Papers of Beatrix Jones Farrand, 1938-1953 (inclusive).

Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872-1959) was one of the most important American landscape architects of the twentieth century. She has the distinction of being the only woman among the eleven founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Farrand trained with private teachers before setting up a practice in New York City in 1895. Her principal teacher wasCharles Sprague Sargent, the first director of the Arnold Arboretum. Under Sargent's tutelage, she studied plant identification and planting design on the Arboretum grounds and had use of Sargent's comprehensive library, then housed at Holm Lea, his estate in Brookline, Massachusetts. Farrand served as a consulting landscape gardener to the Arnold Arboretum from 1946 to about 1950. She produced several designs for the Arboretum grounds during her years of professional practice, including major renovations of Bussey Hill and Peters Hill, and planting beds along the entrance drive. Her views on landscape changes at the Arboretum are described in an article she wrote for Arnoldia (November 1, 1946).

Farrand was born into a distinguished New York family that included her aunt, the writer Edith Wharton. Her early years included extensive European travel, experiences she drew upon in her later professional life. She married Max Farrand, the distinguished Yale historian in 1913. Farrand specialized in private gardens and estates. Her best known and most widely admired design is for the garden of Dumbarton Oaks, the Washington D.C. estate of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, now a museum and study center affiliated with Harvard University. Another well preserved Farrand design is The Eyrie, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller garden in Seal Harbor, Maine. She also did extensive college and university campus designs including work at Yale University, Vassar, and the University of Chicago. Her extensive experimental gardens at Reef Point, her summer home in Bar Harbor, Maine, are unfortunately lost. Farrand's papers and private library are now in the Library of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California at Berkeley.