Landscape architect Ralph D. Cornell designed projects as far afield as Cairo and Manila. He is especially remembered for the public gardens he designed in Southern California, including the landscape setting he created for UCLA during a key period of campus development from 1937 to 1972 and the parkway gardens along the north side of Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. He was also an expert landscape photographer with a vast knowledge of plants and a sensitivity for design appropriate to the environment. His widow, Vera Barnes Cornell, a longtime friend of the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, bequeathed her late husband's papers and an endowment to establish the Ralph D. Cornell Memorial Fund for Special Collections. Income from the fund is used to support the collection and to develop special collections in the areas of landscape architecture, the history of photography, and Californiana.
