Beatrix Farrand - Early Years

Early Years

Beatrix Jones Farrand was born in New York City on June 19, 1872, into a family with many notable ancestors. Her mother was Mary Cadwalader Rawle (1850–1923) whose maternal grandfather was John Cadwalader (1805–1879) and father was lawyer William Henry Rawle (1823–1889). Her father was Frederic Rhinelander Jones (1846–1918). Farrand enjoyed long seasons at the family's summer home Reef Point Estate in Bar Harbor on Mount Desert Island in Maine. She was the niece of Edith Wharton and lifelong friend of Henry James. Farrand was an avid observer of the island's nature in her youth, and her experiments with challenging sites on the Reef Point gardens her interest in design and horticulture and planning. Throughout her life she referred to herself as a "landscape gardener," rather than a landscape architect.

At age twenty Farrand was introduced to one of her primary mentors, the botanist Charles Sprague Sargent, who at Harvard University was both a professor of horticulture at the Bussey Institute and the founding director of the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, Massachusetts. Farrand moved to Brookline, Massachusetts where she lived in Sargent's home and studied landscape gardening, botany, and land planning. She wanted to learn drafting to scale, elevation rendering, surveying, and engineering, and so studied at the Columbia School of Mines of Columbia University in New York City, New York, under the direction of Professor William Ware.

Farrand drew influence in her design from her several tours through Europe, where she visited many notable gardens throughout Italy, France, Germany, and England. She was also inspired by these and other landscape traditions, distilling their influences into her designs. Her style of designing garden rooms, defined outdoor spaces which transition distinctly from one to another, was inspired by studying Italian Renaissance gardens and villas in her travels. She was influenced in using native plant species from: her many successful Reef Point experiences; studying the contemporary books from the U.S. and abroad advocating the advantages of native palettes; and from visiting the influential British garden authors William Robinson at Gravetye Manor in Sussex, and Gertrude Jekyll at Munstead Hall in Surrey, both in England. Jekyll's series of thematic gardening books emphasized the importance and value of natural plantings and were influential in the U.S. In 1913 Beatrix married Max Farrand, the accomplished historian at Stanford University in California and Yale University in Connecticut, and the first director of the Huntington Library in California.