Of Gardens. Paula Deitz

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СКАЧАТЬ were getting older and becoming less active. In her search for someone with experience who could take over Amy Garland's responsibilities in the garden, Farrand sought the advice of, among others, Thomas H. Everett, the chief horticulturist of the New York Botanical Garden. Everett, an Englishman, was on a speaking engagement at Wisley when he met Kenneth Beckett and subsequently recommended him to Farrand. Beckett came to Reef Point for six months during the season of 1954; and in the annual report of that period, Farrand praised him for his excellent propagating work in the greenhouse. But he never felt at home in Bar Harbor and eventually returned to England. During her California stay the following winter, Farrand, then eighty-two, took realistic stock of her position. Costs were mounting, no guarantees could be made on a perpetual tax exemption or on the status of Reef Point Gardens as a foundation until after her death (Bar Harbor had lost much of its tax base as a result of the fire), and finally, and even more urgent, she feared the deterioration of the gardens.

      From Farrand's perspective in the early spring of 1955, if Reef Point Gardens with its ephemeral nature could not be maintained to her standards, she would rather see it destroyed. As usual, she made the courageous decision and took action immediately by writing to Robert Patterson to set the wheels in motion. Some of her colleagues, including the lawyers, were incredulous, but Farrand was as determined now to put an end to the Gardens as she had been to create it. Together, the house and the gardens were sold for $6,500 to Patterson, who maintained a desperate hope that the gardens could be saved. There was no way of knowing then that Reef Point Gardens was ahead of its time by only fifteen or twenty years. A renewed interest in landscape architecture and environmental issues—the greening of America—got a fresh start in the 1970s on the heels of the consciousness-raising Earth Day celebrations. And the first major review of Farrand's work came in May 1980 at a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks.

      Having made her decision, Farrand began to disperse possessions to friends. The young David Rockefellers, who badly needed furniture for their new houses, went to see her. “We told her of our plight,” recalled David Rockefeller, “and she gave us first crack. We took almost 90 percent of what she had.” Now scattered among many homes, they have become treasured mementos of the family's long friendship. Several pieces of fine glassware and furniture also went to the Milliken family. (And just how fine they were was proven with time. One Milliken daughter finally decided to sell the Philadelphia Chippendale wing chair with elaborate hairy paw feet which she had stored in her barn for many years. When it came on the block at Sotheby's in January 1987, it went for $2.75 million, thereby setting a record for the most expensive piece of furniture ever sold at auction. It had been ordered from the maker Thomas Affleck by General John Cadwalader, Farrand's ancestor, and the carving was attributed to James Reynolds.)

      The heart of Reef Point, as Farrand called it, was the 2,700-volume horticultural library, along with its collection of documents and garden prints, and the herbarium. When Farrand acquired the archives of Gertrude Jekyll, with over three hundred garden plans, plant lists, and photograph albums, she called her “one of England's best horticultural writers and artist gardeners of the last hundred years.” The Reef Point collection also included a donation made by Mary Rutherfurd Kay, a Connecticut garden architect, of her own notes, books, and valuable slides. Farrand was painfully aware that even were the collections to remain in the house, the conditions were damp and the facilities not fireproof. During the forties and early fifties, after receiving an honorary degree from Smith College in 1936, she donated to the Smith library over three hundred horticulture and landscape architecture books and many volumes each of more than one hundred periodicals in the same fields. One rare book, in John Evelyn's 1693 English translation, was The Compleat Gard'ner; or, Directions for cultivating and right ordering of fruit-gardens and kitchen-gardens by Jean de La Quintinye, the gardener of Louis XIV's kitchen garden at Versailles. In addition, she gave the college almost eight hundred literary titles, among which Jane Austen figured prominently. From 1932 to 1942, the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was an affiliated graduate school of Smith College.

      As the future home for her collections, Farrand sought an institution offering courses in “landscape art” and discovered that there were relatively few. Finally, to begin what she called their “new life under other skies and with wider opportunities for use,” she selected the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. The College of Environmental Design Documents Collection is located in Wurster Hall, the headquarters of the Departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Today, the life in this building is extremely active and exciting, with a constant parade of student projects and exhibitions pinned to the lobby walls. Here, in an educational institution where young people address environmental issues, the heart of Reef Point beats on.

      After she sold Reef Point, Charles K. Savage, a member of Farrand's board, came forward with an imaginative and ambitious solution for the future not of the gardens per se but of the rare plant collections, which he considered the finest in Maine. Savage was the owner of the Asticou Inn in Northeast Harbor. He was a special person in an unusual position. Deprived of a college education by the early death of his father, who was innkeeper before him, he sought every opportunity to educate himself in art, music, and literature. His aesthetic interests and ambitions were recognized by the intellectuals among the summer residents, who lent him books and invited him to cultural events. Finally, he developed a talent for landscape design by reading widely in the field and becoming knowledgeable in all its aspects.

      In a paper simply titled “The Moving of Reef Point Plant Material to Asticou,” Savage proposed to document and then transport the Reef Point collection of azaleas, rhododendrons, laurels, and heathers, along with other plant materials, across the island to a site around a reflecting pond across the road from the Asticou Inn. Noting that “many features of the natural scenery of Mount Desert have similarities to the Japanese, particularly in the parts of the island where bold ledges, rocks and pitch pines prevail,” he was inspired to create a stroll garden in the spirit of the famous water garden at Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, which had “the same low stone slab bridge, mown lawns to the water's edge, azaleas and pines.” This proposal was made to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who paid the greatest tribute to Beatrix Farrand, his old friend and adviser, by supporting this project with an initial $5,000 to purchase the plants and with additional funds during the next few years to create the Asticou Azalea Garden and enhance the terraces and gardens at Thuya Lodge. Savage was already involved in developing the Thuya property above the Asticou Inn. This had been the home, library, and garden of the Boston landscape architect Joseph Henry Curtis, who had died in 1928.

      Charles Savage and his sixteen-year-old daughter, Mary Ann, made many trips together to Reef Point with a book of paint samples and colored pencils to list the azaleas and record their colors with a color chip or pencil mark. In one letter to Rockefeller he reported, “A great deal of my thought has been given to the arrangement of the trees and shrubs in this garden—mass, line and color, as well as the progression of azalea bloom—with the hope that the effect from the road as people pass by may be, (I hope), an outstanding one.” Lewis Garland chauffeured Farrand over in the dark blue Dodge every two weeks or so to view the progress of the garden, and she would get out of the car, remove her shawl, and stand to talk with Savage for awhile.

      Even the Alberta spruce were brought to the new homes. At Thuya, they have retained their natural form, while at Asticou, one has been saved by expert pruning in the Japanese style. Many of the perennials were also planted in the Thuya garden, so that together the two places have become the successors to Reef Point in an extraordinary feat of plant preservation. In early spring, when the azaleas are in bloom, the paths in the Asticou Azalea Garden wind through clouds of pastel pinks muted by melancholy mists from the sea. But Asticou is equally beautiful in summer, with its cool sand garden inspired by Ryoan-ji, also in Kyoto, and its subtle range of greens, and in autumn with its brilliant leaf colors.

      Farrand's gardens also continued in a more direct way. When the main cottage at Reef Point was dismantled (her old friend and executor, Judge Edwin R. Smith, lives on in the Gardener's Cottage), Robert Patterson incorporated entire sections of its interior into a new cottage СКАЧАТЬ