![]() So the flower borders you see today, while not the originals, are Farrand’s genuine designs, with her groupings and color choices. Eventually, they decided to use plans for a nearby garden of similar size and shape as the template for the replanting. The volunteers, led by a landscape designer from the Hyde Park community and a newly hired horticulturist, gleaned hints about what the garden looked like from Newbold family photographs, but Farrand’s actual planting plans were nowhere to be found. The Newbolds’ grandson Gerald Morgan had donated the house and over 20 acres to the National Park Service in 1976, but by then the original plantings had long disappeared, leaving just weeds and the rough stone edging of the beds. The hedges were completely overgrown and ravaged by deer when a group of volunteers took over care of the garden in 1993. As you can see, this narrowing creates a forced perspective that makes the garden seem much longer than it is, an idea reinforced by the use of the dark green hemlock hedging at the far end. She used the proportions of the Newbolds’ new living room as a starting point for her design, which imagined three garden rooms that simplify as they narrow and flow away from the house. Here at Bellefield, she gave her cousins a plan with a formal outline, even though she expected it to be used informally as a family garden. Please join us at Stop 2, down the steps and to the right.įarrand’s gardens all start with a clear structure. During the time she was working here, she would take on two more prestigious jobs, one as the first consulting landscape architect at Princeton University and the other, as the designer of gardens at the White House for President and Mrs. ![]() Although the Bellefield commission was early in her career, she was already a seasoned practitioner. Her office, modeled on that of the firm of her friend Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park, was known for its high standards of professionalism. Despite this honor, she always referred to herself as a landscape gardener. By twenty-three, she had set up her own business, and four years later was the only woman among eleven founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects. With his help she created a study course for herself that included a tutorial on engineering and an extensive tour of the great gardens of Europe. But, at the age of twenty, she also began more formal studies with Charles Sprague Sargent, the foremost plantsman of the day and founder of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. During childhood summers at her family home, Reef Point, in Bar Harbor, Maine, she had observed plants and plant combinations in the wild and kept detailed journals. In those days there was no formal way for a woman to train as a landscape architect, so Farrand set out to educate herself. Although the Newbolds knew that she was an unusual woman, they probably didn’t realize that “cousin Beatrix” would go on to be one of the leading landscape designers of her time. Unlike her fellow debutantes, however, Beatrix Jones had chosen to pursue a career, inspired in part by her accomplished aunt, the writer Edith Wharton. For young women, this was a world of afternoon teas, dress fittings and glamorous balls, all leading to marriage and motherhood. Jones, who would become Beatrix Farrand upon her marriage the following year, was also born to the privileged world of old New York society. In 1912, the Newbolds asked their cousin Beatrix Jones to design the garden for the new house. McKim turned the eighteenth-century farmhouse into the substantial house that we see today. When the Newbolds decided to enlarge their house, they chose an old friend, Charles McKim, of McKim, Mead & White, the architectural firm that had recently designed the Vanderbilt mansion nearby. Spring and fall were spent here at Bellefield and in the city, summers in Maine, Newport or Europe. The Newbolds divided the year among several homes. Newbold served as a State Senator and was a close family friend and early adviser to his young neighbor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In their time, the house was part of an elegant estate that enjoyed a fine view across the Hudson Valley to the Catskill Mountains. Bellefield was once the home of Thomas and Sarah Newbold, prominent members of New York society at the turn of the twentieth century. Welcome to the Beatrix Farrand Garden at Bellefield, a rare example of the work of one of America’s most distinguished landscape designers.
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