Lester Collins’ Innisfree Listed in National Register
by Kate Kerin and Jean Phifer
On September 3, 2019, Innisfree, the 185-acre designed landscape in Millbrook, New York, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places—the perfect way to help celebrate Innisfree’s 60th season as a public garden in 2020. The property met the criteria for national significance in landscape architecture and the even higher bar of “exceptional significance” required of any work completed in the past 50 years. The Period of Significance, 1930 to 1994, recognizes the entire design arc of this exceptional site, and the nomination itself has just received a 2019 New York State Historic Preservation Award from the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.
Innisfree is the masterwork of Lester Collins, FASLA, an iconic if perhaps underappreciated figure in twentieth-century American landscape architecture. Collins’ work was groundbreaking, influential, and wide-ranging. In addition to Innisfree, his résumé included large-scale urban designs, urban parks and plazas, corporate, academic, medical, and research campuses, and both small- and large-scale private gardens. Describing Collins, Hugh Newell Jacobsen, FAIA, stated, “I always thought he was the best.” Mark Simon, FAIA, who frequently collaborated with Collins, called him “the most important and unsung landscape architect of the late twentieth century….[someone who] was fun to work with… a brilliant designer who made difficult situations simple, but who could make simple solutions interesting.” And the influential Charles Moore, FAIA, said of Collins, “In the pantheon of landscape designers, ‘Lester was right up there.’”
With his clients Walter and Marion Beck, Collins began work at Innisfree in 1938 while still an undergraduate at Harvard majoring in English. In 1939–1940 and 1953–1954 he traveled through Asia studying gardens. During the latter trip, as a Fulbright Scholar in Japan, he collaborated on what is likely the first English translation of the most influential of all Japanese garden texts, the Sakuteik