In search of another’s garden> Bar Harbor home’s landscape inspired by gardener Beatrix Farrand

loading...

Bald Porcupine Island is enveloped in fog. A lobsterman hauls his traps close to the rocky shore bound by fragrant banks of pink and white rosa rugosa. A fog horn blasts in the distance.

American landscape gardener Beatrix Farrand must have delighted at that sight from the veranda of her cottage, Reef Point, along the Shore Path in Bar Harbor. The subtle play of the fog hiding and then exposing the small spruce-clad isle perhaps enhanced her appreciation of vistas and native plants and their place in the garden.

One recent August morning, 40 years after Farrand’s death in 1959, Robert and Catherine Barrett marvel at that same largely unchanged scene from their Tudor-style summer home, Atlantique.

“She used to see the same thing as us every day,” mused Bob Barrett, watching Bald Porcupine slip in and out of the fog blanketing Frenchman Bay, from the depths of a leather sofa in his library.

Barrett, an investment banker who spent 25 years on Wall Street, and his wife, Catherine, a former fashion model and editor at Town & Country magazine, both have ties to Bar Harbor. A Bangor native, he summered as a child in the coastal resort while her cousin, William S. Moore, had a summer cottage there, the Woodlands, which was destroyed by the 1947 fire.

Last year, the Barretts bought the former Breakwater Inn estate and renamed it Atlantique. Learning one of this century’s premier landscape gardeners had lived and gardened just a stone’s throw away, and hearing the sad tale of how she destroyed her Reef Point home and gardens because she lacked the funds to secure their future, the couple made it their mission to further Farrand’s work and secure her place in Maine history.

Last August, the Barretts gave $250,000 to establish the Robert and Catherine Barrett Fund for Landscape Horticulture in Beatrix Farrand’s memory at the University of Maine. The gift is intended to support UM’s Landscape Horticulture Department, provide summer internships and scholarships for students and faculty, and help keep alive the tradition of horticulture and landscape design in Maine.

The Barretts also founded The Bar Harbor Institute. They aim to revive Farrand’s vision for a “living laboratory” on their property where UM students and faculty can study and apply her principles and methods of landscape design and gardening.

Among Farrand’s best known creations are the Italianate gardens at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. and Dartington Hall in Devon, England. But, few of the thousands of tourists flocking to see Thunder Hole, Cadillac Mountain and other sights in Bar Harbor have a clue that one of the nation’s foremost landscape gardeners once lived and worked there.

“That’s where Beatrix’s house was,” Bob Barrett notes, leading the way between two pink granite pillars, capped with cast-concrete finials, marking the entrance to Reef Point. Under towering white spruce, he follows a path — wide enough for two to walk — bordered by lush clumps of moss, ferns, bunchberry and other native plants. He points out a granite foundation where Farrand’s rambling, brown-shingled cottage once stood. An old cedar fence spattered with pale-green lichen runs to the right.

“If she had been a man,” Barrett reflected, “I believe she would have been as famous as Joshua Chamberlain.”

Before her time

Beatrix Farrand was born in New York in 1872. As a child, she developed a love of plants, learning the names of Bon Silene, Marie Van Houtte and other old roses growing at her grandmother’s summer cottage in Newport, R.I.

The niece of novelist Edith Wharton, Farrand was introduced to Italian villas and gardens by her illustrious aunt who lived most of her life in Europe. Her uncle John Cadwalader took her on shooting and fishing parties to Scotland, interspersed with visits to Scottish and English gardens, where she was pronounced a crack shot.

It was Cadwalader who recognized Farrand’s interest in garden design and urged her parents to allow her to pursue a professional career. He is quoted as saying, “Let her be a gardener, or, for that matter anything she wants to be. What she wishes to do will be well done.”

A chance meeting with Charles Sprague Sargent, the first director of Boston’s Arnold Aboretum, launched Farrand’s career. Under his tutelage, she learned how to make a garden design “fit the ground and not twist the ground to fit a plan.”

During her childhood, Farrand’s parents had built their own summer retreat, Reef Point, in Bar Harbor. She inherited the property, turning it into the finest botanical collection north of the Arnold Arboretum, in between designing the East and West Gardens at the White House, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s Eyrie garden in the Mount Desert village of Seal Harbor and other prestigious commissions.

After her husband’s death in 1945, Farrand continued to develop Reef Point as a botanical study center. She had amassed a 2,700-volume horticultural library. A herbarium was established where native and exotic plant species were cataloged.

“The object at Reef Point is primarily to show what outdoor beauty can contribute to those who have the interest and perception that can be influenced by trees and flowers and open air composition,” she wrote in her first Reef Point Gardens Bulletin. “Such interest is never likely to diminish and a taste for gardening can add much to life. Intimate contact with growing things, observation of passing seasons and changes give interest and flavor to each day.”

Sadly, Farrand never fulfilled her vision. In her 80s, she approached the town of Bar Harbor for a tax exemption to ensure Reef Point’s future as a study center. But town officials turned her down, having lost much of their tax base to the 1947 fire. She took stock of her situation and opted to destroy her creation rather than see it falling into decline.

Farrand had Reef Point, with its turrets, high gables and wide verandas, torn down, her gardens dug up and sold the property. She gave her vast collection of books, documents and garden prints to the University of California, Berkeley.

“From Mrs. 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,” wrote Paula Deitz in “Beatrix Farrand The Bulletins of Reef Point Gardens.”

Mission continues

Were she alive today, Beatrix Farrand would likely be pleased by the renewed interest in her work and the Barretts’ gesture to establish a fund in her memory at the University of Maine.

Strolling down her old street in Bar Harbor, wearing one of her Harris tweed suits with a cane in hand and shawl around her shoulders, she would be delighted to find Atlantique — the Tudor-style house she had known as the Jay cottage, has been completely restored. She would approve of the stuccolike, synthetic exterior designed to withstand the elements and perhaps picture her favorite hydrangea petriolaris, with its soft, white flowers, climbing the east walls.

Inside Atlantique, the great landscape gardener would enjoy being shown around by Catherine Barrett, elegantly clad in cream-colored slacks with a camel silk shawl tossed over her shoulder. She would be amused at the sight of Buddy Holly, a sculpted standard poodle, darting like a moving topiary across the Great Hall, and Winston, a Maltese, spread-eagled on the needlepoint rug.

Walking the grounds, Farrand might be flabbergasted by the goings-on to make room for the “living laboratory” she once envisioned, and frustrated she couldn’t see to every detail herself. Plans are afoot to create a spring garden, rose garden, woodland garden and other elements from the Reef Point Gardens.

Farrand would like seeing UM senior Stacy Ruchala tending a small, newly planted perennial bed buffered by a yew hedge. The sight of the horticulture student would remind her of her own professional start more than a century ago.

She also would be comforted to know the garden plans for Atlantique are in the hands of David Melchert of Stroudwater Design Group in Yarmouth. His previous work includes the landscape design at the new Camden Public Library that won an award from the Maine chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Farrand would enjoy strolling the grounds and sharing her thoughts with the soft-spoken landscape architect.

“Through this process, Bob and Catherine Barrett have made Beatrix my client,” Melchert said.

For more information about the Robert and Catherine Barrett Fund for Landscape Horticulture contact Joyce Henckler, trustee and senior development officer, at the University of Maine, 581-1153.