WHERE ARE WE SITTING?

摘要

The urban landscape historian Thaiesa Way, FASLA, relocated this summer from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she has served on the faculty for 12 years, to Washington, D.C., to lead the Garden and Landscape Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks, an outpost of Harvard University. The program operates from an early 19th-century mansion surrounded by a Beatrix Farrand garden on 16 acres above Georgetown-one of the few largely intact designs of Farrand's remaining. Way's arrival follows the retirement of John Beardsley, who ran the program since 2008. We met on a hot July morning, and sat at the back of the garden inside a rustic stone pavilion called Catalogue House, which has two lead squirrels on top. The pavilion holds photographs that explain some of the garden's plantings-such as the recent reinstallation of a famed aerial double hedge of hornbeams. The conversation quickly turned to history and the future of history.