Local gardeners know that the Pacific Northwest offers an incredible canvas for growing nearly any type of garden you can imagine. In the 21st century, nurseries like Cornell Farm offer thousands of diverse plants around the world, but digging into history shows us the incredible journey that our region has undergone to become such a gardening paradise.
From sprawling estates to intimate home gardens, the Oregon-grown landscape architecture firm Lord and Schryver brought a uniquely Northwestern sensibility to the 20th century English-style gardens they designed. Starting in 1929, Salem-born Elizabeth Lord and her creative partner Edith Schryver founded the first woman-owned landscape architecture firm in the Pacific Northwest. As pioneers of landscape design for our region, they were outspoken advocates of fine gardening and created more than 200 garden spaces that continue to offer boundless inspiration for PNW gardeners. Join us in exploring Lord and Schryver’s legacy, learning along the way how to incorporate their revolutionary design into your own beautiful garden space.
History
The story of Lord and Schryver begins in the 1920s, when women were just beginning to enter the fledgling field of landscape design. Elizabeth Lord was the daughter of an Oregon governor and an avid gardener, while Edith Schryver grew up in New York and worked as a draftsman with prominent New York landscape architect Ellen Shipman. Both of these women ended up attending the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture for Women in Massachussets. This school offered female students with one of the first opportunities to make a living in the field. The two women first met on Lowthrope’s European Travel Tour — an itinerary of iconic monuments and gardens across the continent — where they realized their aesthetics and skills strongly complemented each other. In 1929, they returned to Salem together to begin the Northwest's first female-owned landscape architecture firm.
Over the next 40 years, Lord and Schryver demonstrated their incredible capability to craft works of landscape design that last to this day. They designed over 200 gardens, from private estates to major New Deal-era Works Progress projects around the region. Garden education was also a major value in their work: in the 1940s, their Home Garden Hour radio show helped bring a voice of fine gardening to Northwest homes. You can still visit their visionary gardens in our state’s capital at Deepwood Museum and Gardens, as well as their historic home at Gaiety Hollow.
Designing with Nature
“Our specialty is garden design, treating the garden as an outdoor living room of form and color in direct relation to the house, and at the same time taking every possible advantage of the existing conditions of ground and vegetation.”
Elizabeth Lord, 1932
The Lord and Schryver firm re-imagined the aesthetics of the European estate garden with uniquely Pacific Northwest flair in mind. A driving principle of Lord and Schryver’s design philosophy was the interconnection between the home and the garden. They described their style as “informal formality,” blending orderly formal design features with densely-planted garden beds of annuals and perennials to beautifully mimic nature year-round. Their designs were deeply in tune with our regional environment, taking advantage of our temperate weather, rich soils, and complex terrain to re-imagine those formal designs in the spirit of the Northwest.
The women’s shared home estate in Salem, Gaiety Hollow, is now a public garden which beautifully showcases the collaborative vision they applied to designs across the Northwest. They maximized space by imagining different sections of the garden as outdoor “rooms” with their own themes. A major feature of their designs were knee-height boxwood hedges which create geometric borders around hardscaped brick walkways, leading both the eye and foot traffic through the landscape to accentuate the home’s architecture and key elements like statues, fountains, and mature trees.
These design principles weren’t just limited to grand estates – Lord and Schryver were passionate about embracing fine gardening in everyday home landscapes. They believed the beauty of formal gardens had a place even in small spaces. Through their radio show and other community outreach, they inspired a generation of 20th-century gardeners to adapt the design traditions of the East Coast, Britain, and continental Europe to the unique landscape of the Pacific Northwest. While only a limited variety of ornamental plants were available in our region in those days, Lord and Schryver worked closely with local nurseries to expand the offerings of ornamental plants. Boxwoods, for example, were popular on the East Coast and in Europe, but their availability was limited until this design firm helped popularize them – today, garden centers like Cornell Farm offer a diverse array of boxwoods and similar plants for creating dignified formal hedges and topiaries in every imaginable form.
Lord and Schryvers’ careful planning of year-round beauty showcases their mastery of landscape design. For example, the pergola at Gaiety Hollow was planted with spring-blooming clematis, summer roses, and grape vines that would reach their full splendor in the fall. Zinnias, petunias, delphinium, and cosmos created a rainbow of color in the summertime, while hardy hellebores and camellias rounded out the cool season to offer interest throughout the winter. In the spring, Lord and Schryver went heavy on bright colors to draw the garden out of the dreary greyness of the Pacific Northwest winter. Flowering shrubs like rhododendrons, azaleas, and lilacs blossomed each year to join delicate spring flowers like primroses, tulips, violas, galanthus, and hyacinth in cultivating a brilliant display of spring splendor.
A Legacy of Northwest Fine Gardening
Nearly a century after the founding of Lord and Schryver’s pioneering landscape architecture firm, their influence has helped bring beauty to the landscapes of Salem, the state of Oregon, and the wider Pacific Northwest. Salem-based architectural historian, Wallace Kay Huntington, called the firm’s creation “one of the milestones in the history of Northwest garden design.” Due to the popularity of their radio show and other work with the community, their work extended beyond their grandest projects and into charming home gardens across our region.
Today, there are bountiful take-aways from the inspiring legacy of Lord and Schryver, from the blending of the home and garden to the array of plant choices that animated their lovely designs. Treating the garden as an extension of the home and segmenting the landscape into ‘rooms’ opens up possibilities for serene outdoor spaces. The creativity of Lord and Schryver in their plant choices also leads us to appreciate the massive growth of nursery plant offerings since the 1920s. In addition to the palette of classic formal gardens, we now have access to a truly incredible variety of ornamental plants to take advantage of our fertile environment and harness the beauty of nature.
To discover Lord and Schryver’s legacy in the flesh, you can explore elegantly restored showcases of their work at Deepwood Museum and Gardens and Gaiety Hollow in Salem, Oregon to walk through almost a century of garden history. If you’d like to learn more about these garden trailblazers, The Northwest Gardens of Lord and Schryver by Val Libby tells their story in loving detail. As we enter another Pacific Northwest spring, perhaps the best way to celebrate Lord and Schryver is to fill our own Oregon gardens with vibrant spring color and spend a little more time enjoying the beauty we’ve created.
