Ellen Biddle Shipman’s New England Gardens

Judith B. Tankard

This pioneering landscape architect, distinguished for her innovative planting designs, described her use of plants as "painting pictures as an artist would."

Ellen Biddle Shipman (1869-1950) was one of Once hailed as the "Dean of American the most important landscape architects during Women Landscape Architects," Shipman de- the 1910s and 1920s, the great years of estate signed nearly six hundred gardens throughout building across the United States. Shipman’s the country during the course of her thirty-five approach to garden design was steeped in the year career ( 1912-1947/.3 Clusters of her gardens traditionalism of the Northeast, especially the once proliferated in areas such as Grosse Pointe, Colonial Revival style. She owed her great suc- Michigan; Greenwich, Connecticut; and Cha- cess m the design and planting of small gardens grin Falls, Ohio, where she designed several to early years of gardening at her New Hamp- dozen gardens. She also carried out a number of shire country home. "Working daily in my gar- commissions in the New England states, where den for fifteen years," she wrote, "taught me to she had gotten her start. Sadly, few examples know plants, their habits and their needs."’ remain in their original condition. Shipman brought a fine-tuned artistic sensi- Ellen Biddle was born into a promment Phila- tivity to garden design. She transformed the delphia family, the military rather than the flower border into an art form by using carefully financial branch. Her father was a career soldier, articulated compositions of flowers, foliage, and and she spent an adventurous childhood in fron- color, thoroughly grounded in her exceptional tier outposts in Nevada, Texas, and the Arizona knowledge of plants. This planting expertise Territory. Her discovery of gardens came when set her apart from other landscape architects of she was sent back East to live with her grand- the period. Shipman’s simple, unpretentious parents, who had an old-fashioned, rose-filled designs for gardens served as a framework for garden in New Jersey. Later, when she attended her dazzlmg plantmgs. To create the proper set- finishing school in Baltimore, interests in art ting, she would surround the garden with an and architecture were awakened. enclosing curtain of trees and always used During her early twenties, Ellen lived in generous quantities of small flowering trees, Cambridge, Massachusetts, sharing a house shrubs, vines, and standards (such as roses, with Marian Nichols, who later married the lilacs, or wisteria) to create structural notes and landscape architect Arthur Shurcliff, whose pro- to cast shadows over the borders. Invariably her fessional path would intersect with Shipman’s. gardens were enhanced by her delightful designs Ellen’s brief academic career at Radcliffe (then for rose arbors, pergolas, benches, teahouses, known as the Harvard Annex) ended when she dovecotes, and other structures that carefully married Louis Shipman, a dashing young play- echoed the architectural style of the house. wright from New York who was then attending Shipman collaborated with numerous architects Harvard. They moved to the artists’ colony m and landscape architects, including Charles Cornish, New Hampshire, where they were part Platt, the Olmsted Brothers, and James of a lively coterie surrounding the colony’s Greenleaf. Warren Manning, with whom she founder, American sculptor Augustus Saint- collaborated on many projects, considered her Gaudens, who was also Marian Nichols’ uncle. "one of the best, if not the very best, Flower Years later, recalling her first visit to Cornish in Garden Maker in America. "z 1894, she wrote, "a garden became for me the 3

Ellen Biddle Shipman (1869-1950) m her New York City home on Beekman Place in the 1920s most essential part of a home."4 This would Shipman’s originality as a garden designer become Ellen Shipman’s credo in garden design. came from several different sources. The coun- In 1910, when Ellen Shipman was in her early try gardens in Cornish, once dubbed "the most forties and the mother of three children, she beautifully gardened village in all America,"" turned to garden design at the suggestion of her were the pre-eminent influence on her early Cornish neighbor, the country house architect years.s Gardens such as those of Thomas Charles Platt. By then the Shipmans’ marriage Wilmer Dewing, Stephen Parrish, Augustus had deteriorated, leaving Ellen to fend for Saint-Gaudens, and other artists brimmed with herself financially after her husband left her. old-fashioned flowers, dirt paths, and simple Platt admired her garden at Brook Place, the ornaments and features, such as rose arbors and Shipmans’ colonial farmhouse in nearby circular reflecting pools. As a young wife of an Plainfield, New Hampshire, and the remodeling aspiring but penniless writer, Ellen was not able she had recently carried out there. Platt thought to take the grand tour of European gardens as did she had a good eye for design and no doubt felt other prominent colleagues such as her Cornish that her plantings would be an asset for his neighbor, landscape architect Rose Standish gardens. While the Shipmans’ elder daughter Nichols (a sister of her friend Marian Nichols), (also named Ellen) managed the household, or Beatrix Jones (Farrand/.~ Instead, she read Ellen studied drafting and construction under House Beautiful, House and Garden, and popu- Platt’s tutelage. Within two years she was col- lar gardening magazines that would later feature laboratmg with Platt as well as undertaking her own work. She consulted recent books such small, mdependent commissions. as Mabel Cabot Sedgwick’s The Garden Month 4

Clusters of peomes and summer phlox with vmes chmbmg on the pergola m Ellen Shipman’s own garden at Brook Place, New Hampshire. Photograph by Mattie Edwards Hewitt, 1923 5

by Month, Helena Rutherfurd Ely’s A Woman’s Hardy Garden, and others that promoted the revival of interest in hardy plants. As a result, Ellen Shipman’s approach to garden design, in particular her planting style, was refreshingly American in spirit, escaping, for the most part, European influences that dominated the work of Farrand and Marian Coffin. Shipman’s apprenticeship with Platt strength- ened her design sensibilities. She loosely adapted his basic axial garden plan and habit of placing at regular intervals features such as the tubs of plants, statuary, and clipped evergreens associated with Italianate gardens. The result- ing compositions, which varied little through- out Shipman’s career, balanced formality and informality, more in the manner of Colonial Revival gardens of the era. At the crux of her garden design philosophy was the close integra- tion of house and garden, with easy transitions from one area to the next, without stiffness and artifice. Ellen Shipman had nearly four dozen clients in Massachusetts and several gardens in the Bos- Preliminary sketch for a garden m Mattapoisett~’ Massachusetts, for Mrs. Samuel D Warren, 1912. ton area exemplify the range of her capabilities, Shipman’s Colomal Revival-style plan has four mam two from her including designs fledgling years. beds edged m clipped barberry, a small hly pool, and In when she was 1912, just starting out, she a sundial on a side path. designed a small seaside garden in Mattapoisett for Mrs. Samuel D. Warren as a complement design for "Old Farms" harmonized with its to the modest shingle-style summer house. country setting and the clapboard seventeenth- Shipman’s simple, four-square Colonial Revival century house. At the front entrance, she plan consisted of beds of phlox and lilies edged designed a Colonial Revival dooryard garden with low, clipped barberry hedging, with con- with mounds of hardy plants such as peonies, verging stone walks. A sundial and a Lutyens phlox, and lilies in boxwood-edged beds, but bench-at the time a novelty in America- behind the house she created a new-style garden appear to have been the two major ornaments. that would quickly become one of her signature The garden was enclosed on one side by a dense creations. Here she made a garden with low wall of evergreens, and existing cedars stone walls of native fieldstone, set in an old (juniperus virginiana) were accommodated in orchard. Happily, the "bones" of the garden still the plan. Shipman felt an unswerving belief exist. The design was composed of a series of in the importance of privacy: "Planting, how- rectangular beds and walks culminating in a ever beautiful, is not a garden. A garden must be pool and a semicircular "apse" with a curved enclosed ... or otherwise it would merely be a stone bench. Since several of the old apple trees cultivated area."’ In this respect she differed were allowed to "stray" into the garden, its from Platt, whose walls and hedges defined character derived directly from its setting. spaces but rarely offered a sense of seclusion. Screening was provided by clumps of small trees The present status of this garden is unknown. and shrubs around the perimeter. Photographs The following year, in March 1913, Shipman of the garden show it to be one of the earliest designed an mnovative garden in Wenham, on instances in which Shipman used more innova- Boston’s North Shore, for Alanson Daniels. Her tive plantings than the simple flowerbeds filled 6

A wall of evergreens frames flowerbeds filled with phlox and lilies in the Warren garden. Fieldstone paths converge at the sundial Photograph by Edith Hastings Tracy, 1912. with masses of only two or three kinds of plants. kind of garden that appealed to her clients, In the Daniels garden, she created a strong wealthy women, the wives of prominent indus- sculptural effect around the small reflecting trialists, who sought traditionalism m the form pool by using clusters of bold foliage-hostas, of good taste and privacy. Often her clients were bergenia, and iris. Her comment, that she used gardeners themselves, affiliated with local plants "as a painter uses the colors from his pal- garden clubs where Shipman was a frequent ette," is admirably demonstrated in this gar- speaker. den.8 In this respect, her approach to garden For Mrs. Henry V. Greenough of Brookline, design was similar to Gertrude Jekyll’s. How- Shipman designed a small garden in 1926, when ever, Shipman’s style of planting, with her she was at the height of her fame. In her structural "notes," was more architectural than design-an excellent example of her facility Jekyll’s, and she juxtaposed colors in fan-shaped with small spaces-Shipman skillfully com- clusters in contrast to Jekyll’s impressionistic bined formal and wild gardens in a compressed drift plantings. suburban setting. Using her prototypal layout, the garden was surrounded by high brick walls. 10 By the early 1920s Shipman’s gardens were The plantings around the house and terraces receiving wide notice m magazines and books, were designed for all-season horticultural inter- inspiring many new clients to commission a est, with an emphasis on foliage and the color Shipman garden. One editor summed up a well- green. Juniper and pachysandra carried the publicized garden in Philadelphia: "Sheltered garden through winter. In the adjacent formal and friendly and livable ... a delightful bit of garden, her prescription for perpetual bloom- artistry, so skilful and so finely balanced that from bulbs in spring, heliotrope and petunias one forgets the plan and is conscious only of the in summer, and asters and boltoma in the pervasive pleasantness of it all."9 This was the autumn-was precisely outlined on her planting 7

Above, low stone walls and a small reflectmg pool, with plantmgs of bold foliage around the edges, m the Damels garden Photograph by Edith Hastmgs Tracy, 1913 A plan for the garden is below plans. One of Shipman’s planting secrets was that she used no more than six to eight types of flowering plants in each design, letting "each, in its season, dominate the garden. For the time one flower is the guest of honor and is merely supplemented with other flowers."1’ The other flowers were drawn from lists that she main- tained in her working notebooks. If the client was not a gardener herself, then Shipman helped her find a gardener who could maintain the gar- den to her satisfaction. In the Greenough garden, the farthest point from the house, under a dense tree canopy, was the setting for a naturalistic garden with a pool. Although Shipman will forever be associated with flower borders, she designed a number of wild gardens, sometimes in association with Warren Manning. As in the Greenough garden, she augmented the naturalistic effect by using native stone and creating tiny rills of running water. As a formal counterpart, she also incor- porated sculptures, such as a tiny frog sitting on a lily pad. The planting palette included a wide variety of native and non-native species to make 8

A naturalistic pool with natme plants, part of a garden in Brookline, Massachuseels, demgned for Mrs Henry V Greenough m 1926. Photograph by Dorothy Jarvis, c 1931. it seem as natural as possible: mountain ash, The enclosed garden, with whitewashed brick arborvitae, hemlock, dogwood, laurel, rhodo- walls, is divided into three long, narrow gardens, dendron, viburnum, big-leaf saxifrage, calla lil- each on a successively lower level and each with ies, waterlilies, iris, eupatorium, shortia, and its own distinctive character. The uppermost native creepmg woodland and water-loving garden, planted with iris and peonies in low plants.12 clipped hedges, has as its centerpiece a central, For Mrs. Holden McGinley (Mrs. Greenough’s bluestone-bordered lily pool extending the sister), Shipman designed a large garden in length of the garden. The pool itself is a classic Milton in 1925 that was awarded a blue ribbon Lutyens and Jekyll design, clearly lifted from by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society for the pages of Gertrude Jekyll and Lawrence its "great charm and restraint ... planted in an Weaver’s pivotal book, Gardens for Small Coun- unusually interesting manner."13 It exemplifies try Houses ~ (1912). the best of Shipman’s approach to garden design The long, narrow central garden, on axis with at the peak of her career. The gently sloping site the door of the sunroom of the house, has a cen- overlooking the Blue Hills to the south, with tral greensward flanked by perennial borders, massive trees on the west and north, elicited an with a blue-bronze sculpture at the far end. imaginative design solution. To take advantage Hedges of Carolina hemlock and low walls, of the view, Shipman created a two-part plan with posts covered with climbing roses, sepa- that coaxed visitors across the lawn and into a rate this area from the gardens on either side. walled garden before glimpsing the view out- The lower garden is given over almost entirely ward to the hills. to roses-’Golden Salmon’ polyanthus around 9

For Mrs Holden McGinley of Milton, Massachusetts, Shipman designed a garden of successively descendmg rooms. The upper one, with the bluestone nll, has yellow ’Emily Gray’ roses covenng the walls. A lotus fountam is the centerpiece of the middle garden, and the lower one is filled with roses. Photograph by Herbert W Gleason, 1932 ~

In the McGinley garden, an opening in the wall of the lower garden frames a mew of the Blue Hills m the distance. Photograph by Herbert W Gleason, 1932 10

The spnng border m the McGmley garden has double-flowermg peach trees, pearlbush ~Exochorda racemosa), Spiraea prunifolia, daphne, Phlox dmamcata, and flowermg almonds. Photograph by Herbert W. Gleason, 1932. the central circular pool and lotus-leaf fountain; already begun to disappear before she died in standard and bush roses, hybrid teas and 1950. Another aspect is that her practice was perpetuals in apricot, copper, and yellow tones devoted almost exclusively to private gardens, in the beds. and only a handful of these have been converted Another delightful bit of Shipman’s artistry to public use. Had circumstances been other- can be seen in the spring border adjacent to the wise, two Massachusetts gardens could have house. Along the walls she placed double- fallen mto the latter category. flowering peach trees interspersed with pearl- In 1925 Shipman prepared plans for replanting bush, and overhead, a canopy of flowering part of Alice Longfellow’s garden in Cambridge, almonds. Masses of tulips in shades of pink originally laid out by Martha Brookes and lavender-" crescendos, as she called them Hutcheson in 1904. Hutcheson was no longer in her planting notes-were underplanted designing gardens at the time of Shipman’s com- with pansies and Phlox divaricata. A simple mission. Shipman’s charge was to rejuvenate stone-lined dirt path separated the border from the garden by preparing planting plans, plant the lawn. lists, and horticultural notes only, without any Even though the example of Shipman’s career, changes to the overall design of the garden. 14 and those of Beatrix Farrand and Marian Coffin, Many other landscape architects would not opened the door for women in the profession of have done this type of work-rejuvenating landscape architecture, relatively few examples gardens designed by others-but Shipman’s of Shipman’s work can be seen today. One willingness to do so exemplifies her complai- reason is that her gardens, which were unusu- sant attitude toward garden design. It may also ally plant-intensive and therefore fragile, had account for the large number of projects she car- 11I

ried out in her career, six hundred as opposed to Durham, North Carolina. Both of these gardens Farrand’s two hundred. The Shipman plantings are hosting symposia in 1998 to honor the sig- disappeared years ago and now the property is nificance of Ellen Biddle Shipman. known as the Longfellow National Historic Site and managed by the National Park Service. The Notes I historic significance of the landscape, includmg Shipman, foreword, Garden Note Book, p 4 (box 10, Shipman’s planting plans, is currently bemg folder 15, Rare and Manuscripts Collection, Cornell evaluated with the that University). possibility Shipman’s 2 be reinstated.’s Manning, letter to Frank Selberlmg, Akron, Ohio, 20 garden may July 1917 (Archives, Stan Hwyet Hall). In 1930 sketched a April Shipman prelimi- ~ Hall of and for the "House and Garden’s Own Fame," House nary design plan Long Hill, Beverly, Garden, June 1933, 50. Massachusetts, home of Mrs. Ellery Sedgwick ° Ibid , 1 (better known as Mabel Cabot Sedgwick, the ’ Mary Caroline Crawford, "Homes and Gardens of now a property of The Trustees garden writer), Cornish," House Beautiful, April 1906, 12-14 of Reservations. Shipman proposed a series of 6 See Jane Brown, into Gardener- rooms the house and "Lady Landscape garden encircling taking Beatrix Farrand’s Early Years at the Arnold Arbo- full advantage of the dramatic setting. All the retum," Arnoldia 51 (Fall 1991)’ 2-10 features associated with work can be Shipman’s ~ Design chapter, Garden Note Book, 38. found in this plan, including three square gar- s Preface, Garden Note Book, 2. dens to the east of the house, one of which was 9 "Three Pennsylvama Gardens," Garden Magazme a rose garden with a serpentine wall and dolphin and Home Bmlder, September 1924, 11. fountain. There were several pools, long walks, lo See and m Mac a series of terraces plan photograph Gnswold, boxwood-edged flowerbeds, "Fairsted," Arnoldia 56 (Summer 1996): 11. descendmg the hill, and woodland paths. The v 11 Lamar Sparks, "A Landscape Architect Discusses areas farthest from the house were to be planted Gardens," Better Homes and Gardens, November with native plants, especially flowering trees 1930,20 and while the areas closer to the house lz shrubs, "Variety of Form and Abundance of Bloom within a were more formally planted. Had her scheme Small Area: The Garden of Mrs. Henry V. Greenough, been installed, we would have had a delightful Brookhne, Massachusetts," House Beautiful, March example of Shipman’s mature work. Mabel had 1931,62. 13 her own ideas about the garden, so the project Ethel B Power, "A Blue-Ribbon Garden’ The Garden went no further. of Mrs. Holden McGmley," House Beautiful, March While the "bones" of several of Shipman’s pri- 1933, 8G-89, 118. 14 Catherme National Historic vate gardens in the Boston area have survived- Evans, Longfellow Site, Cultural Landscape Report, Boston. National Park stone or has been walls, pools, paths-none yet Service, 1993, 71-73. discovered with the original plantings and it is 1’ The National Park Service is that will be found. For currently reassessmg unlikely they Shipman the garden. Shary Page Berg and Lauren Meier, gardens open to the public, the garden visitor Longfellow National Historic Site, Cultural must travel; one of the best examples of her Landscape Report, Volume 2 Analysis, Significance, work is Stan Hwyet Hall, m Akron, Ohio. As in Integmty, forthcommg 16 the Longfellow garden, Shipman’s task was to To learn more about Stan Hywet Hall, see Judith B "The of Ellen rejuvenate a walled garden originally designed Tankard, Artistry Shipman," Horticulture, January 1997, 72-76. by Warren Manning. The garden was recently restored, following Shipman’s 1929 plans and planting lists but using modern-day cultivars to Judith B Tankard teaches British garden history in create her precise color scheme.’~ Two other the landscape design program at Radcliffe Semmars, Radcliffe and at the Arnold Arboretum. She has gardens that may be visited are examples of her College, written two books on Gertrude Jekyll and a new book, late work: Vue Gardens in New Longue Orleans, The Gardens of Ellen Biddle Shipman, all published designed for Edith and Edgar Stern m 1936, and by Sagapress. She is also editor of the Journal of New the terrace gardens at Sarah P. Duke Gardens, in England Garden History Society.