Historic Deepwood Estate

Elizabeth Lord & Edith Schryver were commissioned in 1929 to design Deepwood's two and one half acres of English style gardens. Lord & Schryver pioneered landscape architecture in the Northwest as the region's first professionally trained women landscape architects.

Both women graduated from the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture for Women in Massachusetts. They met on a European tour of famous gardens in 1927. During their 40-year partnership, they designed and supervised work in Salem & Portland, Oregon and Seattle & Tacoma, Washington.

Though the volume of work was relatively small (about 250 gardens with 25 of them in Salem), the quality of their work was consistently high and earned them regional & national recognition. Lord and Schryver's original drawings and records are archived at the University of Oregon (Eugene), Knight Library, Special Collections.

Elizabeth Lord (1887-1976) was the daughter of William P. Lord, Chief Justice of Oregon's Supreme Court, who later served as Oregon Governor (1895-99). Her mother founded the Salem Garden Club.

Edith "Nina" Schryver (1901-1984) spent five years in the office of well-known New York landscape architect Ellen Shipman prior to joining in a 40-year partnership with Elizabeth Lord.