Russell Page, Garden Designer to the Rich, Dies

Russell Page, a British landscape architect who planned gardens for the rich and famous and advised Lady Bird Johnson on the beautification of Washington, died Friday night, hospital authorities reported. He was 78.

A spokeswoman at London’s Fitzroy Nuffield Hospital declined to give the cause of death.

Page, who once said there was no such thing as an ugly plant, did not have a garden himself.

“I haven’t had a garden since I was 10. I’ve got too many of other people’s,” he remarked in 1966.

Page’s best known work included landscaping Les Halles, Paris’ famed fruit and vegetable market, transformed into a modern complex of restaurants and boutiques, and London’s Battersea Gardens, along the Thames.

Page also redid Longchamps race course outside Paris, making it a proliferation of window boxes. He termed it “the smartest race course in the world.”

Lady Bird Johnson asked Page to advise on the Beautifying of the Nation’s Capital project she sponsored when her husband was President.

The late Duke of Windsor hired Page to lay out a garden at an old mill house near Paris where the duke lived after giving up the British throne to marry a twice-divorced American, Wallis Simpson.

Perhaps Page’s most familiar American creation is Pepsico’s world headquarters at Purchase, N.Y., with its 145-acre park.

Page, born in Lincolnshire in central England, was educated at the prestigious Charterhouse school and studied painting at London’s Slade Art School. But from the time he bought a plant at a country flower show as a boy, his first love was gardening. It should be, he once said, “a matter of attainable perfections.”

London’s Sunday Telegraph described Page’s 1961 book, “The Education of a Gardener,” as “one of the most eloquent of all horticultural testaments.”