Meet the unsung heroine of the nation’s most celebrated gardens

Beatrix Farrand’s life is like a story line from HBO’s ‘The Gilded Age.’ The leading landscape designer of the turn of the 20th century had a list of clients that reads like a who’s who of the Gilded Age: J.P. Morgan, Theodore Roosevelt, first lady Ellen Wilson, John D. Rockefeller Jr. That the rich and powerful of the late 1800s and early 1900s in insular upper-crust America shared the same designer is perhaps not totally surprising. But the fact that this designer was a woman certainly...