Elizabeth Leonard Strang was born into a rural upstate New York farm family in 1886, graduated from Auburn high School in 1904, and entered the “Outdoor Art” program at Cornell the following year. When she graduated in 1910, she was the first woman to successfully complete the landscape architecture program.

Following school, Miss Leonard apprenticed with some of the best known landscape architects of the day including Ferruccio Vitale, Carl Pilat and Ellen Biddle Shipman. During this period prior to WWI Leonard also traveled to Europe, where she met her future husband, author Robert Strang, and taught landscape architectural design courses at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Design for Women in Groton, Massachusetts.

Mrs. Strang is probably best known for the dozens of articles which she wrote for popular periodicals in the 1920s. Describing many of her own projects and explaining elements of landscape design to the homeowner, she emerged as one of the earliest professionals to promote the ideas of landscape architecture to the American middle class.