Category Lady Lindsay
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 […]
Fauna in the Embassy Gardens
The Embassy’s Animals In addition to the elaborate flora planted in the gardens of the British Ambassador’s Residence, there were failed attempts to import some fancy fauna: peacocks. With their colorful plumage and stately gate, peacocks are standard fare at many European estates, wandering the grounds at will. But at the Residence, a succession of […]
The Embassy Gardens in Post-War Recovery
The Immediate Post-War Years The monarch’s birthday celebration in the gardens of British Embassy, last held in 1938, was revived in June 1947. The ambassador who greeted guests entering through the wooden Lutyens garden gate was the unconventional, if not eccentric, Archibald Clark Kerr, 1st Baron Inverchapel. Wearing white linens, he presided over a more […]
The Second World War as Seen in the Embassy Landscape
The transformation of Washington during the Second World War can be seen in structural changes at the British Embassy. Quickly assembled wartime additions to the Lutyens Chancery were erected in 1940. When those proved inadequate for the burgeoning staff’s needs, property was leased throughout the city and land bordering the Embassy’s service road and Observatory […]
Elizabeth Lindsay at the End
After leaving Washington and diplomatic life, Elizabeth Lindsay was to finally have a home and garden entirely of her own making. She initially intended to stay in New York for only a while before following Sir Ronald to England. But with the outbreak of war, the condition of her own health and unspecified “family problems,” […]
Landscape of a Washington Place 
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