Category Ambassador James Bryce
Henry Adams and Lady Lindsay in Washington
Within the intersecting circles of the story of the British Embassy, Henry Adams is the center point in its early history. His beloved home across from the White House brings together several elements of this Landscape of a Washington Place: the Embassy’s first landscape gardener (Elizabeth Sherman Hoyt, later Lady Lindsay); Beatrix Jones (later Farrand […]
The Myths of the British Embassy I: the Location before Lutyens
There persists the unfortunate belief in some publications that in the 1920s the government of the United Kingdom chose a remote site with “little civilization nearby” for their new Washington Embassy. While the British with their previous diplomatic building pioneered the countryside around Connecticut Avenue—with livestock pens and crumbling Civil War barracks for neighbors—that is […]
The Education and Career of an Embassy Gardener
Introduction The wife of the first Ambassador to live in the new Massachusetts Avenue British Embassy happened to be a trained landscape architect and an American, Lady Lindsay (1885–1954). The extent of her influence on the Ambassador’s Residence has been little known and unexamined, particularly her relationship with the grand estate practically bordering the Embassy, […]
Ambassador Bryce
Another participant, if now a seemingly unlikely one, in the area’s landscape was Ambassador James Bryce of Great Britain. Serving from 1907 to 1913, he was an articulate, energetic and persuasive proponent of what made and would make Washington unique in the world. At a Board of Trade meeting in 1912, he warned that the […]
Landscape of a Washington Place 
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