It was Sargent who taught her, according to the Dictionary of Notable Women, that she should seek to “make the plan fit the ground and not twist the ground to fit a plan.” This philosophy in particular enlivened and undergirded Farrand’s future designs for Princeton University. Farrand began apprenticing under Sargent, and soon moved into his family home as his favorite pupil so that her studies could continue uninterrupted. By the end of her career, she would have landscaped as many as 50 private homes in that area alone.Ī family friend introduced her to the great horticulturist at Harvard, Charles Sprague Sargent, director of The Arnold Arboretum. Farrand took on a career-starting commission as early as 1897, working on the first of several private homes in and around Bar Harbor. Her grandmother was also noted for having one of the first espaliered fruit gardens in Rhode Island. ALONG CAME CHARLES SARGENTīorn in 1872, Farrand exhibited an early talent for garden design, at least in part because she witnessed the careful laying out of the family summer home, Reef Point, overlooking Frenchman Bay in Maine, when she was just 11 years old. But the muscular art of paring and shaping a landscape was a privileged discipline for a privileged few. The better question is, how did she learn landscape architecture in an age when there were no schools for it, and when the avenues for women of means were strictly delineated? With her social standing, Farrand would more likely have been expected to design flower gardens and host garden clubs. A quick survey of her upbringing amid strong, ambitious women in New York City-her mother wrote articles and a book about women her aunt wrote The Age of Innocence-and the question practically answers itself. The 19th Amendment, after all, was still eight years from ratification when she began her Princeton work in 1912. Many have speculated about how Farrand, socially fortunate though she was, managed to accomplish so much so early in the game for herself and other women. Formerly on Faculty Road, the nursery was moved to West Windsor in the 1960s. “When you start to peel away the history of her work, it’s fascinating.”Īlthough it was relocated in the 1960s, a nursery started by Farrand for the cultivation and acclimation of campus plants and trees is still in use today by the university. “I got the torch from my predecessor when I got here, and I’m carrying it now,” Livi added. The way the campus looks today is the result of her work-the vines, the espalier, the native plant choices. “If a tree dies, we try to replace it in kind and are very concerned with what she wanted the campus to look like. “We still do things based on her vision and her thoughts about how the campus should look,” said Devin Livi, Princeton’s Associate Director of Grounds and Landscaping. She called herself, always and unfailingly, a landscape gardener. Although she wouldn’t have agreed with that title, either. “I have put myself through the same training and look for the same rewards,” Farrand told the New York Daily Tribune in 1900 when, no doubt, some impertinent reporter asked her why she demanded equal footing in the masculine world of landscape architects. And early feminist, though she probably would not have given herself the label. Bachelorette until age 41, when she married Max Farrand. Consorter with many of the wealthier families of the early 20th century- Rockefellers and Morgans and Cabot Lodges. Only woman founder, along with 10 men (including Frederick Law Olmsted), of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Creator of the celebrated garden property Dumbarton Oaks. Designer of gardens at the White House, at the University of Chicago, at the Morgan Library in New York. Or for that matter the entire, park-like character of campus.įirst consulting landscape architect at Princeton University. Or the sugar maples and beeches that accentuate-rather than compete with-the university’s soaring architecture. Farrand‘s influence remains most evident today in the twisting blooms of wisteria that climb the great Gothic walls of the Graduate College each spring. Two hundred years ago the university was practically a field there were no trees at all around Nassau Hall. There is much to be thankful for in the sylvan, living landscape she put in place to give an austere campus a greener aspect. It is possible to be cowed by Beatrix Farrand even now, over 100 years since her first landscape commission at Princeton University and half a century since her death.
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