Born in 1914 in Portland, Oregon, Robert Hale Ellis, Jr. graduated from Reed College in 1937 and received his graduate degree from Harvard University. During World War II, he served as an army engineer in the Yukon, New Guinea, the Philippines, and Japan. He returned to Portland and became a landscape architect designing gardens and planting schemes for clients primarily in the 1940s and 1950s. Some of his landscape designs were for residential clients who lived in houses designed by well-known regional architects such as Pietro Belluschi, Warren Weber, and Glenn Stanton. Other projects included landscape designs for churches, hospitals, and administration buildings in the greater Portland area.

Ellis was on the board of the Oregon Historical Society in the 1950s and 1960s, and he endowed a faculty position at Reed and established a fund for the acquisition of contemporary art at the Oregon Art Institute (later the Portland Art Museum) in memory of his parents. An avid conservationist, Ellis was involved with the Mazamas, the Oregon Roadside Council, and the Portland Garden Club. He bequeathed his home, the George W. Collins house designed by A. E. Doyle in 1907, to the Oregon Health & Science University for use as the president's residence. He also donated a 370-acre parcel on Shaw Island, one of the San Juan Islands in Washington state, to the University of Washington as a nature preserve. Ellis died in 1982 in Portland.

Sources: "You and Your Landscape Architect: Hillside Gardening," Oregonian, September 18, 1955, Farm, Home and Garden section, Page 3; obituary in the Oregonian, February 13, 1982, page C7; Management Plan for the University of Washington's Cedar Rock Preserve on Shaw Island, San Juan County, Washington, 2008; "'Father of Shaw Island': Frederick Eugene Ellis Sr. '38," Reed Magazine Obituaries, September 2010 (accessed August 2025), https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/in-memoriam/obituaries/september2010/frederick-eugene-ellis-sr-1938.html