Ellen Biddle Shipman (1866-1950) was an unlikely titan her field, leader in landscaping trends and styles, and mentor to generations of younger female designers. After her husband abandoned her and left her as the single parent of three children, Shipman intentionally built a career around her talents to support herself and her family. This personal story, combined with Shipman’s impact as the lead of a studio that hired and professionally developed dozens of young women in the fields of interior and landscape design, resonates today, as gender equity in architecture and design remains a goal yet to be attained.

Named “Dean of Women Landscape Architects” by House & Garden magazine (1933), Shipman designed hundreds of gardens and enjoyed national recognition, thanks to lecture tours, articles in national design magazines such as House & Garden and House Beautiful, and a client list of luminaries such as the Dukes, Fords, Edisons, Vanderbilts, and more. She worked with many leading designers of her day, including architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Platt (the latter, a New Hampshire neighbor and fellow member of the Cornish Art Colony, helped Shipman get her start) and landscape architect Warren Manning, who described Shipman as “one of the best, if not the very best, flower garden maker in America.” These partners sometimes hired her to create landscape plans to accompany their buildings, and sometimes to create planting schemes to fill in spaces laid out by other designers.

Shipman was also the primary design force behind every aspect of Longue Vue’s development over a span of 15 years. Among the 600+ gardens she designed during her lifetime, Shipman’s work at Edith and Edgar Stern’s Longue Vue estate was both an exemplar and a miraculous exception: Through a fortunate convergence of circumstances—Shipman’s maturity as a designer, a lull in other work due to the Great Depression and World War II, her close and trusting relationship with the Sterns, and her clients’ immense financial resources—Longue Vue benefited from an unusual level of involvement and artistic freedom for Shipman. She designed and refined a network of gardens spanning all eight acres of the property, convinced the family to entirely rebuild their house to better integrate with her horticultural vistas, dictated the architectural direction for the house and personally selected its architects, and even designed and furnished the home’s interiors, giving each room a unique character that corresponded with the adjoining garden.

Shipman continued work at Longue Vue until the last year of her life, continually refining and maintaining the gardens over more than a decade. Today, Longue Vue is the only extant example of an interior-exterior design integration by Shipman, and of an intact total site design. In addition to this overall composition, Longue Vue is a stunning showcase of individual design elements—a veritable catalog of signature Shipman features. Among these are intimate garden rooms, radial layouts around anchoring architectural features, curated vistas that give an illusion of expanse, and masonry pathways lined with dense, intricate flower borders with masterful use of color and texture.

The maintenance of such features—intricate, labor-intensive, and expensive—proved too dear for most in the post-industrialist era, and among the gardens that Shipman designed for American estates, the vast majority have been lost. This is another area in which Shipman and the Sterns found ideal partners in each other: The Sterns had the means and the interest to fund and protect Shipman’s gardens, and to ensure they would be shared for years to come. The private estate that was Longue Vue is now open to the public as Longue Vue House and Gardens, thanks to the Sterns’ foresight.