From 1938, Walter Beck worked with the landscape architect Lester Collins (1914–1993) whom he had met while Collins was conducting his graduate studies at Harvard University. Collins later became Chair of Harvard's Landscape Architecture program and was responsible for the design of the National Zoological Park and the redesign of the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden, among many other projects. At Innisfree, Collins created landscapes merging Romantic concepts with Chinese and Japanese garden design traditions which he studied in Japan. When Walter Beck died in 1954, his wife requested Collins to set up a foundation. He managed to link Beck's single scenes to a "landscape as a whole".