to the subregion where the development occurs. Windrush, in Madison
County, Mississippi, north of Jackson, an expensive project sold to doctors
and businesspeople, presents housing in two styles, ‘‘Norman or Louisi-
ana French.’’ (Louisiana French may suggest galleries and wrought-iron
fencing. Norman French—as opposed to Korean Normandy[?]—means for-
tresslike massivity and many roof levels and lines, often suggesting, too,
the likelihood of roof leaks.) A yet more upscale gated community located
between the Atlantic Ocean and Indian River in Florida, called Windsor, is
actually described by its developers as an ‘‘Anglo-Caribbean village.’’ One
yearns to visit such places, to understand what design names actually look
like—but of course one could not get inside.
tSome houses in such exclusive neighborhoods rest on small lots. De-
velopers squeezed them, as it were, among office parks, corporate ‘‘cam-
puses,’’ and malls, selling short commutes and (perhaps) less arduous and
costly landscaping. From the beginning of the American suburbs in the
nineteenth century, however, the urban migrant’s hope and ideal has been
the large, private greensward. Suburbs remain mostly true, I think, to their
original promise: a leafy ‘‘borderland’’ (as John Stilgoe has put it) between
the dirty, noisy, crowded city and the remote, isolated rural-agricultural
realm.^23 There a house is better made a home because it is detached, its
privacy assured by the surrounding yard, the bigger the better. Yards, domi-
nated by expansive lawn, frame and present the home to the world, serving
(paradoxically) as insulator from intrusion and private park. Backyards,
sometimes side yards, too, better realized the insular, though. No wonder
that these were typically women’s places—to supervise children at play and
to grow flowers, herbs, and vegetables for the family. Southern women have
ever relished such spaces, but in the formal literature of lawns and gar-
dens, it was northeastern women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries who created the formal syntax. Among these, Beatrix Jones Far-
rand (–) was not only the private enthusiast but the professional
landscape architect, becoming, during the s, one of the founders of
the American Institute of Landscape Architecture. Farrand studied at the
Arnold Arboretum in Massachusetts and with Gertrude Jekyll, the English
horticulturist. Farrand’s aunt, the writer Edith Wharton, published a book
about Italian gardens in , influencing Beatrix. But like other famous but
nonprofessional Yankee gardeners, Farrand may be regarded as a domes-
tic feminist, or simply as ecofeminist, in her persistent view of the garden
as decorative and useful outdoor ‘‘room.’’ In this important way she lent au-