The Ellen Shipman-designed Salvage garden on Manhasset, Long Island.
Gallery-goers have the chance to see some of the grandest and most lushly designed gardens of the past in "The Gardens of Ellen Biddle Shipman," an exhibition on view through March at the PaineWebber Art Gallery, 1285 Sixth Ave. in New York City.
Among the items exhibited are 18 landscape plans by Shipman, on loan from Cornell's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, which houses Shipman's archives.
Shipman (1869-1950) was one of America's foremost women landscape architects. She found success in the male-dominated profession, completing over 200 projects in her career, most of them residential designs. Her designs were noted for their attention to detail and for their lack of exaggeration or opulence.
Cornell acquired the Shipman papers in the 1950s. The extensive collection includes correspondences, bills, orders, vouchers, articles and other printed materials, as well as more than 2,700 photos and 4,700 planting plans and blueprints. Items from the collection were exhibited recently in a Kroch Library exhibition, "Nature by Design: Landscape Architecture Collections in the Cornell University Library."
The papers and plans in the Cornell archive are among the only remains of Shipman's work. She destroyed all her office correspondence. Her gardens, too, have not withstood time. Only two remain, one in Akron, Ohio, the other in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.
Interest in the collection has been considerable. Items have been exhibited at the Parrish Art Museum in Southhampton, N.Y., and at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 200-page monograph on Shipman written by Judith B. Tankard, founding editor of the Journal of the New England Garden History Society and published by Sagapress in association with the Library of American Landscape History. The book project was originated by Cornell professor of landscape architecture Daniel Krall.
The exhibition was organized by the Library of American Landscape History and underwritten by PaineWebber and the National Endowment for the Arts.