Beatrix Farrand (1872–1959)

Beatrix Farrand, née Jones, was born in New York City into a well-to-do family that she called "five generations of garden lovers." Edith Wharton was her paternal aunt, and Beatrix's childhood home often hosted notable visitors such as novelist Henry James. The family spent summers at Bar Harbor on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Beatrix attended one drafting class at Columbia University and was an informal apprentice of Charles Sprague Sargent, director of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, but was otherwise self-taught as there were no formal schools of landscape architecture at the time.
In 1895, she took a grand tour of Europe, visiting Italy, Germany, Holland, France, England, and Scotland. On returning to the USA, she opened her own firm and by 1899 was well-established as a self-titled "landscape gardener." In 1913, she married Max Farrand, a prominent historian and the first director of the Huntington Library. During her acclaimed 50-year career, Beatrix received more than 200 commissions to design gardens for private residences, great estates, country homes, public parks, botanical gardens, college and university campuses, and the White House. She was one of the 11 founding members, and the only woman, of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Her published works include The Plant Book for Dumbarton Oaks, a resource for the maintenance of the gardens following their acquisition by Harvard University in 1941. She also published a periodical, The Reef Point Gardens Bulletin, from 1946 to 1956.