Judith B. Tankard – författare

Named a Best Book of 2022 by the American Society of Landscape ArchitectsBeatrix Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes presents the life and work of one of the foremost landscape designers of the early 1900s. Born into a prominent New York family (she was the niece of Edith Wharton), Farrand eschewed the traditional social life of the Gilded Age to pursue her passion for landscape and plants.Many of her clients were members of the highest echelon of society with estates in Newport, the Berkshires, and Maine, but Farrand ultimately became a consultant for university campuses, including Yale and Princeton, and for public gardens, including the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden and the Rose Garden at The New York Botanical Garden.Perhaps her best-known work is the extensive garden at Dumbarton Oaks, originally a private residence and now a research institute of Harvard University. Deeply influenced by the English landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll, Farrand was known for broad expanses of lawn with deep swaths of borders planted in a subtle palette of foliage and flowers.Her gardens have been photographed at their peak especially for this book, and these lush illustrations are complemented by beautiful watercolor wash renderings of her designs, now preserved at the library of the University of California at Berkeley.

First published in 1996, this Pimpernel Classic edition has been redesigned and includes new photography.Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932) was probably the most influential garden designer of the early twentieth century. In this classic work Judith Tankard and Martin Wood explore her life and work at Munstead Wood, the Arts and Crafts style house in Surrey, designed for her by Edwin Lutyens, where she lived and gardened from 1897 until her death. Here she exercised her knowledge of architecture and local building skills, and her passion for form, grouping and colour was given full scope in the garden which she designed and worked from scratch.Taking as a basis Gertrude Jekyll's own photographs, scrapbooks and notebooks, and the recollections of contemporaries from Edith Wharton and Vita Sackville-West to William Robinson and Henry Francis Du Pont, the authors describe not only the building and development of the house and garden but also Jekyll's skills both in the arts and as a businesswoman, and her collaborations with architects including Lutyens, Oliver Hill and M.H. Baillie Scott, among many others.