Wild Garden
Beatrix Farrand planned a “Wild Garden” to wrap around Bellefield’s Walled Garden, softening the long fieldstone walls with a more relaxed, naturalistic planting. Though we don’t have Farrand’s planting design for the Wild Garden, she drew the flowing, scalloped shape of the garden we see today. A wild garden was a signature of her designs, where she often used many native plants, and included a mix of trees, shrubs, ferns, bulbs, and wildflowers.
While we might think of designing with native plants as a novel idea, Farrand was, in fact, pioneering this concept more than a century ago. A keen horticulturist who understood and loved natural plant communities, she had been admiring and propagating American wildflowers since her childhood.
The Wild Garden Farrand had imagined for Bellefield did not come to fruition until 2023, when the Beatrix Farrand Garden Association completed an ambitious campaign to bring Farrand’s vision to life, raising $150,000 for the effort. Celebrating Farrand’s legacy as a native plantswoman, this extraordinary project features a staggering diversity of native plants, with more than 160 species represented. This garden’s 7,000 perennials (and counting) were installed with the help of scores of volunteers who turned out for the installation, on Beatrix Farrand’s 151st birthday. Visit this rich horticultural resource to fall in love with native plants up close, or come pitch in as a volunteer to gain first-hand experience with native plants and ecological gardening.
The Wild Garden’s plantings were based on research by local landscape designer Heather Whitefield of Organic Matters, NPS Horticulturist Anna de Cordova, and former BFGA Horticulturist Anne Symmes, who researched the signature plants of Farrand’s wild gardens and incorporated them into an expansive and biodiverse design.
The drawings above were fabricated by Heather Whitefield of Organic Matters.