Pioneer Information
Born in Wilmington, Delaware, Frederick studied political science and botany at Swarthmore College, earning a B.A. in 1948 after serving in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1945. He worked in the Scott Arboretum during college, and although he was accepted to study landscape architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, he instead earned a law degree from Dickinson Law School in 1951, marrying Nancy Greenewalt that same year. The couple together enrolled in Cornell University, studying plant science and nursery management.
The Fredericks operated Millcreek Nursery near Wilmington, Delaware, from 1952 to 1971, offering design services and cultivating a diverse variety of plants. The best known of the Fredericks’ gardens is the one developed over 50 years at their own home in Hockessin, Delaware. Begun in 1964 on a natural canvass of open farmland and woods, the 28-acre property known as Ashland Hollow graces a stream-fed plot in the Brandywine River Valley. Influenced by friendships with many luminary figures in landscape architecture, including Roberto Burle Marx, Conrad Hamerman, Thomas Church, Lester Collins, and Geoffrey Jellicoe, the seventeen-acre garden comprises a varied series of landscapes and vistas and is the product of decades of continuous study and innovation.
Frederick wrote One Hundred Great Garden Plants (1975), The Exuberant Garden and the Controlling Hand (1992), and Wrestling with Angels and Singing with Dragons: The Making of a Garden Across 45 Years (2015), the latter detailing the development of Ashland Hollow. He received many awards during his career, including the Distinguished Achievement Medal from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society in 1980, the Henry Francis du Pont Award for Garden Design from Winterthur in 2001, and the Veitch Memorial Medal from the Royal Horticulture Society in 2005. Frederick died on August 15, 2018, at the age of 91.
