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Finding Aids > UC Berkeley > Environmental Design Archives

Beatrix Jones Farrand Collection, 1866-1959

Farrand (Beatrix J.) Collection

Processed by the EDA Archives Staff

Environmental Design Archives

College of Environmental Design
230 Wurster Hall #1820
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California 94720-1820
Phone: (510) 642-5124
Fax: (510) 642-2824
Email: archives@socrates.berkeley.edu
URL: www.ced.berkeley.edu/cedarchives
© 2000

The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.



Collection Summary

Collection Title:
Beatrix Jones Farrand Collection 1866-1959

Collection Number:
1955-2

Creator:
Farrand, Beatrix Jones

Extent:
16 cartons, 22 boxes, 1 half box, 6 flat boxes, 5 card file boxes, 20 flat file drawers

Repository:
Environmental Design Archives. College of Environmental Design
College of Environmental Design
230 Wurster Hall #1820
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California 94720-1820
Phone: (510) 642-5124
Fax: (510) 642-2824
Email: archives@socrates.berkeley.edu
URL: www.ced.berkeley.edu/cedarchives

Abstract:
The collection consist of personal and professional papers, records of Farrand's work as a landscape architect, and records relating to the Reef Point Library.

Languages Represented:
Collection materials are in English

Information for Researchers

Access

Collection is open for research.


Publication Rights

All requests for permission to publish, reproduce, or quote from materials in the collection should be discussed with the Curator.


Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], Beatrix Jones Farrand Collection, 1955-2, Environmental Design Archives, College of Environmental Design


Related Collections


Beatrix Farrand Library Collection, Environmental Design Library
UC Berkeley
Berkeley, CA


Horticulture Collection, (Lot 5453), University Herbarium Office,
UC Berkeley
Berkeley, CA


Beatrix Jones Farrand Papers, (IV A-4 BJF), Harvard University Arboretum
Cambridge, MA


Dumbarton Oaks Center for Studies in Landscape Architecture
Washington, DC


Library and Herbarium at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden
Santa Barbara, CA


Indexing Terms

The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog

Dumbarton Oaks.
Princeton University.
Reef Point Gardens
Garden structures.
Gardens--Europe--Pictorial works.
Landscape architects--Northeastern States.
Landscape architecture--Northeastern States.
Women landscape architects.

Administrative Information

Acquisition Information

The collection was donated by Beatrix Jones Farrand in 1955, as part of the Reef Point Library records.



Biography

Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872-1959)

Beatrix Farrand, the first noted woman landscape architect of her generation, was born in New York City on June 19, 1872. Her father, Frederick Rhinelander Jones, came from a wealthy family of Dutch and English ancestry. Her mother, Mary Cadwalader (Rawle), was a Philadelphia debutante. Beatrix Farrand was, in her words, "the product of five generations of garden lovers." Her grandmother owned one of the first espaliered fruit gardens in Newport, Rhode Island. As a child, Beatrix observed the laying out of the grounds of Reef Point, her parents' summer home at Bar Harbor, Maine. Reef Point was later the site of one of the most ambitious projects of her career.

Tutored at home, Farrand frequently traveled abroad with her mother and with her father's sister, the writer Edith Wharton. The novelist aided her niece and sister-in-law financially after the Joneses were divorced (sometime before Beatrix was twelve). Mary Cadwalader Jones acted as a part-time literary agent for Wharton, and managed the New York assembly balls for a number of years. She was a close friend of writer Henry James and often entertained other distinguished writers and artists.

As a young adult, Farrand was invited to study horticulture and live for several months at Holm Lea, the estate of Charles Sprague Sargent, near Brookline, Massachusetts. Sargent, the founder and first director of the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, introduced Jones to the principles of landscape design. Although she developed her own philosophy of design, she always followed Sargent's early advice "to make the plan fit the ground and not twist the ground to fit a plan."

Furthering her education, Farrand traveled to England and continental Europe to study traditional gardens. Her studies with Sargent and her travels through Europe were the extent of Farrand's landscape training. There were no formal schools of landscape architecture prior to 1900, when Harvard opened a program that was limited to men.

Farrand returned to New York in 1895 and opened a landscape design office. Within a short time she established a distinguished list of clients and could count among her patrons on Long Island and in Maine Edward Whitney, Willard Straight, and J. P. Morgan. For nearly fifty years, she was consulting landscape architect for Abby Aldrich Rockefeller's garden at Seal Harbor, Maine. In 1899 Farrand joined Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles Eliot, and others in founding the American Society of Landscape Architects.

An early influence on Farrand was William Robinson, the English landscape architect and author of The Wild Garden. She also admired the work of the celebrated English landscape gardener Gertrude Jekyll who, like Robinson, advocated the use of wild and native materials. Her lifelong associate, the landscape architect Robert Patterson, later wrote that Farrand's work had a "freedom of scale," "a subtle softness of line and an unobtrusive asymmetry."

Farrand's reputation for thoroughness and certainty of approach gained her a wide assortment of private and public landscape commissions. Among her major projects were Dartington Hall, an English estate of more than 2,000 acres, and the Graduate College gardens at Princeton University. At Yale, beginning in 1923, Beatrix Farrand designed the Memorial Quadrangle gardens and, in cooperation with the departments of botany and forestry, established a maintenance program that long remained in effect. She designed the West Rose Garden of the White House for Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, and served as landscape consultant to Vassar College, the University of Chicago, Oberlin College, the California Institute of Technology, and Occidental, among other universities.

Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, D.C., is among Farrand's most acclaimed projects. Working closely with her friend Mildred Bliss, who was herself an imaginative gardener, she transformed what had once been a farm into a unique garden that incorporated characteristics of traditional French, English, and Italian garden designs. Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, a diplomat, purchased the property in 1920, and the gardens evolved under Farrand's direction over the next twenty years. "Never...did Beatrix Farrand impose on the land an arbitrary concept," wrote Mildred Bliss. "She 'listened' to the light and wind and grade of each area." Of all her designs, only the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks survive essentially unchanged.

Keeping a small office in New York, Farrand traveled constantly among assignments in Maine, New York, and Washington, supervising the planting and construction of her garden designs. Over her fifty-year career, Farrand designed approximately 200 gardens. She received many awards, including the Garden Club of America Medal of Achievement (1947) and the New York Botanical Garden Distinguished Service Award (1952).

In 1913, Beatrix Jones married Max Farrand, a noted authority on Benjamin Franklin, the author of several books on American constitutional law, and chairman of the Yale University History Department. In 1927 her husband became director of research at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, but the Farrands made their home principally at Bar Harbor. Beatrix Farrand devoted the last years of her life to Reef Point Gardens, a project she and her husband had begun in the early 1920s. Designed for both scholarly and experimental purposes, Reef Point ultimately included a test garden of native flora, a library (which included the original garden plans of Gertrude Jekyll), and an herbarium. By 1945, the year that Farrand's husband died, the library was regarded as one of the best sources on the history of garden design.

In 1955, concerned about the survival of Reef Point Gardens following Bar Harbor's refusal to grant it tax-exempt status, Farrand transferred the contents of her large collection of fine art prints and horticulture books, the herbarium, and her own correspondence to UC Berkeley's Department of Landscape Architecture.

Beatrix Farrand died at Bar Harbor in 1959.

Sources:
Balmori, Diana; McGuire, Diane Kostial; and McPeck, Eleanor M. "Beatrix Farrand's American Landscapes: Her Gardens and Campuses" (Sagaponack, NY: Sagapress, 1985).

Brown, Jane. "Beatrix: The Gardening Life of Beatrix Jones Farrand, 1872-1959" (New York : Viking, 1995).

Iovine, Julie V. "The Impeccable Gardener," American Heritage, June-July 1986, pp. 67-77.

Salon, Marlene. "Beatrix Jones Farrand: Pioneer in Gilt-Edged Gardens," Landscape Architecture, Jan. 1977, 69-77


Scope and Contents Note

Beatrix Jones Farrand donated a large collection of material to U.C. Berkeley's Landscape Department in a series of gifts beginning in 1955. The donation consisted of drawings and papers relating to Farrand's practice as a landscape architect and material she collected for her Reef Point Library. The library contained a large number of books on landscape design, prints of gardens, and the project records of other landscape and garden designers such as English landscape architect Gertrude Jekyll and American garden architect Mary Rutherford Jay. The donation was originally housed in Agriculture Hall except for a few very valuable or delicate books, which were stored at the Bancroft Library. When the Landscape Department and the collection moved to Wurster Hall in 1964 and the became part of the College of Environmental Design (C.E.D.), the Reef Point book collection was added to the C.E.D. Library holdings. Plans, prints, photographs, and correspondence were placed in the C.E.D. Documents Collection (now the Environmental Design Archives). Because the Jekyll and Jay material constituted collections in themselves, they were separated from the Farrand records and treated as their own collections. At some point, probably at the time of the relocation of the Department to Wurster Hall, Farrand's plant samples were given to the Horticulture Collection at the University Herbarium Office.

The Farrand collection is arranged in seven series. Personal Papers consists of Farrand's diary, student drawings, records of her travels in Europe, family records, and photographs. Professional Papers contains awards, association memberships, and articles by Farrand. Also included in this series are the lecture notes and glass lantern slides she used in her talks on landscape architecture. Some of the slides are colorized to show urban landscapes with and without Farrand's proposed alterations.

The third and fourth series document Farrand's professional career. Office Records is a small series comprised primarily of correspondence. Project Records is the largest series and contains project files, photographs, and drawings. Some of the most well-known projects include Dumbarton Oaks in Washington D.C., Dartington Hall in Devonshire, England, and Princeton University. Farrand documented most of her finished gardens with photographs, and therefore there is a fairly comprehensive collection of project photographs and negatives. Several larger project photographs were entered in exhibits; these are located in the Professional Papers series. In addition to numerous working drawings and planting plans, there are watercolor renderings of some designs.

The fifth and sixth series relate to Reef Point, Farrand's estate in Bar Harbor Maine and the research collection housed therein, the Reef Point Library. The Reef Point Records series documents the administration of the house, garden, and library and includes correspondence, planting plans, and acquisition and book lists for the library. There is also a limited amount of correspondence and photographs regarding the transfer and housing of the research collection at the University of California, Berkeley. Research Records is comprised of photographs and prints of gardens, architecture, natural landscapes, gates, and statuary, to name a few. Farrand collected the items on her trips throughout Europe and the United States. The size, medium, and value of the material vary greatly from miniature postcards, to large fine art prints. The final series, Additional Donations, has a small amount of information, primarily on the Black House. This series contains records acquired separately from Farrand's original donation.


Project Index

The following is a list of architectural projects from the Farrand Collection. For more complete information about collection contents for each project, as well as shelf location and microfilming status, download the complete Project Index in an Excel spreadsheet format by going to http://www.ced.berkeley.edu/cedarchives/pindex/farrand.xls . For instructions on interpreting the Project Index, see The Guide to the Project Index at http://www.ced.berkeley.edu/cedarchives/pindex/guide.htm .

The Project Index list is arranged alphabetically by Project/Client Name and contains information, where available, about the location, date, project type, collaborators, photographers, and formats for each project in the collection.

Project/Client Name (location, date, project type) Collaborator (role), Photographer [Format - Ms=Manuscripts, Dr=Drawings, Ph=Photographs]

Container Listing




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