Pioneer Information
Born in Newburgh, New York, Bush-Brown received a private education at the Gunnery School. He then earned a B.L.A. at the Towne School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1919 and attended graduate school at Harvard University, where he earned an M.L.A. In the 1920s and 1930s, he worked with Thomas Sears to redesign the landscape of the Glen Foerd estate in Philadelphia, creating terraced gardens at the south side of the mansion. Bush-Brown taught on the faculty of the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women (which later became Temple University’s Ambler Campus), which his wife, Louise (née Carter), headed from 1924 to 1952. In 1931, he collaborated with Beatrix Farrand to design the school’s Formal Perennial Garden and he established the two-year “Preparatory Course for Professional Study in Landscape Architecture” there in the fall of 1934. In 1941, he was commissioned to design the landscape of the planned community of Abbottsford Homes in Philadelphia, where he aligned the buildings with the site’s natural topography, created small lawns between buildings, and lined the roads with trees. Bush-Brown retired from teaching in 1958. He and his wife collaborated on several books on American gardens, including America’s Garden Book (1939) and Young America’s Garden Book (1962). A member of the American Society of Landscape Architects, Bush-Brown died in Gwynedd, Pennsylvania, at the age of 93.
