When the distinguished American landscape architect Ellen Shipman (1869-1950) first arrived at Graycliff, on October 27, 1929, she must have been awed by the expansive horizon of Lake Erie, viewed from the house, 60 feet above the dramatic Tichenor limestone bluff.  Shipman had been invited by Isabelle Reidpath Martin and Darwin D. Martin to consult on creating gardens for their Frank Lloyd Wright-designed summer retreat, 20 miles south of their primary residence on Jewett Parkway in Buffalo. Darwin Martin, a prosperous Buffalo business executive, had purchased the land in April 1926, and construction took place between 1927 and 1931.

Shipman had arrived after the house was substantially completed, just five days after the great stock market crash that upended the American economy, precipitating the Great Depression. In his diary that day, Darwin Martin wrote: “Mrs. Shipman at G.” followed by “Anxious days because of Stock Market panics.” The story of Shipman’s extraordinary life as a primarily self-educated garden designer, her relationship to the Martins and contribution to the ensemble of landscape and architecture at Graycliff comprises a remarkable chapter in the history of landscape design in America. By the time the Martins had invited her to visit, Shipman was at the height of her career. She had designed hundreds of gardens from New York to Seattle, collaborated with leading architects and was featured in national publications across the United States.

Catalyzed by Isabelle Martin’s desire for a peaceful family gathering place, the lakeside retreat that would become known as Graycliff was initiated approximately 20 years after Wright had designed the Martin’s city residence at 143 Jewett Parkway. The Darwin Martin House is one of Wright’s earliest and most significant masterworks; it commanded attention as one of Buffalo’s first modern houses and served as a bustling domestic environment for the Martins, their children, Margaret and Darwin R., and extended family.

For Graycliff, Darwin Martin stipulated in his correspondence with Wright that Isabelle was to be his client, and that the design for the house must adhere to her strict specifications. Renowned for her love of flowers and talent for arranging them, Isabelle would later reap the bounty of the flourishing perennial gardens that Ellen Shipman would design for her there.  Much has been documented about the dynamic, if sometimes conflicted, working relationship between Darwin Martin and Frank Lloyd Wright, but it is instructive to re-orient our perspective, and to bring Isabelle Martin and Ellen Shipman into focus as women whose horticultural knowledge and collaboration brought the landscape at Graycliff to its fullest expression. 

By the time Shipman met the Martins in 1929, she was one of America’s most prolific and highly sought-after garden designers. During her career, which spanned approximately 30 years, Shipman designed more than 600 gardens across 29 states, Quebec and Bermuda—an astounding body of work. Western New York was a particularly fruitful region for Shipman, where in addition to the Martins, she designed, or consulted on, gardens for at least 17 clients, including the Knox, Forman, Miller-Edison, Schoelkopf, Larkin and Gaylord families. The Shipman sites in Western New York comprise a treasure trove of prospective scholarship and they deserve recognition following upon the success of the garden restorations at Graycliff, the Miller Edison Cottage at Chautauqua and, more recently, a privately-owned garden on Oakland Place in Buffalo. The Oakland Place garden was originally designed for Georgia Greene Forman (1898-1994), who engaged Shipman to consult on the residential garden in the early 1930s. Mrs. Forman’s name is included in the client list that Shipman’s secretary assembled when Shipman closed her New York City office.

Isabelle Reidpath and Ellen McGowan Biddle were both born 1869. The daughter of Ellen McGowan and James Biddle, a career soldier from a prominent Philadelphia family, Ellen spent her childhood at frontier military outposts where her father was stationed in the American West. In Nevada, James Biddle cultivated a garden and taught Ellen about the value of trees. She was privately tutored and later attended Miss Sarah Randolph’s School in Baltimore, but the time she spent as a child in the outdoors, amidst acacia and mesquite trees, was perhaps more impactful to her development than her formal education. From her youth, Ellen displayed an interest in the relationship between plants and art, making sketches of houses and gardens in the margins of her early schoolwork.

In the late 1800s, Isabelle’s Buffalo was a burgeoning city whose growing economic wealth was enhanced by the visionary accomplishment of Olmstead and Vaux’s newly developed system of parkways and parks. Situated at the intersection of the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, Buffalo was the epicenter of steel and grain mill production, enabled by the labor of immigrants from Italy, Germany, Poland and Ireland. Niagara Falls provided the source for hydroelectric power that allowed Buffalo, the “City of Light,” to become the first to employ widespread electric lighting. 

In 1889, Isabelle married Darwin Martin, a self-made millionaire and lead executive for the Larkin Company—a soap and mail-order operation that rapidly expanded as a result of his business acumen. The couple had two children, Dorothy and Darwin R. Martin. Isabelle suffered from a degenerative eye condition, but this would never prevent her from embarking on family trips to Europe and throughout the United States, nor from engaging in philanthropic efforts with her husband, including their mutual support for progressive education, especially for the Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, KY.  

Isabelle’s artistry in flower arranging would have been acceptable for a woman of her wealth and status, as well as one of the keys to understanding her relationship to Ellen Shipman. In a Pictorialist photograph by Louise F. Mueller from 1912, the 43-year-old Isabelle reaches toward a flower arrangement in her living room, dressed in a flowing ivory gown with intricately gathered and tucked sleeves. This stylish garment reflects a transition in women’s fashion between the Edwardian and Art Deco periods, which featured raised waistlines and rich fabrics that were cut and draped to evoke Asian garments or the costumes of the Ballet Russes.

In the early 1890s, Ellen Biddle briefly attended Harvard Annex (Radcliffe College) in Boston, where she found intellectually stimulating friendships and was likely active in the suffrage movement. She left college to marry Louis Shipman, an aspiring playwright with whom she had three children. The Shipmans moved to Cornish, NH, one of America’s earliest and most influential artist colonies, home to artists including Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Maria Oakley Dewing, Maxfield Parrish and landscape architects Rose Standish Nichols and Charles Adams Platt. It was here that Shipman began her journey in creating gardens. By 1910, the Shipman’s marriage had dissolved after Louis left. Ellen Shipman now had three young children to raise and sole responsibility for earning an independent living to support her family.

Her friendships at Cornish gave Ellen the foundation to build a new life. Embedded within a culture that recognized garden making as an artistic pursuit that elevated physical health, intellectual enlightenment and progressive social action, she made her own gardens. Influenced by the American Colonial Revival movement, she did the hard labor of learning to create lush gardens combining native plants with old-fashioned flowers, sculptural ornaments and natural dirt paths. The garden of Augustus Saint-Gaudens was particularly influential and one that Shipman emulated in gardens that she created for her two homes, Poins House and, later, Brook Place in Plainfield, NH. At Brook Place, Shipman educated herself in interior design, a secondary profession from which she earned a living. Even after she had established her landscape architecture office in New York City, Brook Place remained both a retreat and showplace for many years.

Landscape architecture was a nascent profession in the United States at the turn of the 19th century, and although gardening was socially acceptable, women were rarely admitted to the college and university programs that provided training in surveying, mining and engineering required for a practicing designer. Botany was one course of study that women could pursue, but the highly specialized training required to become a professional, not to mention cultivating a business clientele, were virtually off limits to working or middle-class women. One exception for some women seeking a formal education was the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture in Groton, MA, which opened in 1901 under the direction of Judith Eleanor Low. The first school of its kind for women, it offered landscape gardening, elementary architecture, horticulture, botany and allied subjects. It merged with the Rhode Island School of Design in 1945.

Unlike her contemporaries who came from wealthy families, Shipman could not afford private instruction from male landscape architects or travel to Europe to visit significant gardens, nor did she attend Lowthorpe. Nevertheless, Shipman was among a small group of women who were the first to establish independent landscape architecture practices, including Marian Cruger Coffin (1876-1957), Beatrix Farrand (1872-1959), Rose Standish Nichols (1872-1960), Annette Hoyt Flanders (1922-1996) and Martha Brookes Hutchison (1871-1959). 

Shipman educated herself by making her own gardens in New Hampshire, reading journals such as House Beautiful, House and Garden and books on garden design such as The Garden Month by Mabel Cabot Sedgwick. The esprit de corps and competition inherent within a community of artists for whom gardens were a form of high art also contributed to her inherent talent at combining plants as a painter would compose colors.

In 1910, Shipman’s talent was recognized by Charles Platt and he invited her to study drafting and construction within his firm.  Platt greatly admired her horticultural knowledge and artistic eye and, by 1913, she was his collaborator as well as independently designing gardens for private clients. Seven years later, in 1920, she opened her own office on Beekman Place in New York City.

How the Martins first encountered Ellen Shipman is not exactly known, but by 1929, Shipman was a highly sought-after practitioner who had already designed a garden for Mina Miller Edison, daughter of Chautauqua Institution co-founder Lewis Miller and wife of Thomas Edison, around the Chautauqua cottage where she had spent her childhood summers. It is my view that Isabelle and Darwin were likely referred to Shipman through John Larkin Jr., the son of John D. Larkin, Darwin’s boss at the Larkin Soap Company. The Larkin family owned a nearby lake property in Derby, where Darwin had been a guest, and John Jr. was listed among Ellen Shipman’s clients. The referral could also have been made through the social network of Buffalo’s wealthy families. In the early 1930s, Shipman was also engaged in projects for Helen and Seymour Knox II, as well as Seymour’s sister Marjorie Knox and Hazard Campbell, in East Aurora and Aitken, SC.  

By the time Shipman had arrived at Graycliff, the Martins had received Wright’s broadly defined landscape rendering that emphasized a circular water garden near the entrance. Shipman was asked to augment and refine the plan for the eight-acre property.  Given Isabelle’s desire for access to flower gardens, she would certainly have been responsive to Shipman’s reputation for creating lush, intricate beds and picking borders with successions of color and texture. Her strong preference for the use of native plants and trees would also impact the project, unifying the relationships between the architecture and natural landscape beyond.  

Shipman was also particularly sought after by women clients who wanted artistically expressive gardens that reflected their taste, desire for privacy and enclosure to enjoy solitude or conversation and hospitality with family and friends. Shipman’s good-natured personality and attunement to the social and familial dynamics of a garden, as well as her willingness to revise the works of prior architects, made for long-lasting and trusted friendships with clients such as Gertrude Sieberling, Clara Ford and Edith and Edgar Stern. 

When Ellen received Wright's initial Graycliff plan, (dated November 1, 1929, with her office stamp) she immediately went to work. To pore over the actual document in the Ellen Shipman archive in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University Library is a revelatory experience. The instinctual thinking and skillful hand of an accomplished designer in the process of revision is all there. “Take this out” she dashes off above Wright’s suggested sunken pool, while adjustments are made to the lines of various pathways and borders.  To screen neighboring properties and define the landscape edges she notes, “heavy high planting” and “native materials.”

It took Shipman only a month to complete this plan, dated November 1929. It reveals her characteristic style of creating landscape rooms that are near the house, and transitions from enclosed, axial layouts to areas that were broader and meant for recreation or vegetable production. Notably, on the west side of the house, a more formal, enclosed parterre garden with geometric beds and a curved garden seat (seen in other Shipman gardens) was never realized, likely because it would have required enormous maintenance at a time when the Martins were facing significant financial crises. This rejection of an enclosed formal space may also have been considered by the Martins as infringing too much on Wright’s original vision. In the January 1930 revised plan, we recognize the very features that are now beautifully restored, including the double-border cutting garden, croquet lawns, sunken garden (originally on Wright’s design), esplanade and shrub and tree property borders. 

Working with the Martins through 1931, additional drawings specify tree and shrub plantings for the house area, heavy plantings for the east boundary and a general tree planting for the estate. To study these drawings is to be astounded by Shipman’s deep expertise as a practical horticulturist with a highly sophisticated artistic eye for how plants develop in three-dimensional space over time. Detailed instructions are included for soil preparation, placement of plants and their sizes that would have been essential to the success of the garden’s development. “Great care should be taken that plants are not in straight rows,” and “When all the Taxus are planted, the lilies are to be arranged in groups of 3 to five…”  Historic photographs from the 1930s indicate that Shipman’s planting plans were generally followed, with a few modifications. She recommended replacing Wright’s pond design in the front drive with a circular lawn and apple trees. The pond was eventually removed about 1932.

Ellen was truly ahead of her time in her use of native plants, which she often used in transitional/border areas outside the garden proper. I believe this would have aligned with Isabelle Martin’s appreciation for the conifer trees near Lake Placid that she would have known from family vacations there. In her unpublished manuscript, “Garden Notes,” Shipman writes, “Blue Spruce are beautiful in the mountains of Colorado and Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora may be in Japan but not in our front lawns. Eschew all outlandish plants and you will greatly add to the permanent beauty of your place.” Vintage catalogs from nurseries in Fredonia and Buffalo, including West Hill from the New York Botanical Garden archives, document the rich diversity of herbaceous perennials, annuals, trees and shrubs that were available within a stone’s throw of Graycliff.  The Graycliff restoration sought to retain historic plants where possible, including laurel leaf willow, flowering crabapples and viburnums while new plants were introduced according to the cultural landscape report and schematic treatment plan that were undertaken beginning in 2008.

Shipman continued to refine her planting plans from 1929 through 1931. By 1931, on the eve of the Great Depression, the culmination of Frank Lloyd Wright’s and Ellen Shipman’s work was complete. After the deaths of Darwin (1935) and Isabelle (1943), the property was acquired by the Piarists, a religious order, for a religious community center and school. Graycliff underwent numerous changes and Shipman’s gardens were largely abandoned. In the late 1990s, the Graycliff Conservancy was established, and the property received New York Landmark designation, leading to a multiyear, phased restoration supported by private and public grants. Heritage Landscapes, led by Patricia O’Donnell, prepared the 2008 cultural landscape report, which was followed by an additional treatment plan in 2011 by Pressley Associates. The project to restore the gardens to their ca. 1931 condition was substantially completed in 2019 and managed by then-lead horticulturist Nellie Gardner. There remain a few areas, such as the vegetable garden and orchard, that are still undergoing renewal.

While there is no known correspondence between Shipman and the Martins, I am confident that mutual admiration and respect anchored the relationship of Isabelle and Ellen, both 56 years old in 1929. Both women valued the replenishing power of horticulture and understood that a relationship to the natural world was an essential part of a fulfilling life. For Isabelle, with compromised eyesight and the limited independence that condition necessitated, the creation of a retreat filled with the sensual pleasures of fragrant flowering plants, trees, a vegetable garden and orchard would have undoubtedly drawn the two together. Photographs of the Martin family convey happy times enjoying picnics, planting, harvesting and playing games. 

To our great fortune, the confluence of desires and skillful collaboration that originally formed the landscape at Graycliff is now a publicly accessible and legible cultural landmark, thanks to the comprehensive, multi-year restoration of house and landscape undertaken by Graycliff Conservancy and its executive directors, donors, volunteers and staff. In many ways, this endeavor project exemplifies the original collaboration between the Martin family, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ellen Shipman to create a dwelling filled with light, fresh air and gardens. The restored architecture and gardens, and seamless transition between interior and outdoor spaces, restores our connection to the lake, the sky and the horizon beyond, reminding us of a central mission of historic preservation—to study, value and protect the treasures of our natural and built environments for the benefit of future generations.

Rebecca Allan is a New York-based painter, garden designer and founder of Painterly Gardens. She is also a board member of the Kentucky Natural Lands Trust.