered agrarian landscape,” as in the way a plantation of trees is angled into the hillside. For him, beauty and elegance are found in the straightforward solution rather than in the contrived picturesque. His search for a realistic approach, he believes, complements the abstract ideas he develops in his academic life at Harvard University, where design is taught as an art form.

At the beginning of his career, he was inspired by the book Design with Nature by Ian L. McHarg, the University of Pennsylvania landscape architect in the vanguard of the ecology movement who describes man-made landscapes as a picture of nature devised by both conscience and art. McHarg also offers the theory that we continually seek out or recreate “reassuring landscapes,” images made memorable through past associations. In his own work, Van Valkenburgh refers to memory and narrative. Seen in succession, his gardens are woven together by threads of repeated themes and images that recall in minimal forms archetypal models.

In these private landscapes, he combines horticulture—both as a strong element of design and as a transition to natural plantings at the fringes—with a seductive use of mineral elements—stone, water, and metal—that bring a cool, tangible veneer to the settings. Finally, he adds levels, dramatic changes of level that suggest passage and journeys through the gardens. As at the Potager du Roi, the king's kitchen garden at Versailles, steep staircases and slopes make abrupt shifts in the viewer's perspective and repeatedly alter the experience of space.

In the birch garden he designed in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, he drew on his agrarian sensibility to resolve the problem of a sloping terrain behind the house by creating a grade change that was even more pronounced. From a flat terrace above, defined by a brick-and-bluestone retaining wall, a plain flight of wooden stairs plunges into the lower-story woodland garden. The steps evoke for Van Valkenburgh the rickety ones leading down to docks on Martha's Vineyard, where he spends weekends and summers, and they function visually like a drawbridge lowered as a connector.

Planted along the steep slopes on either side is a thick grove of multistem gray and white birch trees whose trunks angle out into linear designs against lush underplantings of rhododendron, mountain laurel, ferns, vinca, common periwinkle, and European ginger. In this deliberate quotation from the garden Fletcher Steele designed in 1926 at Naumkeag in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Van Valkenburgh pays tribute to Steele's ideas about massing with subtle irregularity and about grading land in sculptural rather than natural forms.

While at Naumkeag the birch trees are seen in counterpoint to a series of curving stair rails of white pipes, in the Chestnut Hill garden the birch grove is bisected by a traditional Japanese temple path of diamond-shaped stepping stones set into bluestone gravel scattered with pine needles. Similar to the long granite stones that line Japanese paths, like one at Nanzen-ji in Kyoto, Van Valkenburgh has edged his path with black brick manganese, two dark lines that lead serenely not to a temple pavilion but to a stele-cum-fountain of polished green granite. Visible through a slit on the face of the stone column are overlapping plates of stainless steel that step up so that the flow of water cascades down over them as a fluid surface. At night, neon lights attached vertically in pairs to the brick piers at the top of the stairs cast an eerie glow akin to moonlight. This garden goes beyond pleasure by offering ideas and images that heighten one's experience of traversing what is otherwise a simple grove of trees.

As if designed as a continuation to the birch garden, the Pucker Garden, in nearby Brookline, evolved as a hillside embankment that creates an ascent in the shallow space of a suburban backyard. Calling on references to Roman antiquity, the garage at one side now appears like a ruin of an old tomb that has been excavated out of the adjacent hillside. Echoing the wooden steps, a staircase in high-tech galvanized steel checkerplate floats up like a shiny ziggurat across the myrtle-covered hillside. Curved like an amphitheater and planted with single-stem shadblow trees, the embankment becomes an ideal foil for displaying abstract sculptures on pedestals. The arrangement calls to mind the 1962 exhibition of David Smith's Voltri sculptures arrayed on the steps of the ancient coliseum in Spoleto, Italy.

Like the modernist architects of this century, Van Valkenburgh subscribes to the aesthetic principle that new materials and the latest technology dictate new forms. Without relinquishing classical garden features, he introduces hard-edged structures and industrial surfaces that at first appear more practical than ornamental, except that in the end their trimness and suitability make them a perfect blend with the flat green expanses that are to his gardens what sleek glass is to architecture.

At the entrance to the Pucker Garden, and on axis with the floating staircase across the lawn, a progression of Japanese-style stepping stones has been abstracted into rectangular stones of varying lengths embedded into exposed aggregate concrete. Running crosswise between these pavers are inlaid bands of irregularly set black pebbles that mimic Japanese stepping-stone patterns. Further on, the rendered surfaces of gray stucco for the retaining wall of the formed hillside and the garage exterior complement the galvanized steel post-and-wire-mesh trellis for Boston ivy that screens the back of the viewing path around the top of the hill. Guests usually complete the garden circuit on the flat terrace roof of the garage with its balustrade also of galvanized steel and wire mesh. From this overlook, the Japanese stone entrance patio below resembles a Mondrian painting in tones of gray.

In the lee of a 1950s modern house on a waterside estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, Van Valkenburgh continued the play of hard and soft surfaces in another sculpture garden he created to display important works by Barbara Hepworth. Concealed from the outer drive by a brick serpentine wall that provides slots for the carpark, the bluestone path inside the enclosure swings around a central island of Vinca minor in what the landscape architect calls a gestural curve. Except for an existing cutleaf maple he retained to preside over one corner, the sculptures are the main vertical features in the landscape. With the sound of low spouting fountain jets along the center of a rectangular goldfish pond, the scale recalls old cloistered gardens, fresh but simple, with dark beds of ivy around the perimeter.

Some of these same qualities are present in his Black Granite Garden in Los Angeles, only here the inspiration might be Italian cypress allées or Moorish rills. Even where the images refer to historical precedents, the forms are classically minimal. This is a linear garden, a 120-foot avenue of twenty-foot-high columnar Italian cypress trees set in beds of needle point ivy along a central spine of rosy gray manganese brick pavers that appears infinitely long, channeled as it is between the tall trees. At the edge of a small rill parallel to the path, another granite stele fountain has a monolithic quality—the water pours down the created “washboard” side, while the rough side, dry, faces the sun. A wall of thick-trunked ficus trees forms the boundary along the entire length of the garden. Length like this in a defined landscape is a liberating quality. The reason why avenues in general are so inviting is that they appear to go on forever.

One of Van Valkenburgh's wittiest designs is for a client in St. Louis who collects art from the commercial memorabilia of American highway strips—the real Pop Art. Among his treasures is a red metal Pegasus, the mythological flying steed that is the logo for the Mobil Company. As the myth goes, Pegasus with a single stroke of his hoof could bring forth the waters of Hippocrene, the sacred fountain of the Muses on Mount Helicon that brought them poetic inspiration. This is a symbolic garden ornament for all times. Van Valkenburgh has treated it as the pinnacle of a garden experience that begins with a long granite walk on the street side that passes under a connecting passageway between two house structures and continues as a bridge across a sunken garden to the terminus, the flying Pegasus soaring appropriately across a fountain pool on a metal arch.

Four years ago, Michael Van Valkenburgh began working on Martha's Vineyard and fell in love with its magical landscape of agricultural fields and stands of oak trees stunted by the force of prevailing winds. After coming to the island and eventually buying a house there, he came to see the natural landscape as more powerful than anything he could possibly do to change it. His own house is protected from the road by a picket fence and an unclipped lilac hedge as well as a new swing gate he designed across the drive after spending the better part of one summer in research by looking at everyone else's gate. By isolating architectural features of the New England landscape in their pure form—like a white gable-peaked arch he designed at the end of a double herbaceous border—Van Valkenburgh forces others to see in them associations with and memories of other places and other times.

For one client who owns houses across the road from each other on Martha's Vineyard, Van Valkenburgh's additions made it possible for their surrounding spaces to be experienced with fresh eyes. On the oceanfront property, the new cobblestone drive with runoff troughs that impede erosion is a forceful design in itself. But the major innovation, Wrightian in its dynamic form, is an extended stone terrace wall that juts out into the lawn like the prow of a ship. Extending far beyond the weathered Colonial house, it functions as a viewing platform looking out to the panorama of the sea. In the afternoon, it casts a dramatic shadow on the sweep of lawn that circles around it. On the boundary of the property, Van Valkenburgh planted an equally arresting long border of white hydrangeas.

On the land side, the property around a Victorian clapboard house had to be cleared of scruffy growth to carve out a landscape where the lawn again becomes the central focus for the rest of the garden. From the roadside, granite steps framed with indigenous day lilies look like an ordinary entrance, corresponding to porch steps at the end of a bluestone walk. The house is screened from the road by a woodland growth collected from woods including pitch pine, hollies, azalea, and woodbine.

Only after turning the corner of the house is the plan revealed: joined bluestone pavers suddenly become stepping stones embedded in grass. It is a stark design in contrast to the turquoise carpenter's lace of the house. Then simply by using the multiple entrances at the side of the house to determine axes, Van Valkenburgh made a repeated design out of a set of granite steps leading up the slope of the lawn to a terrace and two of the doors. A stone path from the third door crosses the lawn at right angles to the stepping stones; its line is reinforced by a parallel border of Russian sage. And in the corner of the house, a linden viburnum turns brilliant crimson against the green lawn in autumn. Two more sets of granite steps, cut into a fieldstone retaining wall at the far end of the lawn, lead to shaded paths through a dense growth of maples, sweetfern, bayberry, and wild roses.

Though this landscape bears Van Valkenburgh's imprint of hard-edged forms, the shapes and textures of stones as pavers and steps and a typical New England wall crafted by a New Hampshire stone mason, it reflects the nineteenth-century aesthetic where each house was surrounded by lawn and modest gardens that blended on the fringes with wilderness areas beyond.

On a beachfront property, he designed a peaked-roof open pavilion on the path from the house to the sea as a front porch, where the family congregates after dinner, only apart from the main house. He calls it a rain house because of its copper roof and his own recollection of boyhood afternoons sitting on the farmhouse porch listening to the deafening but soothing sound of a summer shower on the old tin roof.

In contrast to these severely architectural designs and because of his extensive work with the photographs of Gertrude Jekyll, Van Valkenburgh is a strong proponent of planted borders. What interests him is the design of borders that direct as well as please the eye. Fascinated with the seasonality of Jekyll's floral selections and the progression of plantings along her garden paths, he reproduced these theories in a plan for a hypothetical corporate garden, a three-hundred-foot herbaceous border, with hundreds of ten-foot-square beds set on the diagonal, separated by grass walkways. Each bed is planted with one kind of flower in shades of pale pink to deep red; the border blooms sequentially, so that color washes over it slowly like a wave from one end to the other, with, for example, a light pink iris, ‘Vanity', in June, to a deep burgundy dahlia, ‘Black Narcissus', in July, and on to a silvery pink Japanese anemone, ‘Robustissima', in August.

For several gardens, he has designed raised parterres with granite curbs. At a house in Minnesota, he planted these with vegetables, herbs, and flowers, while at another garden in Greenwich, for clients seeking plant diversity, he filled them with several varieties of roses and divided one bed from the other with rows of espaliered fruit trees. The beauty of the parterre form is that in winter, covered with snow or even barren, the open rectangles of stone make a pleasing design on the land.

What is engaging about following Michael Van Valkenburgh's career as a landscape architect and teacher is that his ideas build with his commissions and exposure to new places. For example, a new landscape he designed within a traffic circle for General Mills in Minneapolis could easily have been planted in lawn, “captured lawn,” he calls it. But instead he created a prairie encircled by 162 Heritage River birch trees, and each year the grasses are burned off to invigorate future growth. Similarly, although he did not finally win the competition to restore the Tuileries Garden in Paris, his study of Le Nôtre's geometric plantings and his innovative plan—to introduce the topiary cones of Sceaux in a series of grids that would have linked the Tuileries to the Place du Carrousel—will continue to affect not only his designs but our own perceptions of that historic space.

Extracting the essence of this French classical garden vocabulary, Van Valkenburgh has created a small interior walled garden for an office building in Paris at 50, avenue Montaigne. Although placed in a contemporary setting, the elements, new and spare—rows of pyramidal hornbeams and espaliered lindens in alternation with long basins of water—evoke the spirit of a young seventeenth-century garden. What gives it away as a Van Valkenburgh landscape are the stainless steel water columns that terminate the basins as well as the steel runway and viewing platform, and benches designed by Judy McKie in the form of jaguar cats. Where Van Valkenburgh differs from the landscape architect Dan Kiley, who has also acknowledged the influence of Le Nôtre, is in disrupting the geometric order and linear symmetry. Because of some irregular spacing that is his trademark, a crossview of the garden makes the symmetrical arrangement dissolve into a simple bosque of trees. But still, the minimal form of this garden conveys the richness of centuries of French culture.

Van Valkenburgh achieved a similar effect with a birch bosque he designed for a property in Redding, Connecticut, where he planted sixty white spire birch trees in four rows on a slight incline at the edge of some woods. Like the linear Black Granite Garden and the courtyard of 50, avenue Montaigne, the experience of walking among the trees gives the sense of order dissolving only to become ordered again. The only other experience in art that compares with this is watching a corps de ballet dance Balanchine's choreography—just as the dancers give visual satisfaction by lining up, they break ranks into new groups in a constant pattern of resolution and dissolution.

All of this leads to the commission which may be the summit of his career to date, the new Master Plan for the Harvard Yard Landscape. As a sacred space in American history, it compares in importance to the Tuileries in Paris. Van Valkenburgh admits that to alter either of these spaces is like being asked to repaint the Mona Lisa. Still Harvard is home to Michael Van Valkenburgh, and he speaks of the Yard—a word that has all the connotations of a workaday enclosure attached to purposeful buildings—as an aesthetic unto itself representing Yankee parsimony and elegant frugality. The challenge for him is how to intervene without making the landscape look significantly revised.

Essentially, the landscape is composed of a ground plane of grass crossed with paths under a high canopy of deciduous trees, a combination, according to Van Valkenburgh, that provides a unique sense of place, a New England commons. The firm's sketches for the project demonstrate that Van Valkenburgh's extensive knowledge of tree planting will be as important to our century as Le Nôtre's was for his. Drawings of the Old Yard show how the central axis will be reinforced with tulip poplar trees and how the general replanting will look with rows of unevenly spaced trees. In the part of the yard called Tercentenary Theater, he plans to develop a central halo of light in the deciduous canopy by planting honey locusts in the center with red oaks and red maples at the periphery.

A view of these gardens and landscapes provides an anthology of a sensibility that is intensely original, modernist, and respectful of the past. I met Michael Van Valkenburgh and first saw a garden of his in 1986 at the Urban Center in New York during an exhibition called “Transforming the American Garden: 12 New Landscape Designs.” We stood together next to his submission, a model for a visionary corporate garden called Eudoxia: A New Civic Landscape. It was spatial and sculptural, and it used elements of private gardens, like hedges and herbaceous borders, in colorful hues that related to the city. But what I remember most was the tissue-paper model for the twenty-five-foot-high ice and water wall and what he said about the sounds of water and the fragrance of moisture. The image of the ice wall is lodged in my imagination as if I had seen it. I missed the real ones he constructed in Radcliffe Yard in the winter of 1988, but I have the newspaper photograph of him in front of them—a spare white glistening veneer. In a kind of magical alchemy, Michael Van Valkenburgh can take old elements and transform them into new visions.

Design with the Land: Landscape Architecture of Michael VanValkenburgh, Harvard University Graduate School of Design exhibition catalogue, Princeton Architectural Press, 1994

A Cultivated Civilization: Barbara Stauffacher Solomon's Drawings of Classical Gardens

IN 1904, Edith Wharton set out to reveal what she called “Italian gardenmagic” in her book Italian Villas and Their Gardens. Wharton laid the ground rules by saying the “garden must be adapted to the architectural lines of the house” and provide “shady walks, sunny bowling-greens, parterres, and orchards.” All this happened, of course, only after castle walls disappeared. Before that, the garden was like an interior room, a respite set within the parapets. What Wharton did for the Renaissance house and garden in elegant yet direct prose, California landscape architect Barbara Stauffacher Solomon has achieved in delicate colored-pencil drawings that are masterworks of technique. By limiting herself to a small eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch format, she bears out her own thesis that within a disciplined environment, here the classical garden, the imagination can achieve the greatest release.

By now, Solomon has produced more garden plans on gallery walls than in the ground. Nevertheless, her composite drawings and photographic collages, which convey the essence of place and time in historic landscapes, have made her an influential scribe and seer in the field of garden design. It is not surprising that the wall is fertile ground for Solomon; starting out as an artist in the 1960s, she gained immediate fame as the inventor of supergraphics when her bold stripes and huge letters in blue, red, and black became murals at William Turnbull and Charles Moore's Sea Ranch condominium in Sonoma.

Then, as she worked toward a master's degree in architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, “the grand scale was boiled down to simplicity,” she explains, and her new format in a new medium was born. She remembers learning how to draw trees in a plant materials course. Since then, from a studio in her native San Francisco and on sojourns abroad, she has been turning out magical combinations of plans and elevations with maps and scenery—only now these elements are executed in compressed images.

She draws on a desk in front of six crocks of colored pencils of many different brands, including one from Switzerland, to obtain the fullest range of colors. These drawings can be compared to the experience of garden visits as preserved in memory, which is indeed the basis for her technique, along with historical research. Sudden shifts of scale and dotted sight lines reproduce the sensation of travel or of a passing train of thought. In her “manifesto” drawing, she follows the garden as it moves outside: two identical grids, one dotted in brown, the other in green, demonstrate how the grid of the garden became the grid of the house. The caption: “There is a garden which is neither forest nor farm.”

Writing about the Villa Lante in Bagnaia, Wharton describes a natural woodland as “boldly worked into the general scheme, the terraces and garden architecture skillfully blent with it…its recesses…pierced by grass alleys leading to clearings where pools surrounded by stone seats slumber under the spreading branches.” From this passage, one turns to Solomon's drawing of the twin pavilions at Villa Lante, attributed to Tommaso da Siena, who also designed the gardens she depicts stretching out to the woodland. All her drawings are accompanied by brief passages verging on prose poems, a stream of consciousness that includes her own thoughts and those she has gleaned from literature. Of Villa Lante she writes, “through gardens parting palaces,” and she describes the natural woodlands there as “pinewoods become pergolas.” Villa Lante's axiality and perspective owe much, it is frequently said, to the architectural theories inaugurated by Donato Bramante. The integration suggested by Wharton is here rendered with great clarity.

At first, Solomon's drawings appear to be of fantasy gardens because they are composites of various views and vistas, including elevations, axonometric projections, and site plans, all within one flat plane. Every line, however, is real, based on historical and photographic research and on Solomon's own observations during leisurely walks through gardens. As a result, they also function as a personal account of her own impressions, for she singles out a point of reference, a particular vista or allée of trees, or an entrance revealed in a single vignette. With finely drawn sight lines, she leads the eye from a small detail in the general plan to its enlarged image or a secondary view of it. The effect is of gardens as they are recalled in memory. Each written phrase unlocks in her readers' minds myriad images of other remembered landscapes.

A collection of her drawings of French and Italian Renaissance gardens along with written descriptions is the focus of an exhibition called “Green Architecture: Notes on the Common Ground.” Originated by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, it is currently on view in New York at the Urban Center under the sponsorship of the Architectural League. As the title suggests, Solomon explores that margin where controlled nature and structure coexist, where the inside and the outside merge. (The word garden, she tells us, derives from the Indo-European root gherd, meaning enclosure.) The garden that is expressed architecturally (romantic English gardens and herbaceous borders are not her subject) extends the protective privacy of the home. It expands the house like a porch or even an awning or canopy.

Evocative, then, as the drawings are of place, they also raise the philosophical question of defining inside and outside. Swiss critic Jean Starobinski, in his essay on this topic, writes that “philosophers and biologists alike have stated that an outside begins at the point where the expansion of a structuring force stops. One could just as rightly say that an inside comes into being the moment a form asserts itself by setting its own boundaries.” Though exposed to the natural forces of the out-of-doors, gardens still relate to the life of the interiors—boundary is the key word.

Solomon's study of the European formal garden as derived from the classical garden is presented chronologically, from 1545 to 1723, in the exhibition catalogue, and over time the garden structure becomes increasingly complex, a view that has rarely been given with such precision. Beginning with the simple rectangular lawns and intervening pathways of Ancy-le-Franc in Burgundy, the pergolas, arbors, topiaries, mazes, and colonnades of trees multiply over the centuries. But green architecture is only half the story. The other half is the pale blue-green of water, in fountains, canals, basins, and pools, adding music to the gardens. “Water descends on axis or circuitously,” she writes in tribute to those engineering feats that conducted water from terrace to terrace with only the law of gravity to give it force.

In her drawing of Marly, also called Marly-la-Machine, one sees the grand waterworks that were planned by Louis XIV with Hardouin-Mansart to feed the waters of Versailles between 1677 and 1714. Here, architecture gives the water shape as well as direction.

Palladio's Villa Barbaro (1560) was in essence a gentleman's farm, and in Solomon's drawing the symmetry of the agricultural fields reflects the symmetrical wings of the villa itself. She carries through the semicircular portico of the Villa Giulia in Rome from the villa to garden to water basin. The number of architects and landscape architects who had a hand in this plan would comprise a Who's Who of sixteenth-century Rome: Vasari, Michelangelo, Bartolomeo Ammannati, and Giacomo da Vignola.

By contrast to the hillside terraced gardens of the Italian villas, the more open French gardens of Gaillon and Vernueil offer broader horizons. For the latter, she draws the four grand terraces of promenades and parterres reflected in canals that hark back to the castle moat. Gaillon is a garden and chateau now in ruins, but form and symmetry survive in her drawing. There is nothing static about these; the viewer is always on the move into the farthest recesses of the gardens.

She ends with a drawing of the Portico of San Luca at Bologna, the arcaded walkway from the city to the eleventh-century Santuario della Madonna di San Luca on a hill. Here the inside becomes a pathway through the outside: “a promenade open to the vistas and closed to the rain.”

Although the Continent may have provided Solomon with the historical images for her drawings, her memories of garden architecture began with childhood walks on San Francisco's Marina Green, the grass rectangle that runs along the bay near the Yacht Harbor. She defines this personal archetype in her idealized drawing of it, set within a grid: “The Urban Garden: The green rectangle equals paradise,” or pairidaeza, the ancient Persian concept of enclosure. This greensward, as a basic component of the formal garden, became her “reassuring landscape,” a term employed by another landscape architect, Ian McHarg, to denote a landscape that becomes meaningful from an early association and that one seeks thereafter to recreate or rediscover in other environments. From this bit of urban paradise, she has traced garden history back to the basic form of the tilled field, the agrarian garden. The straight lines of man's first holding become for her the origin of the architectural grid.

Although Solomon's drawings have become an art form in their own right, she puts her theories to practice as a landscape architect of real projects, in particular, for the proposed Turia Gardens in Valencia, Spain; for an estate in Oregon; and for four gardens in Omaha, Nebraska. Closer to home, she has applied the principles of Renaissance architecture and Bramante axiality to a series titled “Crissy Field and the Palace of Marina Green,” a proposal based on her childhood haunt. The focus of this plan is the Crissy Field area, an unused Army airstrip along the bay that lies between Marina Green and the Golden Gate Bridge and is separated by a major road from the Presidio, an 1860s military garrison originally built in the Italianate style. On first view, the site plan resembles the configurations of the Renaissance gardens, but a closer inspection reveals elements suitable to contemporary California life, retaining nevertheless the traditional axes.

Solomon also continues to observe history, colored pencils in hand, most recently on a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, an experience that culminated in a series of nine drawings of Roman streets and the patterns that originated the Western city. She began with the handout map of Rome given to all Academy fellows during orientation, and traced this map in as an overlay, a theme in all the drawings, with a wide serpentine line, the Tiber, as a motif. This juxtaposition records the passage of time from the original inception of the architectural plans to the progressive realization of structure and landscape.

In looking at these drawings, one is reminded that before Bramante was an architect, he was a painter, and, as British critic Stephen Gardiner writes in Inside Architecture, Bramante “saw architectural design in terms of planes and spaces as he might have seen a painting.” These drawings are like the paintings he might have seen. “Rome is Rome still,” Henry James wrote in Roderick Hudson. Here the pergolas, arbors, and garden walls of green hedges have given way to masonry facades that wall in narrow streets and piazzas that lead to vistas of other classical or baroque facades. The outside, the open space, now becomes the inside, the interior.

“The sky is a precious commodity,” says Solomon. “Needing this rare light, Romans have persistently used clearings to catch the sky's brilliance. Places, piazzas, voids—the city is a network of inhabited walls enclosing the mirror images of streets.” One remembers emerging from just such a narrow street and coming upon the Fontana di Trevi for the first time.

In some of the drawings, architectural details float in a surreal fashion above the canyonlike streets; Annibale Carracci's Blue Mercury is in flight over the Piazza Farnese. A sign reading “Lollypops” gives away the century in another one that includes the Teatro di Pompeo. In the Piazza del Popolo, she captures the effect of that great open space with the obelisk; the twin image of the church forms a gateway to the streets of Rome. And she writes on the drawing of the Piazza S. Eustachio: “A landscape is a place enclosed by buildings.” The reversal is complete.

Solomon knows everything about the color of stone. The grays and terracottas of Roman buildings turn into multishades of beige in her latest drawings of San Francisco houses cascading down the grid of hilly streets there.

Essentially all the drawings, of Renaissance gardens or of contemporary city streets, are about passageways from interiors to exteriors and the individual's private experience of borders—cafés under trees, shops under awnings, and fishing piers are some of her border images. But also as the body moves in a disciplined pattern, the mind is free to wander. “Order encloses magic,” is how she expresses it, as muted colors and blurred edges in her drawings evoke the qualities of gardens and places remembered.

Some of the memories she jogs are of literary gardens, those lawns and allées fixed in the imagination with a reality equal to experience. Seen through her eye, Henry James's description of the memorable lawn that stretches out behind the gabled brick house at the beginning of The Portrait of a Lady takes on a deeper significance: “Privacy reigned supreme, and the wide carpet of turf that covered the hill-top seemed but the extension of a luxurious interior.”

“There is magic,” concludes Solomon in one passage, “when illusion is reality and opposites merge.” For her, the common ground, where the inside and outside meet, has become the stage for civilization—civilization, that is, at its most cultivated.

Metropolis, March 1984

Planting Plastic: Martha Schwartz Looks to Art for Inspiration

IN EXPANDING the concept of what makes a garden, the landscape architect Martha Schwartz defines it as a place that is “conducive to contemplation and understandable on a human scale.” It need not necessarily contain plants—”Certainly many fine Japanese gardens do not,” she explained. And even when gardens are “filled with plastic or other strange objects,” Schwartz said, “I think they are still real gardens.” Such a garden is the one Schwartz created several years ago at her mother's home outside Philadelphia.

Admittedly, Schwartz does not come to landscape architecture with a horticultural orientation. She is drawn instead to the fluidity of outdoor spaces and the possibilities of various other media. Her concern is the synthesis between art and landscape, a concern she shares with Peter E. Walker, formerly her professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and currently her partner in The Office of Peter Walker Martha Schwartz Landscape Architects, of San Francisco and New York. It is an approach that would not be foreign to the great landscape architects of the seventeenth century, like André Le Nôtre, who brought all the arts to bear on garden design, employing sculptors as well as gardeners. In fact, Walker sees minimalists like Carl Andre and Donald Judd as contemporary interpreters of the flat planes and systematic order of Le Nôtre's gardens. He adds another dimension with his definition of a garden as “any place out of doors one really cares about and transforms into something memorable.”

“Instead of dealing with the old clichés of garden design,” said Schwartz, “we examined the artists and their sensibilities to determine what their work reflected about today's culture that could be translated into landscape architecture.” During their explorations, Schwartz was especially influenced by the early exhibitions of Frank Stella's metal relief paintings in the late 1970s. These were wall constructions of corrugated aluminum and other materials in arabesque and linear motifs painted in Fauvist colors with a smattering of glitter. In high relief against background patterns resembling those in Matisse paintings, the crowded elements were hooked onto a metal grid, and there was just enough open space at the sides to invite the possibility of the viewer's being inside them.

“I was bowled over by these relief paintings,” she remembered, “and I was intrigued by the notion of ‘more is more.' It was an additive process that ran counter to the modernist tradition I had been trained in, of paring down to the essential idea. He was layering banal shapes with more layers of paint and glitter and building them up to the point where the whole transcended the junk to become richly beautiful. I decided then to try to make a garden like that.” The site for the Stella Garden was her mother's dreary twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot yard behind a semidetached house outside Philadelphia. Her mother's name is Stella Schwartz, so the garden was named for her as well.

Martha Schwartz began the garden by collecting junk. First she made weekly excursions to Plexiglas outlets around Boston, where she then lived, to purchase odd pieces by the pound. They came prewrapped, so she did not even know what colors she was getting. Next, she drove up to Marblehead, Massachusetts, for fishnets, then went to tropical fish stores for aquarium gravel, which comes in two-pound bags, each of a different color.

After carting the stuff to Philadelphia, she culled more objects from the assortment in her mother's garage. Once organized, she built a small study model of her ideas as a guide. The mirror-image yard next door to her mother's house provided a sufficiently verdant background for the Stella Garden, and the neighboring trees that towered above cast down dramatic shadows. Schwartz removed all the scraggly remains of a previous garden—her mother not having a notably green thumb—and laid a sheet of Visqueen plastic to prevent further growth. She then filled in the entire area with gravel.

Schwartz created a formal portal, with two tall tree trunks supporting a cloud of white chicken wire. To “dematerialize” the trunks so that the clouds might appear to float alone, she painted them white with red and green dashes, which also blended in with the visual chaos she sought for the rest of the garden. The height of the trees was balanced by a ladder placed surrealistically against a garage wall. Schwartz also repainted the house with a light lavender base to make it an effective backdrop.

The big moment arrived when she unwrapped the Plexiglas. She and her sister, Megan Reid, then a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, assessed the various sizes and colors and determined an arrangement of the slabs in a border around the garden, gradating them from clear to hot to cool colors. Standing in staggered rows, these sheets of Plexiglas served both as a visually spectacular fence between the backyards and as “flower” beds, with taller varieties in the rear, some shooting out in different directions as flowers are wont to do. The pieces were set in a trench of clay, which was pliable enough to allow ongoing adjustments even after the Plexiglas was in position. As some colors were seen through others, the palette became even richer in shades, and in early morning, the sun shining through the panels cast colored shadows across the gray gravel.

The garden also had a kind of central “water” feature. “Having water in a garden,” Martha Schwartz said, “is what brings the sky down to the ground plane.” Since she is always seeking new ways of translating elements, she introduced into the design, instead of water with its inherent maintenance problems, a four-foot-square wire-glass table on concrete block supports. Like water, the glass reflected light and the color of the sky. The table, in turn, was placed on a six-inch-high wooden plinth or platform painted green, with a grid across the surface containing aquarium gravel in a pattern of amorphous colored shapes that appeared to reflect the jewel-like tones of the Plexiglas. Finally came a canopy of dyed-pink fishnets, stretched like sails above the whole composition.

One aesthetic drawback remained. Old garbage cans stood along the access route from the garage to the garden. Schwartz replaced them with five brand-new galvanized ones, which she covered with glitter and epoxy. “I figured that if my mother had to walk past garbage cans to get to the garden, at least they were going to be beautiful garbage cans,” she says.

Though her mother had the garden for less than a year before she moved from the house, the Stella Garden was built to last, with a minimum of maintenance—primarily an occasional raking of the gravel. Over the long term, cleaning and repainting would have been required, and eventually some of the Plexiglas might have had to be replaced because of fading.

So far the Stella Garden has been unique in her oeuvre as an experiment. “It was a difficult process,” she said, “because I kept feeling I shouldn't add one more thing, but then I felt that I should, for the exercise of it—the more, the better.” The experience of the garden was like walking through the picture plane of a collage. And what it lacked in fragrance, it made up in glitz.

The Stella Garden reflected what Schwartz's partner Peter Walker describes as the historical tendency of gardens to exploit the artistic and theatrical attitudes of their age. At present, under the influence of what Walker calls “the park movement,” he feels that landscape architects generally tend to create natural landscapes; as a result, he believes, the magical, make-believe element of gardens has disappeared.

But that could not be said of the Stella Garden, where, in the black of night, the lights shining through the transparent columns of neon colors created what seemed like an imaginary city somewhere in outer space, and the isolated ladder against the garage wall, a stairway to the stars.

New York Times Magazine, September 22, 1985

Resurrection: The Built Landscapes of George Hargreaves

WALKING AND THINKING, to breathe the site. This is how the landscape architect George Hargreaves works best to achieve his mission of weaving ideas and spaces into masterful combinations, reconnecting cities with their postindustrial derelict lands. And because his designs are perceived as figurative, rather than scenic, to experience them also evokes clarity of thought and observation. The promenade or circuit becomes the tangible thread connecting people to a series of events in these sculpted landscapes that retain a sensitivity to their environments and to their previous histories. Where others see destitution, Hargreaves sees restitution.

Hargreaves found his vision through his own circuitous route, one that began with an epiphany on the summit of Flattop Mountain while backpacking in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park. Emerging above the tree line onto a summer snowcap dotted with flowers, he looked out over Bear Lake to a view of the peaks beyond. It was a spatial experience that made him feel at one with nature and the landscape. When he recounted the feeling to an uncle, who was dean of forestry at the University of Georgia, the older man responded, “Have you ever heard of landscape architecture?”

From then on Hargreaves traveled in a straight line. After completing his bachelor of landscape architecture at the University of Georgia School of Environmental Design, he earned his master's degree at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, where he has taught since 1986 and now chairs the Department of Landscape Architecture. During graduate school came a second revelation. He discovered earthworks of the 1970s like Robert Smith-son's Spiral Jetty in Great Salt Lake and Amarillo Ramp in Texas. While artists like Smithson and Michael Heizer, whose Double Negative cut trenches on a Nevada mesa, saw their works purely as sculptural objects in the landscape, Hargreaves explored them as new elements exposed to the shaping effects of water, wind, and gravity. He further developed these concepts in workshops devoted to landforms—spheres, cones, pyramids—that would serve as space makers the way other designers would insert walkways or plantations. In his 1996 entry to the Festival International des Jardins at Chaumont-sur-Loire, France, he compressed these ideas into something akin to poetry. On a small site, he constructed a spiral mound alongside serpentine beds of grasses and perennials, suggesting agricultural furrows, and an abstract forest of fiberglass rods. The arrangement invited a promenade to the top of the mound for an uplifting view of the Loire River.

While traveling abroad as a young professional, he embarked on another formative experience, that of appreciating the complexity of history and culture that marks places like Stowe Landscape Gardens in England and Courances in France. Stowe provides the most evocative long walk in England through a vast property that was shaped in succession in the eighteenth century by Charles Bridgeman, William Kent, and Lancelot “Capability” Brown, who became head gardener in 1741. On the circuit around fields and lakes and across bridges and into small temples and monuments, there is a moment at Stowe when suddenly the majestic scheme, though based on disparate influences, comes together. The enchanting seventeenth-century park at the Château de Courances, said to have been designed by André Le Nôtre and repaired in the late nineteenth century by Achille Duchêne, is planned on a more domestic scale than Le Nôtre's grander designs for Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles. It is fed by ten natural springs that establish such diverse water features as a moat, a horseshoe fountain, a mirror lake, a stepped canal, and—the culmination—the striking image of a long, somber canal lined navelike with black poplar trees. The fact that the landscapes of both Courances and Stowe have survived the centuries in a composite, readable form indicates a respect for their individual parts.

Cumulative history rather than complex theory is what most affected Hargreaves's view of landscape design. And yet, looking closer at work by “Capability” Brown and Humphry Repton during his travels in Britain, he found that their smooth approaches to grading and tame clumps of trees sanitized rather than invigorated the surrounding nature. Instead, Hargreaves preferred the richness of the wilder approach in New York's Central Park, where Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux unleashed nature by scattering plants and trees and by creating a geological basis with rocky outcrops. Many landscape architects, Hargreaves believes, “lift” the substance of Olmsted without truly understanding his style. (Like many of Hargreaves's own projects, the idealized landscape of Central Park itself was constructed on vacant swampland, as was its inspiration, Birkenhead Park near Liverpool, the oldest free-entry municipal park in Britain, designed by Joseph Paxton.)

Hargreaves followed the forcefulness of nature one step further as he witnessed the destructive powers of a hurricane destroy a beach in Hawaii. He saw in this disorder a beauty that countered the static norms of American landscapes and recognized the greater possibilities of kinetic potential in a human rapport with the land.

Since 1983 Hargreaves Associates of San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have traveled the world with their original concepts of engagement and narrative in rediscovering the underlying essence of landscapes. The plaza for the Sydney Olympics 2000, a waterfront park on landfill for Lisbon's Expo ‘98, and landforms tying Japan Science World to Tokyo Bay are only a few of their international commissions. But for Hargreaves, northern California was like the Land of Oz, a magical but somewhat bizarre, windswept country where anything was possible. Following his professional path in the Bay Area, where he lives, reveals not only the historical evolution of the land itself but also the continuity and fluidity of a practice that has developed, as he says, into three different stages. He describes early work, like Byxbee Park in Palo Alto, as abstract and bare, pushing beyond the limits of normal ideas about landscape and relying for materials on dirt and the remaining detritus on the site. The middle period, represented by Guadalupe River Park in San Jose, brought a dramatic turnaround to fringe or marginalized areas closer to populous downtowns and demonstrates a full command of the requisite supporting technologies. And the third and most recent stage addresses locations at the very heart of a culture, requiring ever more complex solutions, like Crissy Field in San Francisco. At the interface of land and water, all of these remnant sites were also the edges inhabited by Native American tribes whose spirits can be reimagined as people once more promenade along these shores.

Byxbee Park was a garbage mound before it became a park in 1991. Now, paths of crushed oyster shells weave through a series of landforms that blend with adjacent baylands and encourage the return of wildlife. A walk there is similar to hikes in the English Lake District, where the natural hills form an immediate horizon that dissolves when one approaches the next rise. This perceived increase in space and distance through valleys and elevations is something that Olmsted understood when he created the illusion of deep perspectives with undulating paths leading toward a near horizon crested with trees. There are no trees, though, in the thirty-five acres of Byxbee Park, for fear that the roots would disturb the one-foot-thick impenetrable clay cap sealing the landfill under two feet of soil.

In collaboration with two environmental artists, Hargreaves has made a powerful combination of elements that integrate the reclaimed site with its history and location. Waves of nonirrigated native purple stipa grass give the landscape a velvety appearance, changing from green in early spring to a rich golden hue by May. Surrounded on two sides by water, the Mayfield Slough and the Mayfield Marsh, the park may be isolated on a peninsula, but it also meshes visually with the larger landscape beyond.

Striking out across the northern slope, the visitor climbs along a series of eight massive chevrons, formed by concrete highway barriers embedded at right angles as a directional motif for airplanes heading to the nearby municipal airport. From there the path proceeds through a narrow pass between two landforms that open into the park's protected area. Here clusters of hillocks (reminders of Ohlone Indian shell heaps) planted with lupines and other wildflowers offer both shelter from the wind and a lookout over the long vistas.

On the descending slope, five berms of compacted soil and rock infill, set in ever larger arcs for erosion control, give the impression of rippling water. A sculpture installed at the head of this procession, called Wind Wave Piece, echoes the rippling motion—a square arc with hanging ropes that wave in the afternoon northwest wind. The path proceeds along the slough and passes the flare needed for burning off methane gas from the underlying garbage. The thick hedgerows lining the banks of Mayfield Slough are interspersed with triangular, cedar-plank viewing platforms for birdwatching over the wetlands.

As the walk continues around the point, a conceptual forest comes into view, a dramatic grid of weathered green cedar posts. These create an exciting visual rhythm as the grid shifts and finally disperses into randomness as one turns the corner. The patterns recall the experience of passing telephone poles on a drive in the country and reflect as well the processional aspect of power pylons across the slough. The pole field, as it is called, is sliced off at the top in a slanted plane gesturing down to the marsh.

Hargreaves's design for Byxbee Park includes a small gem of architecture: the triangular restroom at the parking lot entrance. An unmistakable reference to Louis Kahn's famous 1950s Bath House for the Jewish Community Center of Trenton, New Jersey, it is elegantly simple and practical. Hargreaves's crisp little pavilion has a translucent roof for natural light, thereby eliminating the need for electricity, while the gap between the roof and cedar walls provides ventilation.

A few miles south in San Jose, Hargreaves engineered an entire series of parks around the Guadalupe River that have transformed and rejuvenated the city. The river, a valuable water source, has also been an instrument of vast destruction during periodic flooding. But Hargreaves brought to the assignment an understanding of both natural and man-made landforms that provided the solution to the hydrological challenge. In a sense, he has designed a string of city parks as a vast controlled water garden. Few landscape architects since Olmsted have had the opportunity to work on such a grand scale in one urban location.

Downstream from the city, the river flows innocently through its narrow bed, but on the embankment of Guadalupe River Park the braided network of alluvial berms resembles in accentuated form the buildup of striated sediment in a river delta. Intermittent channels contain the periodic overflow before redirecting it to the riverbed. In dry periods, the graceful undulating landscape along serpentine paths with plantations of oaks and bay trees belies the technological precision of the engineered landforms that are narrowed on the upstream ends to reverse the torrents. The woody plant habitat on the riverbanks—cottonwood trees, scrub willow, snowberry, and gooseberry—possesses the wildness that Hargreaves believes brings richness to the landscape and also guarantees low maintenance.

In San Jose itself, where the Guadalupe River meets Los Gatos Creek, Hargreaves designed Confluence Park as a meeting place for crowds converging on the San Jose Arena for sports events. Stately rows of poplar trees along the green are like those seen in the French countryside. The sloped Arena Green amphitheater is configured with pyramidal landforms and pocket spaces for picnicking within groves of trees. It recalls the green amphitheater at Claremont Garden in Surrey, designed by Charles Bridgeman. The park crosses the creek via a pedestrian bridge to Confluence Point, a cool, wet naturalistic woodland on a spit of land formed by the two rivers. The handsome Cor-Ten steel bridge has all the stately elegance of the Palladian Bridge at Stowe.

In downtown San Jose, with its combination of old Spanish-style and contemporary office buildings, the threat of the Guadalupe River was even more dangerous, as it flowed through the heart of the city. Hargreaves secured the riverbanks with a wall of terraced gabions that have filled up with enough soil and pioneer plants to sprout a genuine riparian plant community. (Gabions—metal cages filled with rocks used in roadway fortifications—have become one of the most attractive and useful industrial products available to landscape architects.) These terraces combined with long serpentine steps along the riverbank, allowing the water to rise step by step, both control and speed up the river as it travels through the city. A new corporate headquarters constructed by the Silicon Valley giant Adobe on the riverbanks is proof of renewed confidence.

Hargreaves's Plaza Park is San Jose's main square, crisscrossed daily by pedestrians on angled paths typical of town commons. Its central promenade retraces the historic Camino Real, the route that led to the California missions. Here, water has been captured and tamed in the first fountain the landscape architect designed. Its spouts, at intersecting points of a grid of glass blocks, are flush with the ground. They produce mist in early morning, provide playful geysers for children at midday, and at night, illuminated through the glass blocks, glow in a magical terrain. A grid of jacaranda trees recalls the satisfying beauty and regularity of orchards that once dotted the region; mature redwoods, live oaks, and sycamores shade pathways lined with park benches. Hargreaves also leaves his mark with the angled green walls of an informal amphitheater.

While accommodating every aspect of outdoor enjoyment, Crissy Field, now a national park in San Francisco, redefines the process of a public landscape. George Hargreaves and his associates, particularly his longtime collaborator Mary Margaret Jones, peeled back layers of the site's natural and man-made history to discover a configuration of elements that overlap in time. Hargreaves often speaks of the poetry of landscape, which suggests a compression of language and forms that reveal ideas without overelaboration. Urban parks are never natural landscapes, but they may be designed to enhance appreciation of nature. Waterfront parks, like Crissy Field on San Francisco Bay, have the added advantage of facing the beauty and unpredictability of the sea.

Located at the bottom of the Presidio, the old Spanish garrison turned U.S. military post, Crissy Field was originally a tidal marsh where the Ohlone Indians harvested shellfish. In 1912 it was filled in as an automobile racetrack for the upcoming Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915; in 1921, as a grassy meadow, it became an airfield for biplanes named after the aviation pioneer Major Dana A. Crissy. The airfield was paved over in 1935 and remained in use by the military until 1974. Since then, the beach has become a haven for windsurfers who appear even today to fly through the waves on glinting Mylar sails like a flock of low-flying seabirds.

Crissy Field extends one hundred acres from east to west, from a stand of cypress trees just beyond Marina Green to the Golden Gate Bridge. The major elements of the park are a vast tidal marsh, a lagoon fed with seawater, and, overlooking it, a lush kidney-shaped grassy meadow of an airfield. Running the entire length of the park along the sandy beach and boulder-strewn shore is a 1.3-mile windy esplanade, wide enough never to appear crowded even on a holiday. The airfield itself is a giant berm of red fescue grass that rises several feet above the promenade at one end and slants down to ground level at the other. The parking area at the eastern end, for windsurfers and visitors, fades into a meadow with finger-splayed mounds and a grid of trees. At the far end, red-roofed structures with weatherboard siding in groves of palm trees preserve a bit of Army vernacular but also serve as a refreshment area. Complex swirls of berms protect picnic areas and challenge children more than most conventional playgrounds do. In general, though, the flatness of the landscape makes richer all the fine details: the wisps of color of thousands of native plants growing in the dune gardens or the boardwalk leading to a standing grove of Monterey cypress on the beach.

But what is public may also be private. While the flow of people proceeds along the esplanade, anyone can walk out on the bridge crossing the lagoon and quietly watch the birds settle in the twilight as the rosy clouds of sunset gather over the Golden Gate Bridge. Hargreaves has no doubt been walking and thinking there himself to breathe in the site, motivated to re-create in other people's lives the sensation of his existential experience at Flattop Mountain, “to make moments and places more than what they are in a redefined picturesque for the twenty-first century.”

In every era, individuals emerge with a singular creativity—part genius, part opportunity—that takes their art or science to a new level of realization, but without departing entirely from the cultural past. Stowe, Courances, Central Park, and countless other sources have played a role in Hargreaves's education.

In architecture, spectacular results are achieved by variations of form and function combined with new materials and advancements in engineering. The challenge has always been greater, though, in landscape architecture, where the substance of design remains the same: earth, water, stone, plant life, and sky as a source of light and shadow. Add to this list time, memory, people, and the natural history of a site. And more often than not, today these sites represent cultural wastelands depleted of both character and characteristics, abandoned brownfields at the edges of cities. George Hargreaves's goal is resurrection.

The Changing Garden: Four Centuries of European and AmericanArt, exhibition catalogue, Iris & Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, University of California Press, 2003

A Twinkling Terrace that Reaches for the Stars: Kathryn Gustafson in New York and France

PARIS—ZOOMING UP the Champs-Elysées in her Saab, Kathryn Gustafson, an American landscape architect, stopped to admire bouquets of roses tightly arrayed in the rear window of a florist's truck. “That's a garden, too,” she said, and she drove on.

New Yorkers had better prepare themselves for such judgments. Gustafson, forty-seven, has been handed her first American project, the Arthur Ross Terrace at the American Museum of Natural History, scheduled to open in the spring of 2000.

Her new, nearly one-acre urban garden will be just outside the moonlike sphere, designed by Polshek & Partners, that will house the new planetarium. Gustafson's terrace, on the 81st Street side of the museum, will echo what's inside, with a long slanting shadow of dark granite—meant to evoke a lunar eclipse—that will glisten with rivulets of water and twinkle with fiber-optic stars depicting the constellation Orion.

James Stewart Polshek, architect of the planetarium, said Gustafson won the competition to design the terrace because “she understood that the design must be metaphorically linked to the planetarium.”

Ellen V. Futter, the museum's president, said she found Gustafson's spare design for the terrace “elegant yet simple, harmonizing both with nature on earth and with the universe beyond, in a physical context.” She expects that crowds will be drawn to the pristine quality of this public space, and to Gustafson's fantasy of fiber-optic starlight that will sparkle at night.

Gustafson is always in tune with the sights, sounds, and smells of her environment, especially in France, where, until 1997, she lived and worked. Now she is back in her native Washington, on Vashon Island in Puget Sound, but she still commutes to Paris and London for work. Her studio offers the tranquility to create the plaster models that are the basis for the sweeping landscapes and vast movements of land that have become her signature style. Her projects remain best known in Europe, and it is necessary to understand what she has done abroad in order to comprehend her vocabulary for the museum terrace, which is only beginning to take shape.

Having left the fleeting world of fashion, she completed her landscape architecture degree at the École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage at Versailles and opened an office in Paris. She sees herself as part of a historical movement in transition from agriculture to pleasure gardens, and from the architectural garden rooms of the Renaissance to the picturesque. Although she seeks to mix and unify these traditions, her aesthetic veers toward abstract and minimalist forms and was shaped in France by her mentors there. These included the well-known landscape architect Jacques Sgard (“I never drew a curve before I worked with him”), the sculptor Igor Mitoraj (“He gave me the tools to sculpt my clay models”), and Peter Rice, structural engineer of the Pompidou Center. Walks among the systematic beds and the glasshouses of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris influenced her planting designs.

What has evolved is a vision of landscape as an immense canvas to shape and manipulate. Gustafson takes into consideration the movement of people through these spaces and the environment beyond: not only buildings, but also shifting sunlight and shadows throughout the day or, at night, landscapes made vivid by her lighting designs.

Since 1980, she has been involved in three dozen important public projects: town squares, corporate landscapes, and city parks. The Parc de la Villette, in Paris, is on her roster, as are a number of projects for corporations and governments, clients she feels are more accepting of her bold approaches to nature.

In the summer of 1997, when the city of Lausanne, Switzerland, invited landscape architects to enhance its narrow streets and broad esplanades for an International Festival of Urban Gardens, Gustafson redesigned the Esplanade de Montbenon, an undefined expanse of lawn overlooking Lake Geneva. By placing swathes of silvery leafed plants next to long blue beds, she linked this plaza visually with the gray-blue waters and the Alps rising beyond. Then, with the composer François Paris, she suspended glass chimes and gongs from metal arches along the adjacent walkways. Their soft tinkling sounds in the wind were reminiscent of the clock chimes that add a pervasive music to Swiss townscapes.

A few months ago, Gustafson was in the London offices of Sir Norman Foster, the architect of the Great Glass House for Britain's newest botanic garden, the National Botanic Garden of Wales in Llanarthne. It will open next year. The elliptical structure, 330 feet long, will be the largest single-span glasshouse in the world. Gustafson is designing the interior, best described as the Grand Canyon under a glass sky. With deep, sharply cut stone chasms and crevices, a sixteen-foot waterfall, and a flood plain at the bottom, the landscape, to be planted with Mediterranean flora from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, will be a milestone in botanic garden design.

In presenting the model, Gustafson held high a light on a long wire and moved it in orbit like the sun to demonstrate how in the course of a day deep shadows will be cast by the sheer walls of the gorge. The landscape in real stone will be softened by the grays, yellows, and greens of the planting palette. “The atmosphere will be permeated with the fragrance of damp earth and crushed thyme and the crackling sound of real pebbles on the paths,” she forecasts.

But France has been her stronghold, especially the town of Rueil-Malmaison on the Seine, eight miles west of Paris, where several corporations have built new homes nestled among the quiet residential streets lined with linden trees. Those corporations wanted to add to, not detract from, suburban neighborhoods already filled with gardens. Gustafson gave Shell Petroleum rolling green lawns that are bermed up against the headquarters building. One can understand why she says, “I'd love to design a golf course.” The lush lawns, separated by sharp-cornered limestone walls, are like a green lava flow.

Her complex designs for corporations are comparable in scope to gardens designed around palaces and chateaus in the seventeenth century, though her work is closer to that of contemporary land artists like Michael Heizer or James Turrell. Behind Shell's buildings, Gustafson switched from a bold to an intimate, almost domestic, scale. A canal-cum-water garden separates the two main buildings, which are joined by a series of glass-enclosed bridges. Along the water, plantings of dogwood, magnolia, azalea, and rhododendron are arrayed in color patterns from white to purple. Along the canal, a low boardwalk with steel handrails barely skims the water.

In a simpler but no less elegant vein, Gustafson laid out a series of rills in marble troughs in front of the Esso headquarters just blocks away. The troughs stretch like ribbons of water between rolling lawns and a grove of willow trees. From each side, these channels empty into a shallow cascade that flows gently toward the Seine. On the banks of the Seine, in view of the railroad bridge at Chatou, a favorite subject of the Impressionists, she fashioned an overlook with modern steel benches and ample space for skateboarding.

Her ideas about history, culture, and memory are summed up in her park for the medieval town of Terrasson in the Dordogne. It redefines the meaning of gardens. On a steep hillside next to a fifteenth-century fortified abbey, Gustafson created what she describes as “history fragments of gardens,” or what the town calls “Imaginary Gardens.” One mysterious feature of the park is how streams, fountains, and cascades rush into the open—and just as quickly disappear. It is possible to walk through her forest of fountains there and, on a still day, not get wet. And when asked about the undulating trellises of steel bars over the rose garden, Gustafson described the configuration by flipping an imaginary sheet in the air.

Gustafson is also in tune with Paris, and with what makes it the City of Light. Driving by the Place de la Concorde one night, she pointed out how the numerous lampposts are placed at different heights. “If you squint your eyes,” she said, “it is like driving through a galaxy of stars.”

New York Times, January 7, 1999

Landform Future: Laurie Olin and the Integration of Architecture and Landscape

IN 1964, when Bernard Rudofsky wrote of “the challenge of topography” in his seminal work Architecture Without Architects, little did he imagine the import that topography as an organizing principle would exert on twenty-first-century architecture. In a recent book Landscrapers: Building with the Land (Thames and Hudson), Aaron Betsky, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, has heralded the joint engineering of the land and structure as a “utopian form of architecture.” In what appears to be a movement, architects, given the opportunity of a spacious site, have an increased awareness of the importance of melding their design with the existing environment. And gone are the days when landscape architects were viewed only as enhancers of surrounding settings.

Now architects and landscape architects are collaborating in designing buildings that are essentially landform structures in and of themselves. In describing his long collaboration with architect Peter Eisenman, landscape architect Laurie Olin speaks of “the relationship between buildings and site—and our exploration of ways that the two might be considered as aspects of the same thing.” As he elaborates, “This is a bit more than thinking of architecture and landscape as being commingled or working in harmony, but rather thinking (and making) each an extension of the other, conceived and built as a continuum.” This form, Olin acknowledges, grows out of the topography of place.

Although Eisenman and Olin have been working together since completing the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, in 1989—drawing buildings and landscapes as one integrated unit—only two of their twenty-some projects have been built, the other being the recently opened Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. As in any long creative process, even unbuilt projects serve to solidify ideas and lead to new ones. Their current collaboration on the City of Culture of Galicia, above the medieval pilgrimage town of Santiago de Compostela, is a true culmination of their long partnership combining theoretical concepts once nurtured separately.

Anyone who saw the first models of the City of Culture exhibited at the Spanish Institute in New York in 2001, or heard the architects in a dialogue on “The Processes of Santiago” at the Architectural League of New York last February, understands to what degree this complex of six undulating ribbons of buildings emerging from Monte Gaiás and a mass of trees surpasses earlier projects and expresses new concepts in urbanism. Since the purpose of the City of Culture—with two libraries, an audiovisual center, a photography bank, a history museum, and an opera house—is to capitalize on the intersection of technology and information systems with art and culture, the buildings themselves on the 173-acre site are tangible proof of the possibilities that can be achieved through technology without losing the memory of the land.

Although the City of Culture appears to be a long way from Eisenman's squared-off House III (1973), which rotated one cube inside another, he has remained true to abstract Modernism destabilized by other figurative programs related to the site. Olin is also a modernist, but with a touch of Le Nôtre, the seventeenth-century landscape architect for Versailles. If Olin is known for such orderly, populous, urban sites as Manhattan's Bryant Park and the just-completed renovation of Columbus Circle (a Place de la Concorde for New York, brimming with fountains), he also adds other dimensions to his work through his eye for what Frederick Law Olmsted valued as natural scenery.

For the Galicia project, cultural and geological elements merge in a solution that combines nature and urbanity. The architects began by overlaying the site with the figure of a furrowed scallop shell, symbolic of James the Apostle, whose relics have drawn pilgrims to Santiago since the twelfth century. Then they transposed onto the site plan the medieval streets from the historic core of Santiago, warped by the computer, according to Eisenman, as if the topography of the hill were somehow pushed through them. Finally, a Cartesian grid was superimposed to create a variable tartan of unequal intersecting lines. From this three-dimensional model resulted the distorted, tilting, undulating ensemble of buildings and red sandstone walkways with a large plaza. “Instead of the ground being conceived as a backdrop against which the buildings stand out as figures [read the Acropolis], we generate a condition in which the ground can rear up to become figure, and the buildings subside into the ground,” Eisenman explains. The interiors reflect the same folding and fluid surfaces.

Cast over the site plan is a grid of cork oaks recalling agricultural plantings in social centers of Spanish towns. Local grasses and wildflowers creep up the sides of the apparently “excavated” structures of the hilltop to meet roof cladding of native granite slabs. In this northwest corner of the Iberian peninsula, these wavelike volumes are unintentionally reminiscent of the ancient robust granite storehouses for corn described by Rudofsky.

Olin likens the ensemble to the ruins of Etruscan tombs at Cerveteri, north of Rome, where the structures emerge from the landscape at different levels so that they all become one. To complete the illusion here of the mountainous landscape, the plan includes a new forest of Galicia along the steeply terraced slopes descending from the City of Culture. Though Olin has initiated plantings of oaks, birches, mountain ashes, and hawthorns placed on a grid, he knows that the percentages have to be right in order for the natural selective process to turn them eventually into a true hillside forest.

In a different approach to landform architecture, the constructed topography of Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park by Weiss/Manfredi Architects offers a means of healing a divisive rift of urban infrastructure along the derelict site of a former fuel storage and transfer station. In 1976, sculpture had already begun to encroach north of this shoreline area with Michael Heizer's massive Adjacent, Against, Upon on landfill with railroad tracks running behind it.

Clearly, the openness and abundant light on waterfronts present coastal cities as ideal locations for displaying the kind of oversize sculpture difficult to house in museums. In their design for the Olympic Sculpture Park, Marion Weiss and Michael A. Manfredi were faced with a forty-foot drop from street level to the water's edge at a location divided by the same railroad tracks and a four-lane highway. Drawing on earlier experiences in mechanically stabilized earth, they created a wide, descending zigzag of a park that bridges seamlessly over the transportation “gorges.” The firm's design for the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, New York, incorporates a series of berms that conceal parked cars but also purify runoff water through plantings of equisetum; eventually, the overflow of clean water discharges into Lake Cayuga. A similar technology will carry excess water from Olympic Park into Elliott Bay.

In this case, a glass pavilion with galleries at street level acts as an extension of the landscape, and a cut through the sloping roof opens to spectacular views over Puget Sound. Along the first descent, a forest of conifers and redwoods surrounds an upper-level sculpture garden; from there, the landscape unfurls along grassy paths above sheered slopes planted with fragrant wild roses and supported by concrete slabs that double as screens for video art. The architects are restoring the shoreline into a new recreational beach.

Working with local landscape architect Charles Anderson for horticultural materials, the architects have designed an intimate, aerial park that offers appropriately open settings for the museum's extensive sculpture collection, with works by David Smith, Alexander Calder, Toni Smith, and Mark di Suvero. The level changes and sloping platforms provide an opportunity for distant viewing from different angles that adds to a critical appreciation of three-dimensional objects that cannot be perceived in a flat space.

As a totally constructed environment, like the City of Culture, the Olympic Sculpture Park qualifies for Laurie Olin's definition of landform architecture as simply a set of built structures that end up being a landscape. What may have begun as a gesture to energy conservation or sustainable development has evolved into a new aesthetic that shapes inside and outside as a continuum, to use Olin's words. As the architectural firm Weiss/Manfredi has turned to landscape to devise architecture by sculpting the land with felicitous results, Eisenman, in his long collaboration and discussions with Olin, has discovered in local topography a means of merging multidimensional concepts into a veritable eruption of the land. As Olin remarks, “The history of architecture is not over; there is still more to come.” Landscape architecture is definitely in its future.

Architectural Record, October 2005. Reprinted with permission from Architectural Record © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies. www.architecturalrecord.com

A Feminist View of Landscapes: A Partnership with Nature

WHAT DO WOMEN who are landscape designers really want? A new landscape architecture that is ethical as well as aesthetically pleasing. That was the conclusion at a symposium, “Women, Land, Design,” sponsored by the Radcliffe Seminars to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of its landscape design program. At the symposium, a feminist view emerged, not like the ponderous and theoretical gender studies that have dominated art history and literary studies in universities, but rather a lively discussion that focused on practical applications for shaping the future of the environment.

Setting the theme, Elizabeth Meyer, a landscape architect who teaches at the University of Virginia, dispelled the long-held image of landscape as merely a “soft or feminine frame” for architecture. In the traditional view of culture versus nature (which she equated with male versus female), man's relationship to the land is one of stewardship rather than partnership, she pointed out. What she called for was a new definition of landscape architecture that would foster a land ethic as well as an aesthetic that would operate between culture and nature.

Because the Radcliffe program has traditionally attracted to its graduate seminars in landscape design women who already play a planning role in their local communities, the message created a context for new and sometimes revolutionary ideas. “Control” was the word used pejoratively by Deborah E. Ryan, a landscape architect on the faculty of the University of North Carolina, to describe the Louis XIV school of landscape design, epitomized by Versailles. “It expresses man's dominance over the land,” she said. “The majority of design work is still based on historical precedents rather than on an ideology that takes ecology and nature as process into consideration.” Eco-feminism is the word she used for her new value system where ecology and design coexist.

One successful historic example cited was the Fens in Boston, a waterway within the seven-mile spine of parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, known as the Emerald Necklace. People who enjoy the Fens for its beauty are not aware that this created landscape has now become an important ecosystem.

Because conventional gardens and landscapes can also be cost prohibitive, today's landscape designers are challenged to use found materials, as Ryan did in the Playful Forest adjoining an elementary school in Charlotte, North Carolina. In a woodland devastated by Hurricane Hugo, she and her students designed a series of friendly pathways, incorporating pebble puddles and tree ladders that helped the children overcome their fear of the woods. (Another speaker, Margaret Dean Daiss, pointed out that in fairy tales, children are often being abandoned and frightened in the forest.)

Gina Crandell, who teaches landscape architecture at Iowa State University, amused the audience with a slide show that identified water motifs as either male (for example, a geyser, which is “predictable”) or female (a “mysterious” swamp). “Is a geyser superior to a swamp?” she asked, getting participants to consider wetlands not as murky swamps but as national treasures that are more valuable ecologically than Old Faithful. In fact, some local commissions are regulating the work of landscape architects even on private wetlands to protect these endangered areas and their native plants. One example of wetland landscaping shown at the lecture was a pond “planted” by Karen McCoy, a Williamstown, Massachusetts, artist, with a grid of submerged arrowhead leaf plants whose delicate blossoms and spiky leaves cut a design across the surface of the water. “The danger,” Crandell said, “lies in overdesigning wetland areas and thereby converting them from natural to pictorial landscapes, like the geysers.

In conjunction with the symposium, photographs of the work of women who are landscape architects and designers are on display on four floors of exhibition space at Schlesinger Library on the Radcliffe Yard. Co-curated by two faculty members, Elizabeth Dean Hermann and Eleanor M. McPeck, the show reveals innovative ideas from the past as well as for the future. Included among the historic exhibits is the 1923 plan for the garden community of Oakcroft in Ridgewood, New Jersey, by Marjorie Sewell Cautley, who Nell M. Walker, one of the symposium speakers, said was the first American woman landscape architect to enter city planning. At a time when developers built houses in uniform rows, her design of a communal green with six houses separated by gardens of native plants and trees was considered revolutionary. It was the precursor in the East of what became known as the “garden cities movement,” where plantings and houses are merged in the landscape.

The show, whose focus is New England, displays several projects for the greening of cities, especially Boston, where new open space will result from the submersion of Interstate 93, a major road. A study by Catherine Oranchak proposes new parkland that would be an extension of Olmsted's Emerald Necklace. To make the ten-year construction period attractive to pedestrians, Sheila Kennedy has designed elegant frame passageways for the Interim Bridges Project, which look in silhouette like New England covered bridges. (A prototype of this airy structure has already been built in a Boston parking lot.) As a studio project, the Radcliffe students themselves have been working on a proposal for a conservatory and a botanical garden on land that will be reclaimed with the submersion of I-93.

But the show isn't limited to the library. There is a touch of magic right across the common from Radcliffe. Steam and mist that emerge on city streets from underground ducts have inspired the designer Joan Brigham with an idea for a fountain on the Harvard campus. In the center of Peter Walker's Tanner Fountain, a concentric circle of boulders, she has produced clouds of mist that shroud passersby like a deep coastal fog.

As another interpretation of what women seek in gardens, the graduate students presented a separate exhibition called “Strangers in Paradise,” located in Cronkhite Graduate Center. Student members of the Radcliffe chapter of the Boston Society of Landscape Architects used their impressions of a 1990 Canadian women's film titled Strangers in Good Company as the basis of their projects. In the cult hit, a group of elderly women are stranded at a house in the wilderness. As they learn to cope with the environment, they reveal their life stories. The students designed models of imaginary gardens and landscapes suitable to the characters in the film. Using mostly collage art, they created windows on private worlds—a call for landscapes with poetry as well as ecology.

New York Times, April 29, 1993

Facing page: Hervé Abbadie, 50 Avenue Montaigne, Paris.