Beatrix Farrand (1872-1959)

Beatrix Jones Farrand was a trailblazing landscape architect whose work helped to define American landscape design during the first half of the 20th century. Examples of Farrand's unique artistry include major portions of the campuses of Princeton, Yale, and Vassar, her astonishing masterpiece, Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., and the Rockefeller's Eyrie Garden in Maine. At the time Farrand was creating the garden at Bellefield, she was planning gardens for many of America’s most influential families, and also designing the East Garden of the White House for First Lady Edith and President Woodrow Wilson.

Beatrix Farrand was born Beatrix Jones, to a family so prominent in the social world of Gilded Age New York that they inspired the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses.”  Young Beatrix decided to defy the conventions of her class and gender and pursue a career in horticulture. Farrand developed her love of plants during her explorations of wild nature around her summer home in Maine. She then deepened her horticultural expertise through private study at Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, lifelong research, plant trials, and observation.  

With formal education unavailable to her, Farrand organized her own education, assembling coursework in surveying, drafting, and engineering at Columbia University School of Mines. Embarking on extensive European travel with her aunt, the novelist Edith Wharton, Farrand visited the most noted designers and finest gardens, and developed a keen eye for detail, an elegant sense of proportion, and a broad foundation in the fine arts and design history. Despite fierce competition in a male-dominated profession, over the next 45 years, Farrand went on to run one of the most highly regarded landscape design firms in America. 

Farrand’s projects combined elegant garden spaces defined by strong architectural lines and softened by her interpretation of an emerging Arts and Crafts Movement. Farrand famously designed every garden element, from precise engineering solutions to custom-built artistic garden furnishings and structures. Farrand’s impressionistic planting plans, carefully orchestrated color combinations, and forward-thinking awareness of native ecology helped create the foundations of contemporary planting design.  

In 1899, Beatrix Farrand became one of the eleven founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the only woman, and is known as one of the earliest women in the field of landscape architecture.  Her work has inspired generations of landscape architects, designers, horticulturists and garden enthusiasts around the world.