Pioneer Information
Born in Amsterdam in 1904 to a prominent Dutch banking family, Boissevain grew up in the Dutch East Indies and Switzerland. Educated in botany, he moved to Long Island, New York, in 1925 and became a partner in a landscape gardening business. That same year he spent two months in Austerlitz, New York where his uncle Eugen Jan Boissevain (1880–1949) and aunt, famed poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), had just purchased a large country estate named Steepletop. Boissevain lent his expertise in horticulture and landscaping to help the couple establish apple and pear orchards and design a series of garden “rooms” utilizing the stone ruins of a former barn’s foundation.
Boissevain married Miss Marion Bishop (1908–1981) in 1933 and settled in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he continued his landscape gardening practice. In addition to design work, he gave lectures and demonstrations at the Connecticut Horticultural Society (1933), the Town and Country Club (1934), and the Hazleton Garden Club (1938). In 1934 he served on the Connecticut Horticultural Society’s flower show committee and in 1937 he judged the Greenwich Garden Club and Hortulus Club’s flower show. Boissevain wrote articles for Horticulture magazine, such as “The Appeal of Saxifrage” (1935) and “Ferns for the Rock Garden” (1935), and his essay, “Rock Plants for Southern Gardens,” was published in The Massachusetts Horticulture Society’s The Gardener’s Omnibus in 1938.
Boissevain became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1942 and, due to his international experiences and fluency in English, French, German, and Dutch, served as a liaison officer for the head of the Office of War Information during World War II. In 1943 while observing training operations at Camp X in Ontario, Canada, he was hit by a stray bullet during an exercise and killed. Boissevain is buried in Forestville Cemetery in Forestville, Connecticut.
