Beatrix Farrand's American Landscapes (2019) - full transcript

In 1907 Beatrix Farrand wrote,

"the garden-maker must know
intimately the forms and texture

"as well as the color of
all the plants he uses,

"for plants are to the gardener

"what the palette is to a painter.

"He must put his composition
down in the open air

"with the sky and the trees
and the grass as background,

"while the painter has but a flat surface

on which to create
his illusion."

I've been working on gardens
in New York for 36 years,

beginning with the restoration of this one,



the conservatory garden
in New York's Central Park.

Gardens are good for the soul.

They make you feel that your city

or your community cares about you.

Do you come to the garden often?

All the time.
Do you?

Yeah, I'm here all the time. That's nice.

I believe in the
promise of beautiful landscapes

to make people's lives better.

Oh, look!

Look how cute that is with the purple...

Miller, voice-over:
And no one believed that

more than my hero Beatrix Farrand.

She was a groundbreaking garden designer



who overcame barriers for women

and earned her place at
the top of her profession.

She understood plants with an
artist's eye for color and texture,

she mastered engineering
and formal structures,

and she cared, as I do,
about public gardens.

There's nothing like Central Park.

No, Central Park's the best.

Yes. And you can't
put a price on this.

I recommend it to everybody that I know.

I have always felt
that Beatrix Farrand was a mentor to me,

and as I look back on my work
in public horticulture,

I want to look at her life, too,

and learn more about this pioneering woman

who made my career possible.

I have admired Beatrix Farrand for years,

but it wasn't until 2005
that I got a chance

to work on one of her commissions...

The Wyman garden at Princeton's
graduate school.

I love these babies.

And this is lovely.

And you're a good, good thing.

Very nice.

And these are a beautiful color.

Nice texture with that guy.

I'm talking to my plants.

Look at those things.
Aren't they gorgeous?

As I was redesigning the Wyman garden,

I thought about Mrs. Farrand

and what she would have wanted me to do.

It's a sundial.

And Mrs. Farrand
had it over there,

and it was in the shade
by the time I got here,

which was 100 years later.

So I moved it into the sun.

And then I designed the garden around it.

These things are
Mrs. Farrand's.

I mean, they were on the plan,

and I did that to make it
look more like her garden.

She was born Beatrix Cadwalader Jones

on June 19, 1872.

Her mother Mary, always known as Minnie,

was one of the Philadelphia Cadwaladers

and a great-granddaughter of
a revolutionary war hero.

She was a social reformer,

advocating for better conditions
in the city's hospitals

and professional recognition
of the nurses who worked there.

Minnie surrounded herself

with artists, sculptors, and writers,

including her close friend Henry James.

Beatrix's father Frederic was a Jones,

a family so wealthy and high
on the social ladder

that striving members of
gilded-age society in New York

were said to be
keeping up with the joneses.

When Beatrix was 11, her family
chose to escape the stuffy confines

of her grandmother's huge
summer cottage in Newport

and build a house in a more secluded

but no less socially rarefied community

on mount desert island
off the coast of Maine.

The family named their house reef point,

and it was an idyllic summer
refuge for young Beatrix.

That was all a laboratory for her.

She was known to have come out of the woods

with wildflowers that she had dug up

and then planted them near the house.

So that was the beginning.

Miller, voice-over:
But the sheltered enclave

that so transfixed Farrand
was also an extension

of the rigid world of New York society,

and back in the city,

her father was flirting with scandal.

To put it bluntly, dad was a cad

and had had very public
indiscretions in New York,

which just horrified the family

and that whole social stratum.

Actually, the Jones family
took up for Minnie, the wife,

and the father was sort
of put off to the side.

One of Minnie's staunchest supporters

during the ordeal was Frederic's sister,

an aspiring writer named Edith wharton.

It really is out of an Edith wharton novel.

People didn't get divorced in those days.

You just didn't do it, no.

We know the stigma of being divorced

in america at that time

and being the daughter of
a divorced society mother,

I think had a lot to do with the fact

that she felt that she had
to make a life of her own

that was outside of society.

Beatrix Jones
made her debut in New York in 1890,

attending the usual rounds of
parties and costume balls,

including one in which she wore a dress

inspired by formal garden designs.

But even at the age of 18,

young Beatrix had set her sights on being

something more than a society matron.

She came from a family of 5
generations of garden lovers,

and her childhood on mount desert

had kindled a fascination with plants.

Now she was determined to
pursue a career in horticulture.

There was only one obstacle
standing in her way...

It was not a profession open to women.

At the turn of the century,

one journalist had described gardening as

"a congenial, soothing,
out-of-doors pursuit

"to which a woman of taste
who loves flowers

cannot do better than
turn her hand."

But I think Beatrix Farrand
saw herself quite differently.

She was determined to be
a landscape gardener,

what one leading critic
of her day defined as

"a gardener, an engineer,

"and an artist who like an architect,

considers beauty
and utility together."

No universities were
taking female students.

M.i.t. Took their first female
architecture student in 1902,

and she had to take her mother

to class as a chaperone.

Oh, for god sakes.

But Beatrix met Charles sprague sargent,

and he invited her to apprentice with him

at the Arnold arboretum.

Miller, voice-over:
Sargent was one of the foremost

botanists of his day,

and beneath his patrician
reserve lay a fierce drive

that would transform
Harvard's Arnold arboretum

into what one writer called
"the greatest collection

of trees and shrubs in
the northern hemisphere."

Over the course of a rigorous year,

under sargent's demanding supervision,

Beatrix studied botany,
surveying, and horticulture.

"Never was a great teacher granted a pupil

more ideally suited to his hopes,"

a friend of Beatrix later recalled.

Near the end of her training at the Arnold,

sargent arranged for her to visit
the offices of Frederick Law Olmsted,

one of the designers of Central Park.

She saw all the young men drafting.

She thought she needed surveying,

all these skills that she couldn't get.

Columbia school of minds had
drafting courses and all these things.

Women were not allowed.

So she hired one of the faculty members

to tutor her on surveying at home.

And that's what she's so extraordinary for.

She knew what she wanted and she did it.

All the pieces that she
needed and she did it.

"My friends looked upon my studies

as a sort of mild mania," Farrand recalled,

"but they have learned now to
regard them seriously."

In the spring of 1895, with her course

of study under sargent complete,

Farrand took her mentor's advice
and set off with her mother

on a 5-month tour of gardens.

It was a trip that would prove to be

a transformative experience
for the young designer.

They visited the jardin d'essai in Algiers

and the palace of Versailles in France,

where she was captivated by the
work of the famous designer le notre.

She was not always impressed, however.

She found some of Rome's gardens
"so squalid as to be melancholy."

Parts of the gardens at the Vatican were

"a maze of tortuous paths
leading nowhere."

But when they visited the villa lante,

one of my all-time favorite gardens,

it made a vivid impression
on young Beatrix.

In one of her journals she wrote,

"the beauty of the formal Italian garden

"lies in its perspectives,
effects of space,

and the proportions of the
parts of the design to each other."

Beatrix and Minnie saw almost 150 gardens

during their whirlwind tour,

and everywhere she went, she
took careful notes and photographs

of the scale and scope of the
layouts, the parterre patterns,

and the resources required for maintenance.

In england, Beatrix visited two places

that would have a significant
impact on her garden philosophy.

The first was munstead wood,
the home of Gertrude Jekyll,

an impressionist painter
who turned to garden design

when her eyesight began to fail.

From Jekyll, Beatrix learned to
use sophisticated color theories

and approach her plant selection
with a subtle new palette.

At gravetye in Sussex,
Farrand struck up a friendship

with William Robinson,

the renowned author
of "the wild garden."

What was important about "the wild garden"?

His big point was that the formal garden

should only be near the house,

and then as you went
outward from the house,

especially in a large property,

it should get more natural
and more informal.

And that was a really big idea.

She visited him regularly in england,

and he became a mentor
and a friend for life.

Let's look at the layout.

By telescoping this down,
Farrand's trying to

make it feel like the garden
goes on and on and on and on.

And so when you're doing your gardens,

think about movement in your garden,

symmetry and asymmetry, ok?

So if you want to sketch
out some stuff first

and erase a little bit, you can.

The green teens are young people

who want to help their communities

by learning about horticulture.

Today, they're designing their own gardens,

with Beatrix Farrand as their inspiration.

Farrand designed this garden, bellefield,

for her cousin Thomas newbold
and his wife Sarah in 1912.

It was intended to be
an intimate family enclosure

and included a vanishing perspective

that embraced William Robinson's idea

of increasing wildness as
one moved away from the house.

It's like walking through a rainbow

because like, when you first come in,

there's like pink, but it's
not all the same color.

It's like different.

It goes from light to dark,

and then it, like, makes you
go that way towards the white,

and then you come around and
then back to the darker colors.

'Cause like...
Yeah, it's like art.

I want to see.
I want to see.

Oh, look at that!
So I got...

Hey, what are the red things you've got?

The red things, those
are picnic tables there.

Oh, for people to sit and enjoy the place.

When I design gardens, first thing I do

is put in places for people to sit.

Because it has a message, you know.

Come, be here, we want you to come.

I think that's very nice.

Thank you so much.

So you go pick some fruit, go to the pond,

look at the ducks, walk back,

get some fruit, walk through...

So it's all an experience?

Mm-hmm. And then there's a yoga space. Ohh.

So you can do, like, yoga because,

you know, it's, like, peaceful and quiet.

Yes. Yes.

I've been doing this for 40 years.

You try to learn, but you can never quite

get your hands on time and weather.

Somebody said gardening is the
slowest-moving of the performing arts.

And you think you might know
how that plant's gonna behave,

but they always fool you.
They always fool you.

They do something different every year,

'cause they're alive.

In October 1896, fresh from her travels,

Beatrix opened her
own office on the top floor

of her mother's house on
east 11th street in New York City.

This was quite unusual,
for someone of her class

to be taking on a profession as a woman.

There was a report in a New York paper

that said she was out there in
her fisherman's slicker and boots,

and she didn't have a society parasol.

She would have never cared
how society felt.

She was directing the crews,

and this was just, you
know, earth-breaking.

Yes.
Literally.

In the first few
years of her professional practice,

Beatrix Farrand was able to land a number

of important commissions
up and down the east coast.

"It is work, hard work,
and at the same time,

it is perpetual pleasure," she exulted.

"I do not envy the greatest
painter or sculptor

"or poet that ever lived.

It seems to me that all the arts
are combined in this."

As her practice was picking up steam,

Farrand was also establishing herself

as an outspoken advocate for open space.

"It is not too late to
urge upon new yorkers

the absolute necessity of
acquiring a park system,"

she wrote in 1899.

"Boulevards, planted with trees
and kept free from heavy traffic,

"should also lead to the parks

from the densely-populated
portions of the city."

Farrand's early work and writing
attracted the attention

of a group of distinguished designers

who were seeking to formalize
their new profession.

When they decided to form the first society

of landscape architects in the world

and actually coined the term
"landscape architect,"

she was the only woman
signer of it in 1899.

Ah, yes.

So she's considered the first
woman landscape architect.

She was a pioneer, wasn't she, Patrick?

I think so.
She was even a pioneer

among other landscape architects

because she was promoting native plants

and she wasn't doing

what I call facsimile
gardens, which were big.

Everyone was doing Italian
gardens or French gardens.

She could do gardens

with some of those characteristics,

but also could do just
wonderful, undreamt of things.

Yeah, because she was
educated in all those things,

but she didn't spit them back out.

Not everyone
was impressed by the new designer.

Frederick Law Olmsted had
once dismissed her as a dabbler,

and prestigious public commissions

that often made reputations

were still awarded exclusively to men.

If Farrand wanted to
break down these barriers,

she was going to have to prove
herself again and again.

In no small part
because of Mrs. Farrand,

women like me have been
able to have a career

in public garden design.

Mine started when Betsy Rogers

and the Central Park conservancy

gave me the chance in 1982

to restore the conservatory
garden in Central Park.

It was all overgrown.

It did seem dangerous because
there was no one in there.

The city was totally polarized,
racially and economically.

It was in fiscal crisis,

and they cut out the funding for parks.

Finally, people started paying attention.

I had to teach myself how to raise money,

go to people, friends, ask for help.

Of course, everyone said we were mad,

people around here won't appreciate it.

Just really quite awful.
Horticultural snobbism.

Miller, voice-over:
"They," they would say,

pointing in the direction of east Harlem,

"they will destroy it."

The outcome was that they were dead wrong.

People began to come back.

It was so exciting.

And it was the plants creating
a beautiful space

and making people feel happy.

I did collages when I was a painter,

and what is this but a collage?

Miller, voice-over:
Pretty soon, I was painting

on a very large canvas,

which is the city of New York.

In 1912, Beatrix Farrand at last

received a major public commission

when she was hired to design the landscape

at the graduate college at Princeton,

including the Wyman garden I restored

a hundred years later.

Her work was so successful that by 1915,

she would be appointed Princeton's first

consulting landscape gardener.

She felt that the plants had to be as close

to each of the buildings as possible.

This gave her the opportunity to create

some wonderful walk spaces
and lawn areas and open areas.

That were uncluttered with plants.

The sustainability
of her plant palette meant

that she would find the right
plant eventually for the right spot.

We're sitting right in front
of a tree that she planted.

This old katsura tree was the ideal plant

and planted in the right place.

100 years later, and
we're still clipping him.

Yes.

Farrand's ideas for Princeton broke free

of the traditional design
conventions of her time.

She trained different varieties
of trees and shrubs

to grow up the sides of buildings,

allowed for elegant
and proportioned open spaces,

and spent time watching the students...

Where did they go...

And then she put the paths there,

and that is what we now call desire lines.

Princeton's supervising
architect, Ralph Adams Cram,

argued that Farrand's ideas

compromised the architects'
vision for the buildings,

and he and other men on the grounds staff

dismissed her as the bush woman,

always out in the field agonizing

over the precise placement
of trees and shrubs.

Not surprisingly, Farrand didn't back down

from her ideas and usually prevailed.

She remained Princeton's
consulting landscape gardener

for nearly 30 years.

"We all know that education is by no means

a mere matter of books," she once wrote,

"and that aesthetic environment contributes

"as much to mental growth as
facts assimilated from a printed page.

No life is well rounded without
the subtle inspiration of beauty."

She left us great landscapes at Princeton,

at Yale, at occidental college.

They've become part of
the fabric of our lives.

People grow up, get educated, fall in love.

And then go off into life
and remember those things.

Right.

On a brisk fall day in September 1915,

Beatrix Farrand found herself standing

in a boggy piece of land in the Bronx,

trying to figure out
what to do about the roses.

She had been commissioned by
the New York botanical garden

to design a home for what
nybg hoped would become

a world-class rose collection.

The fact that Farrand was taking
on this kind of a project

at such a prestigious institution

was a testament to the upward
arc of her career.

In the fall of 1913,
she had opened an office

at 124 east 40th street in Manhattan,

staffed with an assistant.

A few prominent
commissions soon followed...

Landscaping for the New York
city home of the banker J.P. Morgan

and, through her work at Princeton,

a project at the most famous
address in america...

The redesign of the east
garden at the white house

for president
and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson.

Despite the awkwardness of the
New York botanical garden site,

Beatrix was undaunted.

Recalling a design
principle she had learned

from Charles sargent,

she intended to "make
the plan fit the ground

and not twist the ground
to fit a plan."

This was the bowl,
and it was not well drained,

and roses don't like wet feet,

so an elaborate tile drain system went in,

and then the beds were laid out

in this wonderful triangular pattern.

The centerpiece is obviously this gazebo,

and it makes a hub for
the spokes of the paths,

as well as a prospect from
which you can look at the beds.

At the New York botanical garden,

Farrand combined the classical
forms she loved

with the rigorous botanical principles

she had learned from sargent.

The nybg collection of roses,
more than 7,000 in all,

were organized by plant families

and meticulously catalogued and labeled.

"The new garden will
be at once a museum of roses

and a popular school for all,"
the "New York times" observed,

"whether they wish to grow
a plant or two in a home plot

"or develop a millionaire's garden,

"and will offer material

for the professional student,
florist, or botanist."

She appreciated science

and also geometry.

Those come together in this,

which they don't often do
in other rose gardens.

That's true, that's true.

Almost 20
years after entering the profession

as a landscape gardener,

Beatrix Farrand's career was thriving,

and she had also found someone
with whom to share the journey.

While she was working at Princeton,

she was invited to dinner
at the president's house.

There she met a tall, tweedy
44-year-old professor

of history at Yale named Max Farrand.

A courtship ensued,

and the romance surprised both families.

Max's sister-in-law caught
a glimpse of Farrand

supervising a large crew of men
on the Princeton campus

and exclaimed, "if that
lady really wants Max,

she'll get him."

Edith wharton was delighted.

"Hold on to the inestimable treasure

of your understanding of each other,"

she wrote to her niece that fall.

"Build your life on its secure foundations

and let everything you do
and think be part of it."

They were married at Minnie's home

in New York City on December 17, 1913

and settled down to live in new haven.

They married late in life,

and yet they had a long,
long happy marriage.

They had amazing compatibility

and a great intellectual connection.

Miller, voice-over:
On a January day in 1921,

Farrand arrived at a sprawling,
hilly piece of land

looking out over rock creek
park in Washington, D.C.

The property, that included
a victorian mansion

much in need of renovation,
was called the oaks.

It had been purchased the previous year

by the American diplomat Robert Bliss

and his wife Mildred.

As Beatrix walked around
the property with the owners,

what she saw was a daunting
but exhilarating challenge.

With steep slopes of as much as 100 feet

dropping down from the house
to the creek below,

the garden represented not
only a complex engineering test,

but also an opportunity to
incorporate many of the styles

and influences that Farrand had accumulated

during her work and travels.

After her tour, Beatrix dashed
off a 6 1/2-page report

outlining her vision

for what would become
known as dumbarton oaks.

It was a series of garden rooms
and carefully orchestrated vistas

that moved the visitor effortlessly

through the radical topography of the site.

"You've got it exactly in every respect,"

Mildred Bliss wrote Farrand,

"and I can't be patient
until you get back here

and start to realize your
and our mutual dream."

I've been coming here
since I was a little girl,

and I've always thought
this was the most beautiful

place in the world.

What's wonderful about this place is that

it is a combination of art and plants,

color, line, form, texture,

repetition, scale.

This was really one of
her greatest works of art.

What is so unique about the
structures here in the garden?

One of the things is the sense of enclosure

within these rooms or terraces,

and each room has a different flavor.

And as you're coming down the hill,

you get glimpses into the next room

with pieces of ornament or with plants.

And so it draws me, even after being here

for 20 years, into the next room.

Yes, it's kind of a wonderful trick.

It is.
Adds some suspense.

It does, indeed.

This garden is outside of time.

Its beauty transcends.

I've noticed when I bring
people into the garden

that within just a short period of time,

they rise above the feelings that they had

when they came and are lifted up.

Miller, voice-over:
Construction on the vast project

began in earnest in 1923,
but as it progressed,

Farrand had to keep in touch
with her globe-trotting clients

as they moved from one
diplomatic post to the next.

She kept up a steady stream
of correspondence,

and often sent multiple
drawings of every feature,

piece of furniture, and ornamental detail,

over 1,200 in all.

She built full-scale mock-ups
of critical parts of the garden

so when the blisses were
actually on the site,

they could understand her ideas.

Looking back, Mildred observed that

"never were the owners so
persuasive as to insist on a design

which Mrs. Farrand's
inner-eye could not accept."

Dumbarton oaks was underway,

but little did Beatrix know
that seeing it to completion

would take her more than two decades

and represent the most
monumental challenge of her career.

In 1927, as Farrand was
supervising a design studio

with a full slate of impressive projects,

news arrived that would upend
her carefully orchestrated plans.

She was really on a roll,

and then all the sudden,
her scholarly husband,

Max Farrand, gets a job offer of a lifetime

to be the first director
of the Huntington gallery

and library in San Marino, California.

So one can imagine the discussions

around the breakfast table
about what to do about this.

There was no way that he
was gonna turn that down.

Beatrix would
now be almost 3,000 miles away,

and a 5-day trip by train,

from the most important project
she had ever undertaken.

While Max found his new post
at the Huntington congenial,

for Beatrix, California
was a professional setback.

Two talented designers, Florence
Yoch and Lockwood de Forest,

dominated the landscape field
on the west coast.

Cut off from the tightly-knit world

that had provided many
of her early commissions,

Beatrix found herself shut out
of many important jobs.

Worst of all, the extensive
grounds of the Huntington

remained under the iron grip
of William Hertrich,

Henry Huntington's longtime head gardener.

Beatrix tried to make
the best of the situation,

designing the garden at the
director's house where they lived,

working on the master plan for
the Santa Barbara botanic garden,

and finding consulting work
on the campus of Caltech.

But Caltech treated her like a volunteer,

while paying Florence Yoch for
similar work at the same time.

Finally, Farrand coldly
informed the university that

"my half-charitable, half-amateur
status is not satisfactory,"

and moved on.

While her prospects
in California seemed bleak,

Farrand's girlhood community
of mount desert island in Maine

once again proved to be a sustaining

and nurturing wellspring of her career.

Of all the projects she did on the island,

the most ambitious was the one she designed

for John D. Rockefeller Jr.

And his wife Abby in seal harbor.

The garden would be set
away from the massive

hundred-room mansion called the eyrie,

and it would serve as both a
destination and a cutting garden

to fill the house with
fresh flowers every week.

It was an irresistible
challenge for Beatrix,

a chance to work with
the native plants of Maine

and to create a breath-taking
array of flower borders.

When you bring someone here,

you take them very slowly
down the spirit path.

These statues, they're korean.

They're scholars and generals.

This is a wonderful spot.

The sculpture of it.

And the frog's just in the right place.

Isn't that sweet of him?

And then there's all these
different kinds of moss,

so there are loads of textures.

I mean, just look at that.

You just can hardly resist

patting those babies, they're so beautiful.

There's a little water going through there,

and the moss covers the...

I guess it must be the soil or the rocks.

Ah, I love it.

The spirit path was really catalyzed

by a trip that
Mr. and Mrs. Rockefeller

took to Asia in 1922.

They'd been collecting Asian art

and porcelains and things for years,

but they didn't know about the
culture from which it sprang.

The ming tombs made a big impression,

the formality of this grand
allay of guardian figures.

And they visited the forbidden
city palace, which was in ruins.

It was surrounded by a pink stucco wall

with gold tile roofs.

That idea came home with them.

They wanted what Mrs.
rockefeller called a Chinese garden.

Mrs. Farrand wanted
the spirit path

planted in native plants.

That was so avant-garde of her.

It was.

Today people think they just thought it up,

but she was doing it then.

We go down to the end and come back.

A good garden always has a surprise.

There's a raised bed here
with the wall behind it,

deliberately planted
so that you can't see in.

Ok, so then you come to the gate,

and you stand here, and then
if you're bringing a visitor,

you turn around and you look at them.

Because their mouths fall
apart and they go, "oh!"

You seldom get to see this
much color all at once.

The smell here.
Oh, my goodness.

I've been coming here for 47 years.

I never get tired of it,

never cease to feel that
great jolt that you get from it.

So Mrs. Farrand and Mrs.
rockefeller knew what they were doing.

The spirit path was all
about serenity and quiet,

and then wow.

It's the most ambitious
flower garden she ever did.

There were 600 plants on the list.

It was overpowering.

I think that the soul
of the visitor is stimulated

by all of that wonderful stuff,
and then you turn to this,

and it's much more peaceful,
much more serene.

The use of native plants

and background of woodlands was unusual.

Almost everybody else was trying

to europeanize the American landscape...

Because that's chic.

And no one focused on the fact

that america had unique
landscapes of its own

into which you could insert
traditions from different cultures.

Miller, voice-over:
In the late 1920s,

Beatrix Farrand could have lived
quietly with Max at the Huntington,

content with an already
distinguished body of work.

Instead, she kept designing
and building landscapes

at an astonishing pace.

When she visited friends and clients,

she would often prefer
to stay at a nearby hotel

so she could work late into
the night without disturbing them,

and she continued to travel
back and forth across the country,

often taking an assistant along
for part of the journey.

She used to dictate
memos and things on trains

and then put the person
off at the next stop

to take a train back and to type it up.

To go back to New York.
Oh, I love that.

Miller, voice-over:
The rockefeller garden

in Maine was in full swing,

but it was her ambitious
plans for dumbarton oaks

that would highlight
Farrand's unique command

of every aspect of garden design.

What makes dumbarton oaks special

in terms of Mrs. Farrand's
whole career?

Well, this is one of the most
interesting gardens she did

because it's one of the most challenging.

I mean, it's got incredibly
complicated topography.

And she had to deal with
so many challenging slopes

which she resolved in
part through terracing

and in part through just letting
the natural topography appear.

She let the forest come right
up to the house in some places

and pushed the lawn out
into the forest in others,

so she created this sort of tension

between the city and the forest.

As you descend through the formal gardens,

you would descend down into
these so-called wild gardens

that were designed,

but were very, very much based

on William Robinson type of planting.

And it's all situated
in a natural stream valley.

You were telling me that you had bulbs

that have started coming up that were there

when Mrs. Farrand
planted them.

Yes.

How beautiful.

Do you think she put
these bluebells in here?

This is all her.
She planted all of these.

The two pieces were
obviously designed as a whole.

It was also a compliment
to the formal gardens.

So many of the views radiate
out into the wild garden.

It was meant to be part of the experience.

And in her era, this park
was highly maintained.

There were thousands of
bulbs and stream-side plantings.

I mean, she really tackled
something of quite a large scale.

I think that blending of the
sort of European formality

with the wild garden concept
that the English

and the Irish were advocating is unique.

In a way, this therefore,
becomes an American garden.

Yes.

We're fortunate that
dumbarton oaks has survived.

A hundred years later we can see

exactly what she wanted to do

and what she achieved, and it's brilliant.

Miller, voice-over:
"I want to keep it

as poetic as possible," she said,

"and make it the sort of place

in which thrushes sing
and dreams are dreamt."

Dumbarton oaks and the wild
garden beyond its walls

would eventually become open to the public,

and Beatrix Farrand
crafted detailed instructions

to help transform these private grounds

into spaces that everyone could enjoy.

Farrand's commitment to
the public was on my mind

when in 1987 I was asked to design gardens

in of one of the most
urban places in america...

Bryant park, right in
the middle of Manhattan.

Just as they said you can't

do anything nice
in the conservatory garden,

they would say you can't
possibly fix Bryant park.

5 acres of degradation.

The parks department
wasn't taking care of it.

I had no idea there would be

such public interest in the project.

Who did they call on but the superhero

of public parks,
lynden b. Miller.

There were only two entrances and exits,

and there were these huge, high hedges.

And so people felt
they'd be trapped in here.

Miller, voice-over:
I collaborated with

the landscape architect Laurie Olin,

who opened up the park
and focused on giving people

a beautiful, safe space to enjoy.

Moveable chairs were added
to give them a sense of control.

I put lush gardens on
either side of the main lawn

to bring a connection with
nature back to midtown Manhattan.

The more people there are,
the safer the place is.

The message that people hear is,

we did this for you, and you're worth it.

In 1928, while still working in California

and supervising the ongoing
work at dumbarton oaks

and the garden in seal harbor,

Farrand took on another challenge.

John D. Rockefeller Jr.
had begun

building a network of carriage
roads on mount desert

in what would later become
acadia national park,

and he was committed to
making them open to the public.

Once again he called for Farrand's help.

The ambitious project,
which covered 82 miles

of roads and connecting footpaths

and 13 bridges built
of stone from local quarries,

involved a significant amount
of blasting and clearing.

Rockefeller hoped that Farrand
would be able to restore the roadsides

in a way that both healed the landscape

and maintained the views and character

of the new thoroughfares.

It's one of her great unheralded projects

because they were blasting,

which left a lot of rubble and scars.

She designed the plantings
with 99% native plants

so that would all be invisible.

And she did it on the condition

that she would not charge for it

because he was doing
it out of his own passion

and she wanted to try to match that.

Her collaboration with rockefeller

was a meeting of two strong-minded people,

who, to their great delight,
saw things the same way.

"Please know that there is
no road which I build

"for which I do not covet
your gracious interest

and skillful consideration,"

rockefeller wrote her
in one typical letter.

Mr. Rockefeller
and Mrs. Farrand

went over every square inch of the roads,

thinking how to make them more
beautiful for the public.

She was always painting with plants.

Farrand drew strong parallels

between nature and design landscapes,

and one of the most eloquent arguments

she made was for the
creation of acadia national park.

She was an early supporter.

She wrote an article
in which she articulates

the value of nature and
the value of public access

to a beautiful place like that.

And see, that's why...
That's why she's my heroine.

I've watched what those places do.

I think every person has
something inside them

that needs a connection with nature.

I've noticed
that during national tragedies,

people tend to rely on the
natural world to ground them.

In 2001, when the world trade
center buildings came down,

they were only about 6 blocks from a garden

I had designed in battery park city.

Despite the devastation,
the rescue workers used the park

as a refuge during their lunch hours.

Everything kept right on blooming
through the smoke and the ashes.

On September 12th,
I was looking out the window

where I live 100 blocks away

and thinking about my poor city,

and something happened that
caught the eye of the media.

My Dutch bulb-grower called up and said,

"I'm so upset about what's
happened to New York."

And, "what can I do?"

And I said, "hans, have
you got any extra bulbs?"

Miller, voice-over:
Within a week,

he'd found a million of them,
and he donated them.

Yellow is the color we've adopted

in this country for remembrance.

Working with the commissioner

of Manhattan parks, Adrian Benepe,

and new yorkers for parks,

we planted in all 5 boroughs,

in places where they hadn't
seen a flower in years.

New York City will be the golden apple.

The yellow ribbon of daffodils
winding through every borough.

We planted bulbs with the families

of firemen and policemen.

Since September 11th,
j.A. Reynolds has been trying

to come to terms with
the loss of his son Bruce.

This was his playground.

He grew up here when he was
5, 6, 7, 8 years old.

It got me back again into the garden.

We have to find some way to
perpetuate their memory,

and I don't think there
could be any better way

than turning to the earth.

Miller, voice-over:
In march of 1941,

Max Farrand resigned from the Huntington,

and he and Beatrix left California

and moved permanently
to reef point in Maine.

They shared a dream of
transforming her childhood home

into a center for public
horticulture and research.

"The object of reef point," Beatrix wrote,

"is primarily to show what
outdoor beauty can contribute

"to those who can be influenced by trees

and flowers and open-air
composition."

She wanted to open up gardens for people,

just ordinary people to come and look at.

It was a happy time at last,

and the two of them could work
together taking a family home

and converting it into
a landscape study center.

Miller, voice-over:
Nothing quite like reef point

had ever been tried before...

A private home transformed
into a botanic garden,

specializing in native plants

and dedicated to spreading
ideas about horticulture.

It was a study garden.

Everything was laid out in beds,

and herbarium sheets were
made for every single thing.

Don't you wish we could've gone there?

And I would've liked to have
been one of her students.

Oh, I think so.
I think so.

In a sense, Beatrix was coming full circle,

returning to her horticultural
roots as an avid student

of Charles sargent's
at the Arnold arboretum.

And standing behind all her
efforts was her husband,

whom she called
"my golden Max."

But in the spring of 1945,

Max Farrand's health began to decline,

and in June, he died.

Beatrix reflected to a friend about

"30 years of happy companionship

with a great teacher, a scholar,
and a charming gentleman."

Without Max for support,
Beatrix continued to try

to realize their dream at reef point.

It developed into really
a major botanic garden

with herbarium and all
the things that you need,

all the seed packets
from all over the country.

I mean, who else was doing that
as an individual gardener?

Beatrix began
publishing a series of newsletters

and started writing a weekly column

for the "bar harbor times."

And she opened her gardens
to the public in 1945.

One visitor recalled that Beatrix

"put a sprig of white
heather in my buttonhole

when we said good-bye."

Then, on September 5, 1947,

a wildfire swept across the island,

destroying almost 20,000 acres,

including a sizable portion of bar harbor.

Miraculously, reef point was spared.

But the future of Farrand's
dream was in doubt.

Despite attracting 50,000 visitors overall,

there was no endowment for the center,

and her own resources were dwindling.

Amy garland, her head gardener, was aging,

and efforts to find
a skilled horticulturist

to replace her proved fruitless.

In the end, Beatrix felt she had no choice

but to shut reef point down.

What appalls me and seems so dramatic

is that she took her
life's work in those plants,

and she said,
"take them away."

There's a bit of an anger,
don't you feel, in this?

Oh, yeah, I think so, and frustration.

Yeah.

I always have felt that she was depressed,

and she just said the heck with it.

I think her standards
for the garden were so high.

Yeah, yeah.

And she could see the difficulty

of ever trying to maintain those standards

without the proper staff and without
the resources that were required.

She couldn't bear to watch it go downhill.

"It has taken all the courage I can muster

to have arrived at this decision,"

Beatrix wrote in may of 1955.

"But it is better to be of good
courage and arise and do it

"than have to face
deterioration of the gardens

and waste the resources of
the library and collections."

Unable to afford the upkeep,

Beatrix had the house torn down.

Her old patron and friend
John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Agreed to underwrite the cost of
saving her most remarkable plants,

and they became the foundation
of two new public gardens.

At the age of 83, Beatrix Farrand

was now looking for a final home.

Amy garland and her husband
Lewis were planning to retire

to a small farmhouse
surrounded by a hundred acres

not far from bar harbor,

and they invited her to join them.

She accepted and constructed
a separate wing

for herself and her maid,
Clementine Walker.

As she settled into
her modest surroundings,

Beatrix Farrand had one more
garden she wanted to design.

She brought all of her favorite plants,

which had to be winnowed
down to a much smaller list

and is very telling

and made a little formal tripartite garden

that the apartments looked out onto.

Her companion, Clementine,
liked hot colors,

so Clementine looked out
into the hot garden,

and Beatrix's sitting room
looked out into the cool garden.

I love that.

Here she has a very
simple rectangular space,

and everything is small.

I love that you can sit on
the sofa and see what she saw.

This is what she chose after a long,

exciting, and complicated life.

She didn't stop.

I mean, once she got to her little cottage,

she made a new garden,

and she kept her standards
right to the end.

Very astonishing woman.

Miller, voice-over:
Beatrix Farrand lived on

at garland farm for 4 years.

She received an honorary degree

and the rank of professor
from Yale university,

a doctorate of letters from Smith college,

and the garden club of america
gave her its medal of achievement.

She died at home on February 27, 1959.

You can go into one of her gardens

and learn about this necessity to adapt

to changing climate, changing times.

She had long-term associations

and over time made sure that
those landscapes would endure.

In her gardens, people experience nature

and art at the same time,

just the same way they were 100 years ago.

She came out of this
very society background,

and she struck out on her own
and became something modern.

And that's... that's
what a pioneer is.

It's somebody who breaks the mold.

"Gardening is a
gentle art," Farrand once wrote,

"and yet it needs imagination, strength,

"and perhaps more than anything else,

"the vision that sees
the future through the present

and bravely works toward
that vision."