Reviews and feature press about the film
"Your film's breadth and quality are gifts - and such a meaningful and
important tribute to Beatrix Farrand and Lynden Miller. Everyone at the EFF
felt so lucky to be able to feature its Washington DC premiere at our Environmental Film Festival.” Flo Stone, Founder of the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital
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"On March 14, with 400 other people at the New York Botanical Garden, I saw the premier of a documentary, Beatrix Farrand's American Landscapes. It was a triumph! The documentary explores Farrand's groundbreaking work as a landscape gardener in the first half of the 20th century, including residential designs like Dumbarton Oaks, the Rockefellers' Eyrie Garden, and our nearby neighbor, Bellefield, as well as public spaces like Yale and Princeton. With almost equal attention, the film describes the narrator, Lynden B. Miller's amazing career as one inspired by and in some ways made possible by Farrand. Everyone left invigorated and more acutely aware of the powerful role landscapes play in our lives. I think they also left with a much better understanding of what a hero Lynden truly is.” Kate Kerin, Landscape Curator at Innisfree Garden
Thirteen.org - ‘Landscape Artists Beatrix Farrand and Lynden Miller’ -May 2020, Christina Knight
“Gardens are good for the soul,” says public garden designer Lynden B. Miller in the documentary Beatrix Farrand’s American Landscapes. Whether in public parks, landscaped cemeteries or private gardens, to spend time outdoors is one of the few past times possible during the coronavirus pandemic. With most of our lives at a standstill, we literally have time to stop and smell the flowers. With the premiere of this film on PBS, we can now learn about those who dedicated their careers to bringing nature to homes, campuses, and public spaces…
New England Home Magazine - “Beatrix Farrand Documentary” - March 2020, Tovah Martin
Anne Cleves Symmes always wanted to make a film documentary of Beatrix Farrand. The trailblazing landscape gardener behind projects as diverse as the blowsy formal beds at Connecticut’s Harkness Memorial State Park, the natural plantings along the carriage roads in Maine’s Acadia National Park, and the tree-swaddled campus at New Jersey’s Princeton University fascinated Symmes, who is the education director at the Beatrix Farrand Garden Association in Hyde Park, New York…
Mount Desert Islander - “Beatrix Farrand featured in new film” - July, 2019, Becky Pritchard
BAR HARBOR — Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted dismissed her as a “dabbler.” No university would accept her. Her own friends thought her professional ambition was “a sort of mild mania.”
Yet Beatrix Farrand, who lived from 1872 to 1959, persisted. And she became the first female landscape architect, leaving her mark in gardens, parks, and other public landscapes across the country…
A well-designed garden can contain a multiverse of plantings, pathways, and surprises. It's living art—a dynamic canvas crafted with thought and purpose. Left unmanaged, it will redesign itself, and the original intent can all but disappear as Mother Nature, untamed, fulfills her deepest desire: to grow. When a relic garden is rediscovered, however, there's a chance it can be restored…
The documentary “Beatrix Farrand’s American Landscapes” will have its Hudson Valley premiere at the Beatrix Farrand Garden at the Bellefield Estate in Hyde Park, New York on June 1 and 2. The film follows public garden designer Lynden B. Miller as she explores the remarkable life and career of America’s first female landscape architect — Beatrix Farrand. Written and directed by Stephen Ives and co-produced and co-written by his wife, Anne Cleves Symmes, the movie interweaves the story of Miller and her pioneering mentor as she journeys to iconic Farrand gardens, engaging designers, scholars and horticulturists in a spirited dialogue about the meaning and importance of this ground-breaking early 20th-century woman…
Friday, March 15, 2019 marked the Sixth Annual Humanities Symposium. To celebrate the occasion, the Humanities Institute, together with NYBG’s Department of Adult Education, invited audiences to the screening of an important new documentary, Beatrix Farrands’s American Landscapes…
WAG Magazine - “Gilded Age gardener” May 2019, Laura Joseph Mogil
Narrated by Miller, the film charts the life and career of America’s first female landscape architect (1872-1959), who designed gardens for the private estates of East Coast society and served as a consultant for some of the country’s most prestigious private universities and colleges. The film features several of her best-known extant public masterpieces, including the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor, Maine, and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C….
