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By Judith B. Tankard 

By all accounts, Patrick Chassé was not only an innovative landscape architect, but also a keen historian and educator with many specialized interests and passions. He received a B.S. in biology from the University of Maine in Orono, a M. Ed.  in environmental studies and botany from the University of Maine, and a M.L.A from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He also studied printmaking, glass-blowing, and metal fabrication. In the end, he found his niche in historic landscape preservation and the reconstruction of natural plant communities, an interest that later earned him the delightful title “Moss King.” He was also passionate about Chinese and Japanese garden history and led numerous garden tours to Japan. For several years he taught design and plant ecology at the Landscape Institute at Harvard (formerly the Radcliffe Seminars), the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, the College of the Atlantic, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Sheffield University in the United Kingdom. Later in his career he was appointed the first-ever Curator of Landscape at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. 

Above all, Patrick Chassé  was associated with Mount Desert Island, Maine, where he established a thriving office and saw the restoration of many notable gardens, such as the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor. In addition to the Rockefeller family, Patrick’s client list included Martha Stewart and Brooke Astor among many others. He was also a founder of The Beatrix Farrand Society at Garland Farm in 2003 along with the Farrand scholar, Diane Kostial McGuire, myself, and members of The Garden Conservancy. At Garland Farm he helped establish a significant library that replicated the one Beatrix Farrand donated to the University of California, Berkeley in the 1950s when she closed down her famous home and garden at Reef Point. 

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Patrick obviously wore many hats, but he was passionate about gardens and history. Fortunately, his vast archive of landscape project files, amounting to 151 document boxes, and 24,000 slides was recently transferred to the Maine Historical Society and his specialized collection of rare books on Asian botany to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s library at Elm Bank, in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where they can be studied. 

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On a personal note, I first met Patrick when he was teaching at Radcliffe Seminars in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until my own interest quickened on historic gardens that our paths began to cross, most notably in the early days of the Beatrix Farrand Society. We had bonded in 1993 on a rigorous five-city lecture tour sponsored by Horticulture Magazine that stretched from the New York Botanical Garden to Winterthur. And later we were often fellow speakers at other historic gardens, such as Dumbarton Oaks. He had a delicious, if not rapacious, sense of humor that extended to his recent illness as well as quips about people we both knew. On his first trip to a renowned cancer clinic in California a number of years ago, he cited going to a bleak medical center and taking an elevator down five levels to the x-ray department which he described as “the kind of place where you might find Dick Cheney wandering around. . .” On the other side of the coin, he was generous in his praise for people who accomplished great things.

Judith B. Tankard taught at the Landscape Institute, Harvard University for twenty years and authored twelve books on landscape history, including Ellen Shipman and the American Garden (2018) and Beatrix Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes (2009).