Garden containers.

Toward the end of her long and productive life, the landscape architect Beatrix Farrand (nee Jones; 1872-1959) spent her time cultivating her own garden, called Reef Point, in Bar Harbor, Maine. She had made provision in her will for it to become a center for horticultural studies, making use of her extensive library, herbarium, and experimental garden of native plants. By 1955, however, no institution had come forward with the necessary funding, so she gave her library of some twenty-seven hundred books, all her papers and garden plans, and some eighteen hundred specimens from her herbarium to the department of landscape architecture at the University of California at Berkeley. At the same time she dismantled her labor of love--the house and garden at Reef Point--and removed them (along with her chauffeur and handyman Lewis Garland, his wife Amy, who had overseen the Reef Point gardens, and her maid Clementine Walters) to Garland Farm, a much smaller property on Mount Desert Island nearby. Garland Farm has recently been rediscovered, and much to everyone's surprise, it has survived remarkably unaltered, albeit over-grown.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Period photographs of Reef Point confirm that Farrand incorporated garden ornaments such as bird baths, planters, sundials, furniture, and even cast-off architectural elements in her designs for her own property as well as in her designs for gardens all over the United States. About 1901 she came across the work of Eric Ellis Soderholtz, a craftsman working in West Gouldsboro. Maine, who had devised a method of producing pots and amphorae using reinforced concrete. Unlike ...