Lester Collins (landscape architect)

Collins was born and grew up in New Jersey, the son of Lester Collins and Anna Mary Albertson.[1] He majored in English at Princeton University, but transferred to Harvard where he majored in architecture,[2] graduating in 1938.[1] He then studied landscape architecture at Harvard, traveling in 1940 to East Asia with John Ormsbee Simonds, a fellow student.[1][2] He finished a master's degree in 1942.[1] During World War II, in 1942, he joined the American Field Service, placed in North Africa,[2] and then served in the British Eighth Army. He married Petronella Le Roux of South Africa in 1947. She continued his work until her own death in 2012.

After World War II, Collins began to teach as professor at Harvard and later became Dean of the landscape architecture department at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.[3][4] On a Fulbright scholarship, Collins traveled to Japan in 1953 to work for a year with Fuku Ikawa on the translation into English of an ancient Japanese book about gardens, Sensai Hisho. With architect Walter Gropius, he created a "healing garden" for the new Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago.[1]

Collins settled in Washington, D.C., in 1954. He joined the firm of Simonds & Simonds in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1955 as their partner in Washington. Collins headed the firm's plan for Miami Lakes in the 1960s which pioneered a new kind of town planning in Florida. In 1970, the firm changed its name to Environmental Planning and Design.[1]

Collins worked independently on projects in Washington, such as a new design for the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden in 1977,[5][6] the Enid A. Haupt Garden, the garden of the Kennedy Center, the Washington Zoo, and in Virginia Gunston Hall Plantation in Lorton. In collaboration with the National Park Service, he designed 29 parks along Pennsylvania Avenue. He worked on campus plans for Georgetown University and American University.[1]

View of a meandering creek at Innisfree Garden

He developed and directed Innisfree Garden in Millbrook, New York, over 55 years, using his knowledge of Chinese garden design.[1] Collins died of cancer[2] at the age of 79 in Sharon, Connecticut.[1]

In 1964, Collins was named a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects.[1] Innisfree Garden was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2019.[7]

• Innisfree: An American Garden (Harry N. Abrams, 1994)