Category Elizabeth Sherman Hoyt
Elizabeth Hoyt & Gladys Rice, Landscape Gardeners
What happened to the landscape gardening firm of Hoyt and Rice? Why didn’t the two mentees of Beatrix (Jones) Farrand, Charles Sprague Sargent and the staff at the Arnold Arboretum ever start their planned business together? While a footnote in the story of the landscape of the British Embassy, Washington, one wonders if the partnership […]
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 II: the Location with Lutyens
The previous entry in this website surveyed the District’s Gilded Age landscape with its Beaux-Arts architecture existing on Massachusetts Avenue before the British Chancery and Ambassador’s Residence arrived in the neighborhood. This was to address misinformation about and the perplexing view that the architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, designed the United Kingdom complex in rural land […]
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 […]
On the 75th Anniversary of the Washington Visit by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth
In Canada, the 75th anniversary of the Royal visit to North America is being honored this year with special commemorative coins and whiskey. In the United States, there has been little historical account of the jammed-packed two days in the District of Columbia and northern Virginia during the inaugural trip to North America of the […]
Centre Island Revisited
The first ambassador’s wife to live in and influence the new British Embassy in Washington, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, was the spirited Lady Lindsay. She has born Elizabeth Sherman Hoyt and grew up and died on Centre Island, New York. The place was formative to her character and early career, instilling a love of […]
The Embassy Gardens and Dumbarton Oaks
With the ridge of Clifton Hill between them, the British Embassy and Dumbarton Oaks have a shared legacy and stories, the memory of which has nearly been lost over the years. The original 19th-century estates of both sites were once part of the same Royal land grant, the Rock of Dumbarton. Before each gained renown, […]
Lindsay’s Plantings, Parties & Good Press
The design of the plantings that Elizabeth Lindsay did for the British Embassy gardens followed the tradition of Gertrude Jekyll. From extant, available photographs, plants were used as strong design elements, providing form, texture, and depth to the landscape with a predominate palette of greens. Lady Lindsay made the rose garden, in the largest terrace […]
Lindsay’s Groundwork for the Gardens
With the return of the diplomatic corps and the beginning of the fall social season of 1930 in Washington, the press was filled with reports of the new British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. The Ambassador’s Residence had already been put to work: the first large party to be held there was that August for 600 […]
Before their Washington Gardens: Americans in Paris
Even before her marriage to the diplomat Ronald Lindsay, Elizabeth Hoyt occupied the same worldly and cultivated social spheres as her close friends and future neighbors in Washington, Robert and Mildred Bliss of Dumbarton Oaks. Along with Hoyt’s aunt Elizabeth Cameron and the historian Henry Adams, they were bound by friendships formed in Paris and […]
Landscape of a Washington Place 
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