Kathryn Imlay Stedman in the landscape she designed for Joseph and Lilian Eichler, c1958. Photo courtesy of D. Warner North.
Kathryn Imlay Stedman was a very busy landscape architect practicing in the Bay Area between the 1940s and the 1970s. Among her accomplishments was the design for the personal home of Joseph Eichler, as well as many private homes in and around Palo Alto. I happened across a drawing by Stedman and began research, publishing an article on Stedman in 2025 in Eden, the journal of the California Garden & Landscape History Society. Link to the article and the issue of Eden here.
Site plan for the Blake estates in Kensington, California. The site to the south, created by and for Anita and Anson Blake, is now owned by UC Berkeley and may be visited. Site plan courtesy of UC Berkeley.
Mabel Symmes studied landscape architecture at UC Berkeley in 1916. She went on to design landscapes in Berkeley, including the paired estates for Anson and Anita Blake, and Edwin and Harriet Blake. She had previously been dismissed as a dilettante, buy my extensive research proved otherwise and was published in the Summer 2020 issue of Eden, the journal of the California Garden & Landscape History Society and may be viewed at this link.