![]() 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. Judith is also a stalwart regional representative and garden host in our Open Days program and a frequent speaker at our educational events.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. Judith Tankard was a Board member and Vice-President of the Society and is advising us on this tour. Desert Island, where Farrand lived and worked in the last part of her life, and where the Beatrix Farrand Society is located. Later this summer, subscribers to our Society of Fellows garden-study tour to Maine will visit Mt. She was the only woman among eleven founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects. “It was very unusual for a woman to get any kind of commission for anything other than a ‘flower garden,’ whereas the men took on the great missions of ‘landscape architecture.’ She was the first woman to cross that invisible line,” says Judith in the film.įarrand is renowned for her landscape designs at Princeton and Yale, among many other projects, including the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor, ME, Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, and the summer estate of Edward and Mary Harkness in Waterford, CT (now Harkness Memorial State Park) in Waterford, CT. ![]() Featured as part of the event, titled “Shaping our World: Women in Design & Innovation,” was a short tribute film (above) in which author, landscape historian, and longtime Garden Conservancy member Judith Tankard details Farrand’s inspiring accomplishments in an otherwise “man’s world.” Last year, Beatrix Farrand (1872-1959) was inducted posthumously into the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame for her pioneering work and achievements in the field of landscape architecture.
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