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Dumbarton Oaks Gardens
| Article
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20423 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1992 |
2,494 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
"Quod Severis Metes" reads the wrought-iron gates to the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens, the Latin arching gracefully over the two gilded sheaves of symbolic wheat. "As you sow, so shall you reap." The saying and its symbol appear throughout the gardens; in the stones of the pool in the Pebble Garden on a bench in the Rose Garden and in the same garden, on the limestone slab behind which are interred the ashes of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, the creators of Dumbarton Oaks.
The Blisses acquired the property in 1920, inspired by what Robert, an independently wealthy career diplomat, called "a dream during twenty years of professional nomadism of having a country house turned out to be a Georgian mansion obscured by nineteenth century renovations and additions and located on fifty three acres of steeply sloping land lying between Wisconsin and Connecticut avenue sin Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown. First named Rock of Dumbarton by a Scotch Indian fighter in the early 1700s, the property underwent several name changes until the Blisses christened it Dumbarton Oaks when they acquired the grounds.
Soon after they purchased Dumbarton Oaks, the Blisses set about restoring the house to its original design. And, working with their friend and noted landscape architect Beatrix Farrand, they began to transform the grounds into a series of gardens.
When Beatrix Farrand began to study the site of Dumbarton Oaks, she had forty years of experience in garden design behind her. And as consulting landscape gardener at Princeton, Yale, and Oberlin College, her commissions included gardens for the residence of J. Pierpont Morgan (later the Peirpont Morgan Library) and the White House.
Farrand had first shown an interest in horticulture as a child, and while still in her teens, she studied with Charles Sprague Sargent, founder and first director of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. In her twenties she became a charter member and fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and established offices in New York City.
Farrand's style emphasizes heavy walls, asymmetry, winding paths, and decreasing formality as the gardens extend outward from the house. Like her British contemporary, garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, Farrand favored native plants oak, hemlock, holly, box, yew, and the silver maple over the exotic plantings that had been popular in the late nineteenth century. Unique to Farrand, though was her sense of color. For Jekyll, color
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