‘Connecticut motive’: Beatrix Farrand and the Marsh Botanic Garden of Yale University 1922–1939

Abstract

Little survives today of the Marsh Botanic Garden of Yale University as it was designed and planted by Beatrix Farrand in the 1920s. But there still endures, the venerable white oak, a critical player in the dialogue that accompanied the garden's evolution. It remains standing in the center of the eight-acre garden that surrounds a turreted stone mansion at the top of science hill on Prospect Street in New Haven, its central branches rent by storms into a horizontal silhouette, which stoops and arches, still casting its cool shade across Yale afternoons. It was there, on one such Saturday afternoon, in the autumn of 1931, that a group of field botanists, members of the Connecticut Botanical Society, ‘remained to lunch under one of the great white oak trees in the grounds surrounding the Marsh gardens’ (figure 1). They had been admiring the two rare gordonia shrubs blooming in the Farnam Memorial Garden on the opposite side of Prospect Street. A year earlier, the same group had witnessed gentians from the pine barrens of New Jersey, pinks from the salt marshes, 25 varieties of aster and 35 of goldenrod, and a dozen different sunflowers: all plants indigenous to North America, raised from collected seed and ‘now in full bloom in the ordinary garden soil’ of the Marsh Botanic Garden.1