The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Birch Bay Retirement Village.
“We must keep time with Nature,” Beatrix Farrand wrote, “and follow her forms of expression in different places while we carry out our own ideas or adaptations.”
BAR HARBOR—Cameron DePaola spends his days building beauty in landscapes.
As the project manager at Reef Point, which was once famed landscape architect Beatrix Farrand’s estate, he does that through discovery, joy, and hard work for both himself and his team.
Hands rediscover a forgotten bulb.
Surviving stone is soothed and allowed to stand. Numbered markers from Farrand’s own garden create continuity of place and of garden even as plants and designs change.
The gardens and path at Reef Point next to the popular Shore Path in Bar Harbor isn’t a restoration of Beatrix Farrand’s estate, Cameron DePaola is quick to point out.
It’s a tribute, practical and respectful.
It preserves what has survived and learns from what DePaola’s work has uncovered.
“My connection to this story is practical and personal,” DePaola told attendees of an on-site lecture and tour of the property. “In the last few years, we have been working on the former Reef Point property. We are not recreating Farrand’s estate, and I would not call what we are doing a restoration. We are trying to understand what remains, preserve the most meaningful pieces, and build a landscape that honors the history while still functioning as a private residence on the coast of Maine.”
On Tuesday, September 22, DePaola took approximately 30 people on a tour of the property’s garden and orchards in an event coordinated with the Bar Harbor Historical Society. A small fire in a stone pit, charcuterie boards, and a nine-page handout lovingly prepared by DePaola made the already special event even more extraordinary.
As did, DePaola himself. He infused the talk with love, facts, and a clear kindness toward the owners of the property, the listeners, and the landscape itself.
“The opportunity to see the current iteration of the Reef Point property along the shore path was a really special evening hosted by Cameron DePaola,” Bar Harbor Historical Society Director of Engagement Nikki Moser said. “The very specific inclusion of public space on the private grounds is an extraordinary idea and one that we (the public) will be able to get to watch come to life. Programs like this engage community and bring history to life.”
FARRAND AT REEF POINT
The famous landscape gardener and landscape architect’s parents purchased Reef Point and Farrand spent much of her youth there with the property reportedly helping to foster her love of plants and landscapes. The property was originally approximately six acres and stretched from Atlantic Avenue to Hancock Street in Bar Harbor proper. The house which was to become known as the Bar Harbor residence of Farrand was built in 1883.
Farrand married Max Farrand in 1913 and at some point in time took possession of the estate. Over the ensuing years, Farrand established an expansive garden on the property and used the gardens as a vehicle for experimenting with horticulture and landscape design concepts.
The gardens at Reef Point were laid out on grids. At the corner intersections of each grid stood small granite columns with a metal button embedded in the top with four numbers, two on either side of a line. The line was the demarkation line for the two plots on either side of the marker. This system helped Farrand keep track of what was where and allowed guests to know where they were in the gardens and more easily identify the plants in each quadrant.
Farrand also amassed a large collection of horticultural materials and established a horticultural reference library in the residence.
Farrand’s husband Max died in 1945 and two years later the devastating fires of 1947 burned much of the land heading into town. With that fire came the loss of the many of the summer cottages of the wealthy. This led to decreased land values and increased property taxes for the surviving properties.
Aging and unable to keep up with increasing tax rates, Farrand allegedly approached the Town of Bar Harbor and asked the town to give Reef Point tax relief under the premise that Reef Point was a public garden. The town refused the request.
“Due to her failure to find an administrative gardener after Mrs. Garland’s imminent retirement, mounting costs, and the changing character of Bar Harbor after the fire in 1947, Farrand decided to dismantle Reef Point,” the Beatrix Farrand Society states on its website.
In 1955 Farrand decided to dismantle both the house and gardens. In 1956 she sold the property to Robert Patterson, a Reef Point board member and architect. The house was dismantled and much of it was used to expand Garland Farm in Bar Harbor where Farrand spent her remaining years.
“Farrand’s decision to dismantle Reef Point was not simply an ending,” DePaola said. “It was an effort to ensure that everything she had assembled—the plants, the library, the records, and the knowledge they represented—would go where it could be best understood, appreciated, and preserved for future generations.”
The majority of the gardens, with the financial help of John D. Rockefeller Jr. were dug up and moved to the Asticou Azalea and Thuya gardens.
“Her concerns extended beyond her own legacy. She wanted the work itself to remain useful and alive,” DePaola explained.
THE FARRAND PATH
It’s about the plan fitting the ground, not the ground fitting the plan, advice given to Farrand by her mentor Charles Sprague Sargent and now used by DePaola.
The Farrand Path is an addition that the Reef Point owners commissioned DePaola to create as well.
It opens a small portion of the property, closest to the Shore Path, to the public to walk through flowers and bushes on a mostly gravel, slightly winding path.
“The decision felt essential,” DePaola explained.
While Reef Point was once imagined as an educational garden for the public, by Farrand and for that time period, it’s been a private property for decades.
“The path allows part of the property to remain connected to Bar Harbor and to the people who value the landscape,” DePaola wrote.
Again, the space is not a reconstruction, but a tribute. It looks toward Farrand’s cool color palette, he explains, and her leanings toward views and movement and sequence. It also adjusts for the harsh winter, storms—like the ones in 2024 that decimated the Shore Path and necessitated its rebuild—and practical durability that suited the ground conditions.
“That meant making choices,” DePaola explained. “We highlighted the surviving walls, the office, the bulbs, the quadrant markers, the terraces and the recovered granite. We used Farrand’s design ideas as guidances without claiming that the new garden is hers.”
Instead, the public path is everyone’s, a homage to Farrand and a gift to the public.
A stone bridge waits at one end. The granite comes from the stones found at the former home site.
WHAT REMAINS
Farrand’s property was sold to Robert Patterson, an architect. The property was divided.
The current owners of 2 Reef Point purchased the property in September 2024 after having summered in Bar Harbor for approximately 15 years.
The current house is “just to the right” of the estate site and it’s being added onto. But little of Farrand’s home remained. What does is her small office which looks like the turret of a castle.
Foundation pieces survive. They are now retaining walls, intact, standing and continuing, but with a different purpose.
The original door remains, but not at the property by the shore path, but at Garland Farm. They’ve replicated it for the house here.
“The goal,” DePaola explained, “is not to pretend the original house is still there. It is to let the new work acknowledge what came before it.”
Brass capped granite pillars—quadrant markers—survived. They show where planting and gardeing areas were. They’ll be reincorporated into the landscape.
“To me these small objects explain Farrand particularly well,” DePaola explained. “They show both sides of her work: the beauty of a garden and the discipline required to understand and care for it.”
It isn’t just the stones that have survived into the current century.
“The most exciting discoveries were not architectural,” DePaola wrote in an extensive handout that he created for attendees. “They were in the soil.”
DePaola and his crew found hundreds of bulbs that had been naturalized. They believe they are remnants of Farrands’s earlier garden.
“They are a reminder that a garden can survive underground long after its formal arrangement has disappeared,” he explained.
“What we can bring back is a relationship: between the house and the shoreline, between the plan and the ground, and between a private property and the people of Bar Harbor. The Farrand Path makes that relationship visible,” he said.
There is something larger in that distinction between restoration and tribute. Historic places do not always survive by being frozen in time. Sometimes they survive because someone is willing to understand what remains, adapt it to the present and make room for the next generation to encounter it. At Reef Point, that means a private landscape opening a small door to the public and a garden that disappeared decades ago continuing, in unexpected ways, to shape what grows there now.
The stones have found new work. The bulbs have continued beneath the soil. A path now offers the public a way through a landscape that is no longer Farrand’s, but still carries traces of her.
In the end, DePaola’s work and the new owners’ vision seem to follow the advice Farrand left behind: keep time with nature, pay attention to the ground, and let what comes next grow from what is already there.
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Rick Osann Art.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos: Carrie Jones/Shaun Farrar/BHS
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
A Selection of Projects Designed by Beatrix Farrand via the Beatrix Farrand Society
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden, Seal Harbor, Maine
Ambler College, Temple University (Formal Perennial Garden), Ambler, Penna.
Beatrix Farrand Garden at Bellefield, Hyde Park, New York
College of the Atlantic Bar Harbor, Maine
Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon, England
Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C.
Dumbarton Oaks Park, Washington D.C.
Glenmere, Chester, New York
Green Spring Gardens & Historic Site, Alexandria
Friends of Harkness Memorial State Park, Waterford, Connecticut
Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Conn.
New York Botanical Garden (Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden), Bronx, New York.
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
Promisek, Bridgewater, Conn.
Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, Santa Barbara, California
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A beautiful essay for this beautiful day in Bar Harbor. ThankYou!
Garland Farm hosts very interesting programs. The plantings and library are definitely worth a visit.
The Asticou Azalea Garden and the Thuya Garden are both in Northeast Harbor, open to the public without reservation, and managed by the Mount Desert Land & Garden Preserve. More information is available at gardenpreserve.org.