Lynden Breed Miller | |
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| Born | December 8, 1938 (age 85) |
| Occupation(s) | Landscape and garden designer |
| Spouse | Leigh Miller |
Lynden B. Miller (born December 8, 1938) is an author, an advocate for public parks and gardens, and a garden designer, [1] best known for her restoration of the Conservatory Garden in New York's Central Park, completed in 1987. [2]
Lynden Ryder Breed grew up in Washington, D. C. and New York. Through her mother, she is a descendant of a long line of lawyers and jurists including Judge William Butler Hornblower. [3] She attended Chapin School (Class of 1956), and graduated from Smith College (Class of 1960), where she studied art and spent her junior year abroad at the University of Florence. [4] She married Leigh Miller, an attorney, in 1966.
Miller pursued a career in fine art painting which spanned 18 years. Combining her aesthetic talents and training, knowledge gained from horticultural classes in Chelsea-Westminster College in England [5] and instruction at the New York Botanical Garden, Miller first designed her own garden at her home in Sharon, Connecticut in 1979. [6] Her selection of plants was influenced by her desire to fill the space like a canvas with texture and color in every season. She experimented with a broad palette of colors and range of native flora, shrubs, annuals and perennials to create her signature painterly plantings.
In 1982, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, a friend who at the time was the Administrator of Central Park, invited Miller to help restore the Conservatory Garden, six neglected and vandalized acres located near Fifth Avenue and 104th Street. [7] [8] Miller raised the money for the project herself, and recruited volunteers to help her replant the overgrown East Harlem garden. [9] Her efforts came at a time when the park was considered by some to be dangerous. The result was a lush refuge that reopened in June 1987. In a 2019 interview, Miller said, "There's something really quite wonderful about being able to bring up connection with nature to people, especially who live in a city." [10]
Miller's very visible success with Central Park led to subsequent commissions, collaborative plantings and redesigns of established gardens. She has been lauded for designs and renewals of numerous urban spaces such as Bryant Park and referred to as "New York City's very own Miss Rumphius" [11] for bringing beauty to everyone. Examples include:
University campuses such as Columbia University [22] Princeton University, and Stony Brook University have sought out Miller's expertise. In 1996, Miller was asked to update the gardens at Columbia in time for the Centennial observation of their move to the Morningside campus. At Princeton, Miller was invited in 2005 to work with Michael Van Valkenburgh as the university's consulting gardening architect, focusing on the 17 gardens that are distributed throughout the campus. [23] As part of a team that included architects Beyer Blinder Belle, [24] they sought ways to make planting choices that respected the history of the property but also took climate change into account such as installing fewer annuals and substituting perennials.
Miller is adamant about working on public gardens rather than private properties. A good example of this is her collaboration with Dutch bulb grower Hans van Waardenburg in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks; Miller launched and co-founded the Daffodil Project and together with NYC Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, she led the planting of thousands of daffodils throughout the park system to honor the victims of the attack. As of 2019, over 7.5 million daffodils have been planted in parks, school yards, community gardens and tree beds on sidewalks throughout the five boroughs. Miller's contributions to this program were recognized with the naming of a narcissus "Lovely Lynden" in her honor. [25] [26]
Miller has lectured widely on garden design, horticulture and advocacy for public spaces. She has written articles for numerous magazines and botanical publications including Fine Gardening, [27] the Royal Horticultural Society Journal, American Nurseryman, and American Horticulturist. Her book, Parks, Plants, and People: Beautifying the Urban Landscape won a Horticultural Society National Book Award in 2010. The book details not only her approach to designing attractive gardens for public use but also how to secure funding and volunteers for these maintenance heavy endeavors. Miller's central tenet is "Make it gorgeous and they will come. Keep it that way and they will help." [28]
Most recently she narrated and hosted a documentary about one of America's most notable landscape architects, Beatrix Jones Farrand called Beatrix Farrand, American Landscapes. [29] The film was directed by Stephen Ives and produced by Anne Cleves Symmes. [30]
Miller started teaching at NYU in 2006 as an adjunct professor in their Urban Design and Architecture Program. [31]
Miller serves on the Boards of the Central Park Conservancy, the New York Botanical Garden and New Yorkers for Parks. [32] She is also a member of the Friends of the Botanic Garden Advisory Committee at Smith College. [33]
Miller is married to Leigh Miller and has two sons, Marshall and Gifford and two step-sons, Ethan and Christian. Her son [37] Gifford Miller is a politician. [38]
Beatrix Cadwalader Farrand was an American landscape gardener and landscape architect. Her career included commissions to design about 110 gardens for private residences, estates and country homes, public parks, botanic gardens, college campuses, and the White House. Only a few of her major works survive: Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden on Mount Desert, Maine, the restored Farm House Garden in Bar Harbor, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, and elements of the campuses of Princeton, Yale, and Occidental.
Landscape architecture is the design of outdoor areas, landmarks, and structures to achieve environmental, social-behavioural, or aesthetic outcomes. It involves the systematic design and general engineering of various structures for construction and human use, investigation of existing social, ecological, and soil conditions and processes in the landscape, and the design of other interventions that will produce desired outcomes.
The early history of gardening is largely entangled with the history of agriculture, with gardens that were mainly ornamental generally the preserve of the elite until quite recent times. Smaller gardens generally had being a kitchen garden as their first priority, as is still often the case.
An arboretum is a botanical collection composed exclusively of trees and shrubs of a variety of species. Originally mostly created as a section in a larger garden or park for specimens of mostly non-local species, many modern arboreta are in botanical gardens as living collections of woody plants and are intended at least in part for scientific study.
The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) is a botanical garden at Bronx Park in the Bronx, New York City. Established in 1891, it is located on a 250-acre (100 ha) site that contains a landscape with over one million living plants; the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, a greenhouse containing several habitats; and the LuEsther T. Mertz Library, which contains one of the world's largest collections of botany-related texts. As of 2016, over a million people visit the New York Botanical Garden annually.
Landscape design is an independent profession and a design and art tradition, practiced by landscape designers, combining nature and culture. In contemporary practice, landscape design bridges the space between landscape architecture and garden design.
The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) is a professional association for landscape architects in the United States. The ASLA's mission is to advance landscape architecture through advocacy, communication, education, and fellowship.
Joseph Forsyth Johnson was an English landscape architect and disciple of John Ruskin. He "played a pivotal role in introducing the notion of naturalistic planting."
A garden designer is someone who designs the plan and features of gardens, either as an amateur or professional. The compositional elements of garden design and landscape design are: terrain, water, planting, constructed elements and buildings, paving, site characteristics and genius loci, and the local climatic qualities.
Ellen Biddle Shipman was an American landscape architect known for her formal gardens and lush planting style. Along with Beatrix Farrand and Marian Cruger Coffin, she dictated the style of the time and strongly influenced landscape design as a member of the first generation to break into the largely male occupation.
The Conservatory Garden is a formal garden near the northeastern corner of Central Park in Upper Manhattan, New York City. Comprising 6 acres (24,000 m2), it is the only formal garden in Central Park. Conservatory Garden takes its name from a conservatory that stood on the site from 1898 to 1935. It is located just west of Fifth Avenue, opposite 104th to 106th Streets.
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is an American environmentalist, landscape preservationist, author of numerous books and essays, and a former park administrator. Her most notable achievement was her role in the revitalization of New York City's Central Park in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1980, Rogers helped found the Central Park Conservancy, a not-for-profit corporation formed to organize private sector support for the restoration and renewed management of the park. She served as the Conservancy's first president from its founding until 1995.
Diana Balmori Ling was a landscape and urban designer. She was the founder of the landscape design firm Balmori Associates.
Reef Point Estate was located in Bar Harbor, Maine, United States, on Mount Desert Island. Reef Point was the coastal “cottage” of Mary Cadwalder Rawle and Frederic Rhinelander Jones, the parents of landscape architect, Beatrix Farrand (1872–1959). It stood beside Bar Harbor's Shore Path.
Elizabeth Sherman Lindsay was an American landscape gardener, American Red Cross executive during the First World War and wife of British diplomat Sir Ronald Charles Lindsay.
Mildred Esther Mathias was an American botanist and professor.
Mary Rutherfurd Jay (1872–1953) was one of America's earliest landscape architects and an advocate of horticultural education and careers for women. The great-great granddaughter of American Founding Father John Jay, she grew up in Rye, New York, surrounded by the gardens of her ancestral homestead at the Jay Estate in Westchester County overlooking Long Island Sound. Her education was fostered by travel abroad with her mother and domestically through classes in design and horticulture taken at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Bussey Institute in Forest Hills, Massachusetts.
Mai Haru Kitazawa Arbegast (1922–2012) was an American landscape architect, and professor based in Berkeley, California. She was a professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Berkeley. She was the first acting director Blake Garden after its gift to the UC Berkeley Department of Landscape Architecture . As a professional landscape architect who specialized in planting design and her work included estates, wineries, and large scale residential gardens, as well as public, commercial, and educational projects. Projects of note include the Hearst Castle planting restoration, California Palace of the Legion of Honor renovation, and the UC Davis Arboretum.
Alice Recknagel Ireys was an American landscape architect whose notable clients included the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the New York Botanical Garden, the Clark Botanic Garden, the Abigail Adams Smith Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum.
Louisa Boyd King was an American gardener and author who became a leading advocate of gardening and horticulture, especially in connection with the garden club movement. She wrote on horticultural topics as Mrs. Francis King.
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