Katherine Bashford
| Katherine Bashford | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
August 18, 1885 Prescott, Arizona |
| Died | June 3, 1953 (aged 67) |
| Nationality | United States |
Katherine Emilie Bashford (1885–1953) was an American landscape architect who designed residential gardens primarily in Pasadena and landscaping for several Southern California public housing projects.
Katherine Bashford was born August 19, 1885, in Prescott, Arizona, one of four children of Coles and Henrietta (Parker) Bashford. The Bashfords were a prominent political family: Katherine's great-uncle was Coles Bashford, one of the founders of the Republican Party. In 1894, the family moved to California, where Katherine would spend most of her adult life.
Bashford was educated at the Polytechnic High School in Pasadena and the Marlborough School for Girls, from which she graduated in 1905. She also studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, but as a designer she was to a large extent self-taught. Her education in landscape architecture amounted to some time traveling around Europe viewing gardens just before World War I and again in 1924—especially Spain and Italy, which have climates similar to southern California—and a two-year apprenticeship with the California landscape architect Florence Yoch beginning in 1921.
Bashford began designing flower gardens out of her home, on a small scale, in 1917. Following the professional training she received with Yoch, she opened her own office in Pasadena in 1923, specializing in gardens for private residences. She hired as office manager Hinda Teague Hill, an author and former schoolteacher, who helped Bashford promote her business by publishing articles on landscape design. She later hired a trained landscape architect with engineering skills, Beatrice M. Williams, to help work on the large gardens that were coming into vogue. In 1928, she moved her office to downtown Los Angeles, where it would remain for the rest of her career. Bashford's combination of artistic talent and business skill made her one of the most respected southern California landscape architects and kept her in demand throughout her 25-year career. Architects like Wallace Neff, H. Roy Kelley, Roland Coate, and Reginald D. Johnson, worked with her repeatedly.
Although Bashford's aesthetic as a landscape designer was influenced by European models, on the whole she leaned away from traditional landscaping—she disliked foundation plantings, for example—and towards a more informal style that emphasized simplicity and human scale. Her gardens made good use of native plants and those adapted to the southern California climate, and she was one of the handful of early-modern landscape designers who experimented with gardens as usable spaces and outdoor rooms. She was a proponent of massing flowers by color to create abstract compositions, and a number of her designs featured the flower-bordered walkways, patios, low tiled fountains and benches, fruit trees, and use of large potted plants as accents than are now staples of southern California residential landscaping. As a contemporary writer observed admiringly of her work, Bashford's "desire and aim has been to make gardens and home settings comply with the California spirit... she is first and last a real artist."
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