Colour and compromise: Ellen Biddle Shipman's design for the garden at Elm Cottage

Abstract

It was a beautiful garden. Designed by Ellen Biddle Shipman in 1945 for the recently purchased Sewickley, Pennsylvania, home of Mr and Mrs Henry M. Curry, Jr, the garden at Elm Cottage was finished by the summer of 1946. Retaining the location of a pre-existing Victorian garden on a terraced site approximately 60 X 130 feet that was slightly uphill from the original nineteenth-century farmhouse, Shipman redesigned the garden to complement the new late-Georgian facade and brick terrace with which the Currys had updated the house (figures 1 and 2).