Lady Ellen's Landscapes

The trailblazing landscape architect who painted with plants at Longue Vue

by

House & Home

Ellen Biddle Shipman, today recognized as an icon of early twentieth century landscape architecture, first stepped into the field of design entirely out of necessity when, in her early forties, her husband abandoned the family and left her to financially support their three children.

Suddenly her family’s sole breadwinner, Shipman did not languish in despair, but instead secured a legacy for herself, harnessing her considerable gardening experience and stepping boldly into a professional field where women were seldom welcomed. 

“She was one of the first women to carve out for herself a very successful career as a landscape designer,” said Judith Tankard, landscape historian and author of The Gardens of Ellen Biddle Shipman (1996) and Ellen Shipman and the American Garden (2018). 

“Until women took up landscaping, gardening in this country was at its lowest ebb. The renaissance of the art was due largely to the fact that women, instead of working over their boards, used plants as if they were painting pictures, and as an artist would.” —Ellen Biddle Shipman 

A trailblazer in her day, Shipman was the landscape designer behind more than 600 gardens dotting the United States between 1914 and 1950, from east coast colonial strongholds such as Delaware, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, to more southerly environments in Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Without formal training, Shipman developed her own design style, adopting an approach reminiscent of an artist filling a canvas with color. 

“Until women took up landscaping, gardening in this country was at its lowest ebb,” Shipman told an interviewer in 1938. “The renaissance of the art was due largely to the fact that women, instead of working over their boards, used plants as if they were painting pictures, and as an artist would.”

Of her numerous projects, one of her most celebrated is that of Longue Vue House and Gardens in New Orleans, originally home to philanthropists Edgar and Edith Stern. Here, Shipman designed not only the lush, expansive gardens across the estate’s eight acres, but also the interior of the sprawling, Classical Revival style house.    

“Longue Vue is the best place to experience Shipman’s design signature,” said Dr. Stella Baty Landis, Longue Vue’s executive director. “We are the only space that’s open to the public that has both her interiors and her garden design. She did only eight interiors, along with her 600 landscape designs. It’s the only place you can see both.”

Planting a Seed 

Although she was born in Philadelphia in 1869, as the the child of a career soldier Shipman spent much of her childhood traveling the American frontier. She eventually relocated to New Jersey to live with her grandparents, at which time her grandmother and her beds of roses instilled in her an early passion for gardening. In adolescence, she attended school in Baltimore, developing a taste for architecture and art, before enrolling at Radcliffe College in Cambridge. She ultimately never graduated, instead leaving her studies to marry the playwright Louis Shipman. The couple made their first home at the Cornish Art Colony in New Hampshire. 

Here, Shipman was surrounded by the preeminent creative minds of her day, discussing critical theoretical questions, such as humanity’s relationship to the land and the built environment—ideas that would later inform her design approach, according to Lenora Costa, deputy director of Longue Vue over the collections. Here, too, she learned more about the intricacies of contemporary landscape design, eventually planning and planting her home garden, Brook Place. “Working daily in my garden for fifteen years,” she wrote at one point, “taught me to know plants, their habits and their needs.” Shipman’s friends included the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, his niece Rose Standish Nichols, the artist Thomas Dewing, the illustrator Maxfield Parrish, and the architect Charles A. Platt, among other illustrious figures.

“There were many budding artists, artisans, designers that were living in that community, and that would be vital for what Ellen Shipman would go on to do, that she had exposure,” said designer Charles King Sadler in a 2020 lecture on Shipman’s career for the Southern California Chapter of The Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. “I mean, it was in her, I'm sure, but it brought out those artistic gifts, being in this more or less creative incubator.”

These creatives were the support system Shipman would come to rely upon when personal turmoil struck. Sadler refers to Shipman’s 1910 divorce from her husband as “a Greek tragedy.” 

“You can just imagine what your prospects would be as a single mother living in rural New Hampshire. She was not independently wealthy. She needed to make a living,” he said. “And so that's, to me, where the story really gets interesting. It's not necessarily what you're given, but what you make of what you have. And she made an incredible life.” 

In the separation’s fallout, Platt, an architect known for his embrace of the Italian Renaissance style, became Shipman’s mentor and guide. He came to admire her gardening expertise and provided the critical, informal design training that allowed her to eventually branch out and found her own firm. Coupled with her experience in plants and flora, Platt’s guidance helped make Shipman a formidable and sought-after landscape designer in the subsequent decades. "Although Mrs. Shipman's basic designs were outstanding and practical, her use of plant material to interpret the design was in a class by itself," according to Shipman’s friend and colleague, Anne Bruce Haldemen. 

“She had lots of hands-on experience with gardening and growing things long before she was divorced from her husband and had to find a means of supporting herself and establishing a career,” Tankard explained. “She just didn't, all of a sudden, decide she wanted to be a landscape architect and take a plunge. She'd had many years under her belt with her own garden, with learning about plants—and that's what made her so extraordinary.”

Collaborating with Platt by 1912, Shipman spent the early years of her career on garden projects in locales from Cleveland to Seattle, often given full design authority. During her career she also worked with other notables such as the Olmsted Brothers, James Greenleaf, and Warren Manning. By 1920 she had moved to New York City, where she opened her own office and hired exclusively women—preferably graduates of the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture for Women, in Groton, Massachusetts. In 1933, House & Garden dubbed Shipman “Dean of Women Landscape Architects.”

“She was a tough woman, a tough business person, a very skilled negotiator,” Sadler said. “But I think one of her strengths, from the little bit that I can glean from my reading and discussions, was she was skilled at collaborating, and she had a level of humility.”

A Room with a (Garden) View

Influenced by Platt, Shipman’s design style included a walled garden formula, with axial paths, rectangular beds, and central statuary, such as a sundial or fountain. She would also regularly feature small ornamental trees, espaliered fruit trees, and peony or wisteria stands, among other design hallmarks. Above all, she was known for her plantings—color, texture, and foliage dazzled within the framework of her comparatively simple designs.

Shipman brought such approaches to her work at Longue Vue in New Orleans. 

Edith Stern, a lover of flower gardens and freshly cut blooms, met Shipman through a garden club in the city in the early 1930s; soon, she and her husband had invited Shipman to work on a small project at their Longue Vue home, which would expand to encompass the entire estate grounds. 

Shipman’s gardens at Longue Vue are best known for their garden “rooms,” her signature design technique, according to Landis. These defined exterior spaces, marked by gates or suggested natural thresholds between gardens, give the sense of walking into different rooms as one wanders across the landscape. 

“So garden rooms with really, really purposeful, detailed, experiential goals is a style technique,” Landis said. “Her axial views, the extended sightlines, are consistent across all the gardens that she designed, even very small ones.”

“The entire history of Longue Vue, from concept and creation, to preservation and restoration, represents the epitome of the classical principles of harmony and obedience." —Charles King Sadler 

The breadth of Shipman’s horticultural expertise also lent itself to a varied selection of plant options, which subsequent gardeners could choose from when a certain plant failed because of climate or upkeep. According to Landis, Longue Vue’s gardeners today have “a range of options” allowing for consistency of texture, color, and the layering of spaces. Shipman even collaborated with Louisiana horticulturalist Caroline Dormon to bring native plants into the scheme. The results were painterly, floral designs evoking an expressive romanticism in her gardens. 

“You wind up with color schemes that are very, very purposeful,” said Landis. “Sometimes she would have a monochromatic approach to a specific garden, because she'd be going for a certain kind of meditative experience. Sometimes there would be a burst of colors. It really is like a painter on a canvas, thinking about the effect you want and how colors blend, how textures blend, and also very much at the same time, unlike paint on a canvas, the experience of being embraced within a space.”

To the Sterns, Shipman was “Lady Ellen,” the designer responsible for executing a sumptuous vision of rich, ornamental gardens consistent with their appreciation of the classical style. During the extensive overhaul of the grounds, Shipman suggested to the Sterns that their current Colonial Revival house failed to mesh with her opulent gardens. The solution? A new house—one with fidelity to Shipman’s more classical vision. 

[Read about Shipman's collaborator at Longue Vue, the naturalist Caroline Dormon, in this article from our May 2025 issue.] 

“The entire history of Longue Vue, from concept and creation, to preservation and restoration, represents the epitome of the classical principles of harmony and obedience,” Sadler said.

The first house was moved—literally rolled down the road—to make way for a new construction. In concert with Charles A. Platt’s sons, architects William and Geoffrey, Shipman oversaw the design aesthetics of the Classical Revival style house that sits at the heart of Longue Vue today. While the Platts dedicated their energies to the built environment with their relatively recent formal training (including such then-groundbreaking amenities as central air conditioning, a heating system, and recessed lighting), Shipman designed the building’s interior with rapt attention to the smallest visual elements. 

Most notably, she designed each room in the Longue Vue house to correspond to a garden, blending the interior and exterior spaces to create harmonious unity. “Once you start noticing it, you can't unsee it,” Landis said. 

For instance, the dining room adjoins the Pan Garden (named for the Greek god of the wild, shepherds, and flocks—whose statue is a focal point in the space), filled with flowers in white, pink, and purple hues. To complement the view, Shipman chose wall coverings with similar pinks and purples that emerge more clearly when the flowers bloom each spring, along with green curtains to echo the same shade of foliage in the garden when the flowers disappear. Shipman selected furniture scaled to the ceiling height of the room, which also reflected the scale of the garden beyond. When the windows or doors open, outside and inside merge seamlessly through shapes, palette, and scale. Each public room in the house is accessible to the gardens, allowing Shipman ample opportunity to match and mirror design choices between environments.  

There are other subtle design choices, such as Shipman’s incorporation of small Lilies of the Valley—Edith’s favorite flower, which fails to thrive in the Louisiana climate—rendered on doorknobs and wallpaper, providing tiny glimpses of beauty throughout the space.  

“It was a three-and-a-half, four-year process from idea to move-in, and it's like, ‘Oh, why did it take so long?’” Costa said. “Well, there were a couple of reasons, but one of them was because this is the level of detail that they were working with.” 

Finding the Beauty   

Apart from their lifelong friendship, the Sterns acted, in many respects, as Shipman’s artistic patrons. Shipman continued to contribute to Longue Vue until her death in 1950, visiting several times a year to oversee the gardens and consult with the Sterns on different landscape design choices.  

The Sterns valued progressive principles of equality and open access—a legacy that lingers even after their deaths. In 1980, Longue Vue became a nonprofit historic house museum, open to the public. Today, Longue Vue House and Gardens is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and is also designated a National Historic Landmark. 

As for Shipman, her prolific career opened doors for a new generation of female landscape architects, showcasing the aptitude of women in a formerly male-dominated field through her precise work, skilled negotiations with clients, and appetite for collaboration. This legacy is not lost on the curators of Longue Vue today, who have sought to highlight Shipman’s story alongside the Sterns’ philanthropy. Next spring, Longue Vue’s annual Design Symposium will be an homage to Longue Vue’s remarkable landscape architect, titled: “Shipmania: In the Spirit of a Pioneering Woman.”

“I'm motivated to preserve this, to share these really instructive stories of perseverance and also vision, and creative collaboration, and connection, and I think that they can help us learn about ourselves,” Landis said. “When we can look at this story as a whole and how it manifests in the spaces Shipman designed, it creates a lens into our own experience that can hopefully help us understand and lean into what's important to us in our daily life, in terms of how we interact with design, and also as a community, how we connect around design decisions.”   

[Read more about the modern day task of maintaining Shipman's landscaping at Longue Vue, here.]

At Longue Vue, Costa urges visitors to remain present and engage with nature, to look for the moments of quiet amid a bustling world. She recalls a quote from Edith Stern about Longue Vue: “There's a lot of beauty here. I think people could learn a lot.” Costa agrees that there is a great deal of beauty at the estate—though some of it can be easily missed. 

“Sometimes I see the beauty when the native plants die and they go to seed; that's not attractive. It's all brown and crusty. But then that means that certain animals are going to eat it, and then they're going to do better, and that's going to help the ecosystem,” she said. “Longue Vue is a great place to come and enjoy as a large design aspect, holistically as a large space—but do not forget the tiny details, because the tiny details are the ones that are personal and will really resonate with you, and you'll hold on to even after you leave.” 

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