A new documentary produced by Insignia Films and directed by Stephen Ives, Beatrix Farrand’s American Landscapes, follows award-winning public garden designer Lynden B. Miller as she sets off to explore the remarkable life and career of America’s first female landscape architect—Beatrix Farrand. Farrand was responsible for some of the most celebrated gardens in the United States and helped create a distinctive American voice in landscape architecture. Although she created gardens for the rich and powerful, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr., J.P. Morgan, and President Woodrow Wilson, she also was an early advocate for the value of public gardens and believed strongly in the power of the natural world to make people’s lives better. Through the documentary, Miller journeys to iconic Farrand gardens, engaging designers, scholars and horticulturists in a spirited dialogue about the meaning and importance of this ground-breaking early 20th-century woman. Lynden Miller’s experience as New York City’s most prominent public garden designer is woven into a wide-ranging biography of Farrand’s life and times.

BFGA is proud to be the fiscal sponsor for this film.

The film is available for group screenings, festivals, and home DVD purchase:
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One of the pioneering women of the early 20th century was not a campaigner for women’s suffrage, or a writer, or a social reformer, but a landscape designer. Beatrix Farrand was sought after by America’s wealthiest families like the Rockefellers and the Morgans, by Ivy League universities, botanical gardens, municipalities, even the White House, and yet she also emerged as a pioneer of public space and the power of landscapes to improve the lives of all Americans.  Her iconic work combined artistic invention, classical references, and horticultural expertise. At age 27 she became the sole woman founder of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Her revolutionary ideas and designs reveal an artist who helped create a distinctive American voice in landscape design.  

Lynden B. Miller considers Beatrix Farrand a mentor and heroine. She is a nationally recognized landscape designer and authority on public space. Miller was the catalyst and visionary behind the acclaimed renovation of the Conservatory Garden in New York’s Central Park, the revitalization of the gardens in Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library, and the driving force behind a post-9/11 effort to plant millions of daffodils throughout New York’s five boroughs.  The film revolves around a deeply personal journey, as Miller engages with horticulturists, designers, and scholars to deepen her understanding of the ways in which Farrand has inspired her career in public gardens and left an enduring legacy for future generations. 

Beatrix Farrand was born Beatrix Jones, to a family so prominent and envied in the social world of Gilded Age New York that they inspired the phrase “Keeping up with the Joneses.”  Young Beatrix decided to defy the conventions of her class and gender and pursue a career in horticulture. 
Despite fierce competition in what was then a profession dominated by men, over the next 45 years, Farrand ran one of the most highly regarded landscape firms in America. Her designs were characterized by ingenious engineering, elaborate garden structures, distinctive planting plans and a forward-thinking awareness of native ecology.  Her work has inspired generations of landscape architects, designers, horticulturists and garden enthusiasts around the world.

During the course of the film, Miller takes a carriage ride along paths Farrand landscaped in Acadia National Park, explores the secluded Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor, Maine, and walks through the multi-tiered majesty of Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC. She also visits Farrand’s girlhood home, Reef Point, in Bar Harbor, Maine, which Farrand converted into a revolutionary landscape study center, devoted to native plants, and open to the public.  Miller also participates in a workshop at Bellefield, Farrand’s walled garden in Hyde Park, N.Y., with the Green Teens – a group of young people enrolled in a program that empowers urban youth to be active community change-agents through local food systems and horticulture.  

In each location Miller comes to understand a different aspect of Farrand’s work.  Intercut with these lively, and often funny, exchanges are a series of historical flashbacks that illuminate the social and cultural milieu that shaped Farrand’s career, and portraits of the seminal projects that Lynden Miller undertook, often with Farrand as her inspiration. Historical photographs, elegantly drawn watercolors and garden plans, and period film footage provide further context for Farrand’s compelling life and work.  “Gardening is a gentle art,” Farrand once wrote, “and yet it needs imagination, strength, and perhaps more than anything else, the vision that sees the future through the present, and bravely works towards that vision.”