By: Priscilla Williams
In what is nearly a footnote to garden history, the small town of Groton, Massachusetts was once home to the first school of landscape architecture and horticulture for women. Starting with a potpourri of subjects in 1901, the Lowthorpe School honed in on teaching landscape architecture in the 1910s.
With the old Boston connections of its well-traveled founder, Judith Eleanor Motley Low, the school attracted leading lights of the field such as Sargent, Olmsted, and Dawson to teach and advise. Designers Fletcher Steele and Ellen Biddle Shipman were lecturers and mentors. The tone was set for a very high caliber of education, and the “Lowthorpe spirit” was instilled in its graduates. When the school merged with the Rhode Island School of Design in 1945, it brought the landscape architecture department to a new region.
My research and book will tell the stories of key graduates and faculty from each decade and showcase gardens to visit today designed by Lowthorpe graduates.
This article will feature Elsa Rehmann, class of 1911, who was one of the first known Lowthorpe graduates. At a time when careers, rather than marriage and motherhood, for educated women were a new concept, Rehmann was able to successfully combine designing, writing, and teaching. Meeting Edith Roberts at Vassar and observing her cutting-edge teaching landscape changed Rehmann’s philosophy of gardening from the prevailing gardenesque style to ecologically based. The two women were pioneers who introduced concepts of ecology and naturalistic design to a broad public.
You may have encountered the slim volume entitled American Plants for American Gardens by Edith A. Roberts and Elsa Rehmann. If not, find it at once. Published originally in 1929, it was reprinted in 1996 with updated nomenclature.
The book profiles 11 plant communities, or associations of plants, in the northeastern United States, including the open field, the juniper hillside, the gray birches, the stream-side, and the oak woods. Each chapter ends with a plant list, although modern readers will need to cull the recommended use of some invasive plants. The writing combines art and science and provides a succinct overview for anyone designing and planting in this region today. It is both a field guide and a primer. At the time, it was the first book on plant ecology and the use of native plants in gardening written for a popular audience. This was decades before Sara Stein, Rick Darke, Doug Tallamy, and other modern proponents of the theme.
Elsa Rehmann (1886-1946)
Rehmann was raised in Forest Hill, the garden city section of Newark, New Jersey, in an artistic household. Her father was an architect and the principal of a local drawing school that both his daughters likely attended as young women. At Wells College, Rehmann was moved by the memorial tribute book, Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect, and inspired to investigate this emerging field as a career. She later transferred to Barnard where she studied history and writing, graduating in 1908. She immediately enrolled at the Lowthorpe School. This three-year program included hands-on horticultural work in the school’s gardens, accompanied by surveying, drawing, and design studies.
Rehmann graduated in 1911 and went to work for landscape architect Charles Lowrie in New York City, assisting in the design of parks, campuses, and estates. It was surely a coup to land this position in the office of one of the founders of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Women were rarely employed by male-owned firms as professionals. She then moved to estate design projects in the office of noted landscape architect Marian Coffin. During these years, she wrote a book aimed at the serious gardener and the professional landscape architect: The Small Place (1918), analyzed 15 designs for residential properties created by colleagues. She collaborated with her sister, Antoinette Perrett, on its photography.
Both women wrote numerous garden articles for popular magazines such as Vogue and House and Garden. Subjects covered the gardenesque style so popular in the day. In 1919 Rehmann set up her own practice in Newark, designing residential gardens in the mid-Atlantic and New England regions. She published her second book, Garden-Making, in 1926, a compilation of her magazine articles, and this time included examples of her own design work.
Edith Roberts (1881-1977)
Roberts grew up on a farm in New Hampshire and graduated from Smith College in 1905. She earned two graduate degrees from the University of Chicago where she was mentored by Henry Cowles, an early proponent of the emerging study of ecology. After a stint as an extension agent traveling around the 48 states to educate women on how to farm in the absence of men during World War I, she came to Vassar to teach Botany in 1919. Two years later she was named full professor and chair of the department she later renamed Plant Science.
Roberts promptly went out into the field and investigated the flora of her new region, Dutchess County, New York. Gaining permission from the college to establish a “botanic garden” of every plant native to the county, she and her students organized a messy four-acre plot into “associations” of plant communities such as the open field, the juniper hillside, the stream-side, the oak woods, and the bog. A small stream, the Fonteynkill, helpfully ran through the plot. The site became an outdoor teaching laboratory for her classes that spurred many investigations into plant physiology and seed germination of native plants. She also was keenly interested in connecting the local community and gardeners everywhere with the science of plant ecology. The teaching laboratory was always open as a public garden.
Roberts and Rehmann Collaborate
Vassar secured funding for a part-time instructor in landscape architecture in 1923. Rehmann got the job and worked under the aegis of Roberts. Meanwhile, Roberts had already compiled native plant lists by community type and secured funding from the Garden Club of America in 1922 to publish a brochure aimed at the public. She asked Rehmann to expand on these plant lists, writing about how one might utilize each list in the landscape. It was the ideal assignment for the would-be poet and experienced writer. Interestingly, she includes suggestions for laying out a residential property in each association and creating appropriate architectural details such as roofing, terraces, and siding to best harmonize with the surrounding environment. In 1927-28, House Beautiful magazine serialized the articles. Editor Ethel B. Power, architect and graduate of Lowthorpe’s rival Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture for Women, was certainly on board with the content. Macmillan published the articles in book form in 1929.
Rehmann offers many tips for the would-be designer, ranging from planting in layers from the overstory to the ground layer, establishing masses of plants, and keeping pine needles in place to carpet a path. Hints at the underlying soil type that determines plant distribution are made. There are even suggestions for ecological restoration: how to reclaim the environment if the plow and axe have uprooted a portion of the site. In this case, “existing vegetation may become the keynote” for further planting. Intensive observation was encouraged.
Sadly, there was no resounding chorus of approval from colleagues when the book first appeared. Why not? Perhaps the feeling was that these were “women’s ideas” and fine for students and amateurs. Many landscape architecture firms were segregated into men-only and women-only at the time. There was likely increased competition for client commissions with the onset of the Depression. All firms had to rapidly adapt to survive and may not have been in a position to implement new design concepts. Meanwhile, the Modernist style trend was beginning, in which native plants had little importance.
In 1933, both women published articles in professional journals: Roberts in Ecology to commemorate via photographs and lists the 10th anniversary of the opening of her Outdoor Ecological Laboratory, and Rehmann in Landscape Architecture. Rehmann made a final plea to include native plants per the associations, even in suburban subdivisions and large-scale plantings. She called for others to develop lists of plant communities in other regions of the country, beyond the Northeast.
Rehmann left Vassar in 1927. She then stepped back from her profession to devote herself to poetry writing with some occasional lecturing at the Lowthorpe and Cambridge Schools in the 1930s. Rockport, Massachusetts became her home, shared with her sister and artist husband. Roberts continued to research, teach, and write, co-authoring a history of plant life in Dutchess County, New York in 1938 with a local historian. She worked on native roadside plantings on the Taconic Parkway with students. In 1946 she left Vassar for MIT.
Photo of Vassar Students
Vassar’s Ecological Laboratory
With Roberts’ departure, the Outdoor Ecological Laboratory fell into neglect under a new administration not interested in pursuing this line of study. The site was fairly obliterated by the 1960s. Part of the garden was lost to road straightening on the abutting Raymond Avenue. In 1994, a boardwalk was constructed around the Fonteynkill. A new Bridge for Laboratory Sciences building was constructed from 2011-16, with very innovative ark-style architecture spanning the stream and nestled between other nearby science buildings. Unfortunately, the college did not maintain the new plantings around the building and even took down young trees. With such disturbances came the invasive plants that have now obscured much of the original outdoor laboratory site. It is estimated that only about 20% of Roberts’ original garden remains, the stream-side association.
Biology Department Chair, Professor Margaret Ronsheim, found remnants of spring ephemerals in this area of campus in 2009. Her studies at Duke focused on these plants, so she wanted to show them to students and explain their adaptations. She heard there once was a Botany professor who had a garden laboratory! Colleague Yvonne Elet, a Vassar art historian, shared an article about the history of campus landscape design that contained more clues. Ronsheim decided to use this concept in her own teaching: outdoor hands-on work.
In her 2010 conservation biology class, the discussion centered on restoration and management, as invasive plants and their impact were coming into focus in the profession. She quickly found that students had no reference point to identify plants, how to weed, edit, or garden. Ronsheim even had to teach how to put a shovel into the ground.
Classes study what has persisted for 100 years on the stream bank: Viburnum, bladdernut, alder, red twig dogwood, groundnut, marsh marigold, royal fern, Jack-in-the-pulpit, dutchman’s breeches. These are what her students replant when they remove invasives; not just specimens. Swamp azalea, for instance, has not established well at the site, but buttonbush has taken hold. Upland, Ronsheim has let a small grove of aspens root. She lets students take ownership of what they plant. Space and time are needed to evaluate success vs. failure, a challenge with an ever-shifting population of college students.
Ronsheim and students are also studying the biology of invasive plants, especially vines that don’t share light with other plants. Vines do very well with increased CO2 in the atmosphere and now grow over the tops of trees, eventually toppling them. Many people today do not remember what the landscape looked like without invasive vines obscuring native vegetation. Ronsheim calls this “generational amnesia.” As Roberts put it: “This type of laboratory will never be finished. Its very dynamic character makes this impossible.”
Conclusion
The inspiring work of Rehmann and Roberts lives on today at Vassar and in all who read, understand, and synthesize their writings. Now we have numerous lists of plant associations across the country through state natural heritage programs and regional non-profits. Concepts of a sense of place, sustainability, and ecologically based design first aired by Rehmann’s pen are now buzzwords among us.
Priscilla Hutt Williams is a garden historian with a varied background in fine gardening and business management. In 2001, she founded an organic landscape gardening company northwest of Boston called Pumpkin Brook Organic Gardening and ran it for 22 years. Working with the Northeast Organic Farming Association, she co-authored the first organic landscape standards in the United States. Earlier careers were in institutional advancement for nonprofit arts organizations in Boston, event planning, and luxury retail sales. She holds music and business degrees and certificates in conservation horticulture, permaculture, and historic landscape preservation.
