She founded a horticultural study center at Reef Point, her family home, in Bar Harbor, Maine, which she ran until the early 1950's, when she was unable to raise ongoing funding and, dismantling her ancestral home and garden, moved to nearby Garland Farm for the last three years of her life. The mission of the Beatrix Farrand Society is to preserve Garland Farm as a nexus for information, research, and activites concerning Beatrix Farrand, including a Design and Horticultural Reference Library, a Design Archive, and a Center for Internship Studies in Horticulture and Design.
In any case, it's a fine mission and worthy of our suppport, and I was all too happy to donate my lecture to the cause. In repayment, I was happily squired by Patrick to some of the notable gardens he has worked on in Maine, including Martha Stewart's "Skylands" and the aforementioned Rockefeller Garden. "Skylands", a stately Arts & Crafts mansion built for the automotive Ford family shortly after the turn of the 20th Century and adorned with gardens by the noted early 20th Century garden designer Jens Jensen, was a rare treat. However, it is Mrs. Farrand's spectacular Rockefeller Garden that I will share with you now.
Constructed between 1926 and 1930 for Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the garden is actually two splendid gardens, a meditative Chinese Garden know as "The Spirit Walk" existing side by side with a spectacular sunken and terraced mixed border garden of astounding exuberance. The "Spirit Walk" is all moss and ferns and carefully laid stepping stones, redolent with the heavenly scent of pine needles and flanked by massive, mainly 14th and 15th Century Japanese, Korean, and Chinese statuary.
The conjoined great "Lawn" and "Oval" gardens, appearing like a stoutly walled apparition in the midst of the Maine woods, are classic Beatrix Farrand, with a strong nod to historic English borders, one side cool colors, the other "hot", in two tiers of extravagant blossom. Delphiniums dance with dahlias, lilies with larkspur, and phlox and stock, zinnias and artemesias, euphorbias and foxgloves all vie winningly for one's attention.
Patrick oversaw the revived planting of the gardens for David and Peggy Rockefeller, son and daughter-in-law of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. He explained that the gardens were designed to be in full, glorious bloom for a scant two weeks a year at the beginning of August, which used to constitute "the season" in Maine, and I was fortunate to be front and center for the show. I don't think I have ever witnessed a border so jam-packed with interesting combinations of color and blossom, both annual and perennial, and sensory revelations abounded.
As every avid gardener knows, garden touring is the most blissful form of self-education: pad and camera in hand, the sun on your back, and a garden at your feet. There are lessons to be learned and noted around every corner: this charming plant juxtaposition, that fencing or gate detail, that imaginative way of staking. What makes a garden designer like Beatrix Farrand great may be, at the most basic level, a technical feat, but what really tells you that you are in the presence of something extraordinary is a visceral experience entirely.
