America’s first career women: The groundbreaking garden designers who set the …

Groundbreakers: Great American gardens
in the 20th century and the women who designed them, is on view at The New York Botanical Garden
The exhibit explores the work of garden designers Marian Coffin, Beatrix Farrand and Ellen Shipman
The women have been hailed the nation’s first specialized career women

By
Associated Press

Published:

14:15 EST, 20 May 2014

|
Updated:

14:15 EST, 20 May 2014

Occasionally, landscape gardening goes well beyond flowers and shrubbery to encompass questions of national identity, culture, even social change. The era from 1900 to 1930 in America was one of those times, thanks to several enterprising and unsung women.

Well before American women could vote, these college-educated few rose to the pinnacle of their fields as garden designers, writers and photographers.

Declaring American gardens to be distinct from those in Europe, they took as their mission the beautification of America, whose cities were polluted and whose residents were suffering from decades of grinding income disparity and rampant industrialism.

Groundbreaker: The career of American garden designer Beatrix Farrand is charted in a new exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden. Two of her masterpieces are on view in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden and in ‘Mrs. Rockefeller’s Garden,’ a dazzlingly colorful indoor horticultural exhibit

Setting a scene: The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor, Maine, was designed by Beatrix Farrand

The New
York Botanical Garden — itself a creation of that Progressive
‘push-back’ between the height of the Gilded Age and World War I —
explores these women and their work in Groundbreakers: Great American
gardens in the 20th century and the women who designed them, a suite of
exhibits on view from May 17 to September 7.

‘Groundbreakers’
explores the work of garden designers Marian Coffin, Beatrix Farrand
and Ellen Shipman, and garden photographers Jessie Tarbox Beals, Mattie
Edwards Hewitt and Frances Benjamin Johnston.

It
combines original hand-tinted glass ‘magic lantern’ slides and the
hefty photographic equipment used to make them; detailed drawings of
some of the greatest estate gardens of the time; gardening journalism
and literary writing; and breathtakingly colorful flower gardens — most
notably one evoking the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller garden in Seal Harbor,
Maine (complete with Ragtime musical accompaniment).

Homage: Farrand’s design for the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Maine has been evoked in the Conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden for the Groundbreakers exhibit

‘These
women were the leading lights in their fields. And in a broader cultural
sense, the work they did helped elevate the quality of life for many
people across America through these landscapes and their photos and
writing,’ said Todd Forrest, the botanical garden’s vice president of
Horticulture and Living Collections.

‘This
brief Progressive era is especially important to look at now as
historians ask themselves how, in our present gilded age, we’re going to
get this kind of momentum again,’ explained Sam Watters, the historian
whose ‘Gardens for a Beautiful America’ book (Acanthus Press) helped
inspire the show, and who curated its photographic segment.

Among
the nation’s first specialized career women, the women highlighted in
the show not only designed gardens for private estates, but educated and
informed the public through lectures, writing and photos, Watters said.

Trailblazers: Photographers Jessie Tarbox Beals (left) and Frances Benjamin Johnston (right). Along with photos, the exhibit features examples of the era’s imposing wooden camera equipment — gardening photography required serious biceps — along with a few original lantern slides

Their work
helped inspire the construction of landscaped parks and gardens across
the country; the expansion of tree-lined streets; and the widespread
planting of the lush lawns, bordered by flowers and ornamental shrubs,
that remain emblematic of American yards today.

‘Garden
club women, inspired by the garden photos they saw, started going to
prisons. They put a rose garden in the courtyard of Sing Sing. A big
formal garden with a fountain was put in a prison in Michigan. And they
planted gardens around train stations across the country,’ Watters said.

‘It really was landscape gardening as social activism.’

On
the great estates, the cutting edge of landscape design at the time,
photographs were commissioned and schoolchildren brought in with the
edification of the masses in mind.

Tranquil: This 1919 hand-tinted photograph, taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston, shows the garden of Helen Thorne in Millbrook, New York

Hard at work: This circa 1922 a hand-tinted photograph of the gardener for the estate of James and Elizabeth Metcalfe in Bedford Hills, New York, taken by photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston

Whereas
19th century American gardens replicated gardens in Europe, these new
gardens combined Asian architectural elements, English-style flower
borders, European ideas of space and distinctly North American settings
for a unique sensibility.

And before there was color photography, the
lush hand-tinted coloring of Johnston’s lantern slides awed and inspired
home gardeners.

The show is ambitious and sprawling, and
experiencing it in its entirety requires the better part of a day.

Although the exhibits can be viewed in any order, the story flows best
by beginning in the garden’s Mertz Library Rotunda with ‘Gardens for a
Beautiful America: The women who photographed them,’ curated by Watters.

Enjoying the scenery: A hand-tinted photograph of Admiral Aaron Ward and his wife Elizabeth in Roslyn Harbor, New York, taken by photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1914

Across the pond: A hand-tinted photograph of the pagoda at the estate of Viscount Waldorf and Nancy Astor in Taplow-on-Thames, England, taken in 1925 by photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston

Along with photos, books, magazines and journals of the period, the
exhibit features examples of the era’s imposing wooden camera equipment —
gardening photography required serious biceps — along with a few
original lantern slides.

Two of Farrand’s masterpieces are on view in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden and in ‘Mrs. Rockefeller’s Garden,’ a dazzlingly colorful indoor horticultural exhibit. Shipman designed the garden’s Ladies’ Border, and Coffin designed the Montgomery Conifers Collection.

The show also includes a ‘Poetry Walk,’ featuring poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, many inspired by her garden in Austerlitz, New York; a section on ‘Groundbreaking Women in Science’; a series of concerts, films, lectures and poetry readings; a free iPhone app with previously unpublished photos; and a section for kids on the science and art of landscape photography.