page_title: Dumbarton Oaks
section_title: Garden
hierarchical_section_title: Dumbarton Oaks / Garden
caption_attribution_description: English: A fountain in the Dumbarton Oaks gardens in Washington, D.C.
context_page_description: Dumbarton Oaks is a historic estate in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was the residence and garden of Robert Woods Bliss and his wife Mildred Barnes Bliss.
  The Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection was founded here by the Bliss couple, who gave the property to Harvard University in 1940.
  The research institute that has emerged from this bequest is dedicated to supporting scholarship in the fields of Byzantine and Pre-Columbian studies, as well as garden design and landscape architecture, especially through its research fellowships, meetings, exhibitions, and publications.
  Dumbarton Oaks also opens its garden and museum collections to the public, and hosts public lectures and a concert series.
  Dumbarton Oaks is distinct from Dumbarton House a Federal Style historic house museum also located in the Georgetown area.
context_section_description: In 1921, the Blisses hired landscape gardener Beatrix Farrand to design the garden at Dumbarton Oaks, and for almost thirty years Mildred Bliss collaborated closely with Farrand. Together they transformed the existing farmlands surrounding the house into terraced garden rooms and vistas, creating a garden landscape that progressed from formal and elegant stepped terraces, in the near vicinity of the house, to a more recreational and practical middle zone of pools, tennis court, orchards, vegetable beds, and cutting gardens, and concluding at the far reaches of the property with a rustic wilderness of meadows and stream. Within the garden rooms, Bliss and Farrand used a careful selection of plant materials and garden ornaments to define the rooms’ character and use. Since that time, other architects working with Mildred Bliss—most notably Ruth Havey and Alden Hopkins—changed certain elements of the Farrand design. The garden at Dumbarton Oaks was first opened to the public in 1939.
  The Dumbarton Oaks Park is a 27-acre naturalistic streamside valley park, maintained as a part of Rock Creek Park.
caption: A fountain in the Dumbarton Oaks garden
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