“The Dean of American Women Landscape Architects”

When Ellen Biddle Shipman designed the landscape for Mayfair House in 1929, she was already one of the most respected voices in a profession that had been known to exclude women. At the turn of the century, landscape architecture was firmly a male domain, yet Shipman not only broke through, she redefined the field with the philosophy that she would “paint her landscapes with flowers”. This unique approach led her to be hired by R.T. Vanderbilt and Henry Ford.

In 1920, she established her office at Beekman Place in New York City, where she made a deliberate decision to hire women exclusively. She had a particular preference for graduates of the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture for Women in Groton, Massachusetts, one of the few institutions at the time, dedicated to training women.

Her influence was impossible to ignore. In 1933, House & Garden magazine named her the “Dean of American Women Landscape Architects". It was a title that reflected not just her talent, but her decades of advocacy and achievement in a field that had once shut its doors to her.

Shipman lectured widely across the country and her work was celebrated in countless books and publications throughout her career. Upon her retirement in the late 1940’s, Cornell University honored her legacy by dedicating an archival collection to her life and work. The Smithsonian Institution also maintains a dedicated collection documenting her garden designs - a lasting testament to her enduring influence on the American landscape.

MAYFAIR

The problem of a home for two families has been successfully solved in the plan of this double house and the balanced scheme is completed in the two “Siamese” gardens with their twin old lead wall founts and almost identical planting. The original designs for the setting of the house and the twin gardens.

- On the Mayfair House, Garden History of Georgia 1733-1933

A camellia from the garden at Mayfair on the cover of Town & Country Magazine June issue from 1955.

"Until women took up landscaping, gardening in this country was at its lowest ebb. The renaissance of the art was due largely to the fact that women, instead of working over their boards, used plants as if they were painting pictures as an artist."

- Ellen Biddle Shipman

Sources:

“Laurel Hall”, Town & Country Magazine, New York, Hearst Inc.,1955

Cooney, Loraine M, Garden History of Georgia 1733-1933, Athens, Georgia, University go Georgia Press, 2018

Tankard, Judith The Gardens of Ellen Biddle Shipman, Sagaponack, New York, Sagapress, 1996

Tankard, Judith, Ellen Shipman and the American Garden, Athens, Georgia, University of Georgia Press, 2018