author
Beatrix Farrand
1872–1959
A pioneering American landscape architect, she helped shape some of the country’s most admired gardens and campuses. Her work blended formal structure with a deep understanding of plants, creating spaces that still feel graceful and alive.
1 Audiobook
The garden as a picture
by Beatrix Farrand
About the author
Born in New York City in 1872, Beatrix Farrand became one of the most important figures in American landscape design at a time when very few women worked in the profession. She studied horticulture and garden design with Charles Sprague Sargent of the Arnold Arboretum and went on to build a career designing gardens for private estates, public spaces, and major institutions.
Farrand was the only woman among the founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1899. Over the course of her career, she worked on around 110 projects, including celebrated designs for Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., gardens at the White House, and landscape plans for college campuses such as Princeton, Yale, and parts of the University of California, Berkeley.
She was known for a style that felt elegant rather than showy, combining architectural order with rich planting and careful attention to how a garden would grow over time. Farrand died in 1959, but her influence endures in the landscapes she shaped and in the place she secured for women in landscape architecture.