Beatrix : A Gardening Life of Beatrix Jones Farrand, 1872-1959 Book

Beatrix Jones Farrand is one of America's greatest landscape gardeners. Born in 1872 to an old New York family - Edith Wharton was her aunt - Farrand worked as a consultant and designer on more than 200 gardens, including among her many distinguished clients the Rockefellers, the Morgans, and the White House. Entertainingly written and beautifully illustrated, Jane Brown's biography conveys both the privileged social world in which Farrand grew up and the genius of her work at such places as Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., and The Eyrie, the Rockefeller garden at Seal Harbor, Maine. Other major commissions included Yale and Princeton universities, and the New York Botanical Garden's Rose Garden, recently restored based on Farrand's design. But the book is also a moving account of Beatrix's life, including her parents' separation and divorce when Beatrix was ten, her summers as a young girl at Reef Point in Bar Harbor, Maine, which became a cornerstone of her life and work, her marriage later in life to the famous constitutional historian Max Farrand, and her sad decline after Max's death, which led to the destruction of most of her personal papers and the dismantling of her garden and extraordinary collection of gardening books.

A gorgeously illustrated biography of American landscape designer Beatrix Jones Farrand. Using Farrand's own drawings and plans, and marvelous full-color and black-and-white photos, Jane Brown shows that when her contemporaries were still turning to well-known European fashions, Farrand was creating an original and lovely style that America could call its own.