Where Design Meets Memory

The daughter of a civil engineer who adored gardening and a 1946 Smith alumna who grew up in a spacious Tudor home with a beautiful backyard outside New York City—in the same New Jersey suburb where she and my father raised my siblings and me—I have, not surprisingly, always loved architecture and landscaping.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to cultivate these loves throughout my life: in childhood; at Smith, where I minored in art history, taking one of my absolute favorite courses, on 20th-century architecture, with Helen Searing, and constantly exploring the campus’s natural glories; and as an adult, since graduating from college in 1972.

Living mostly in Manhattan since graduation, I’ve had the pleasure of frequenting New York City’s wonderful parks and gardens, including Central Park, whose Conservatory Garden is a gem, and the New York Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, which mounts highly creative exhibitions celebrating artists, currently the legendary Vincent van Gogh.

As a journalist, I’ve been lucky to do a lot of travel writing, which has taken me to six continents and enabled me to visit some of the world’s most famous buildings and celebrated gardens.

My appreciation and love for these sights, instilled in childhood, blossomed when I arrived in Northampton. I lived in Baldwin House during my four years at Smith, which meant I had to walk up Bedford Terrace and cross Elm Street to reach the central campus. One of my most memorable sights upon entering the campus was a Rodin sculpture, The Walking Man. (He lives indoors today, in the art museum.)

Smith’s campus plan was first created by Frederick Law Olmsted—the iconic landscape architect who designed Central Park—in the early 1890s, when he was hired by the college’s trustees to turn the entire campus into an arboretum. Olmsted proposed a “domestically scaled suburban community, in a park-like setting.”

Smith’s campus has long cast a spell on those who walk its paths. Whether you’re a first-year student acclimating to college life, an alum returning decades later and becoming reacquainted with the campus’s myriad beauties, or a visitor drawn in by them, you’ll find that Smith’s physical environment becomes part of your inner being. Its gardens and green spaces aren’t just lovely—they ground you, orient you, and linger in memory.

According to an essay celebrating the centennial of the college’s botanic garden by the late C. John Burk, Elsie Damon Simonds Professor of Biological Sciences, it was Smith’s first president, Laurenus Clark Seelye, who “followed a tradition that had begun with universities in Renaissance Italy and spread throughout Europe. Recognizing the aesthetic value of a well-designed campus, he commissioned Frederick Law Olmsted’s landscape architecture firm to lay out the college grounds. The Victorian campus with its lofty trees still reflects Olmsted’s pastoral landscape, while plant groupings serve scientific purposes.”

The botanic garden was a year-round highlight for me; I reveled in its beauty and treasures. The Succulent House contains exotic plants that I had certainly never encountered in New Jersey. Equally astounding to this Jersey girl was the Palm House. The centerpiece of Lyman Plant House and Conservatory, it is home not only to palms but also to other tropical trees and plants, introducing visitors to far-flung worlds beyond Northampton.

One other favorite spot in my campus wanderings was the President’s House, occupied in my time by Thomas Mendenhall. Its landscaping was at its peak when I last visited, during my 50th Reunion weekend in May 2022. This was not an accident: The new garden there, the Happy Chace ’28 Garden, was designed to be in full bloom in May, when students pass by en route to Commencement ceremonies in the quad.

Another delight afforded by passing by the President’s House is its glorious views of Paradise Pond—a 9-acre, human-made body of water dotted with a picturesque island. I enjoyed ambling around the pond as a student, observing the changing landscape.

What I remember most fondly from those college hikes to the athletic fields, taken to fulfill my gym requirement, are the heavenly fragrant and beautiful lilac bushes. This experience sweetly returns to me each spring, when I pass the lilacs blooming in the Conservatory Garden in Central Park.

My favorite season in Northampton was autumn. There is nothing more beautiful than a crisp New England fall day, dazzling with clear blue skies and trees ablaze with red, orange, and yellow leaves. I’d like to think Maya Lin, architectural designer of the recently renovated Neilson Library, had this season in mind when she developed her plans for the project.

In a recent interview, Lin said two later additions to the library “bifurcated the campus at its very heart … effectively creating a wall that separated the two main campus greens as created by Olmsted’s plan, which had placed Neilson at the center of the campus and allowed free circulation in and around it. By removing the two wings, we reunited the two major 
campus greens.”

Her plan cleared the view and created paths for travel from the museum to the science quad, and from Green Street to Chapin lawn, thus restoring the openness and flow that Olmsted originally envisioned for the campus. The new amphitheater incorporated the 16-foot elevation change between the library’s east and west sides and preserved several of the campus’s state champion trees, a dawn redwood and a linden recognized by Massachusetts for their size and significance in the landscape.

The emotional attachment felt by me and so many others to the beauty of Smith’s landscape shouldn’t be surprising, suggests John Berryhill, the botanic garden’s director. “Plants tell us where we are,” he says. “They create a connection to a place; they’re why we feel so emotionally connected.”

My strolls around Smith’s campus as a student and alumna made me aware of the changing seasons, their constantly evolving beauty and light. They sharpened my powers of observation, teaching me how to observe, remember, and truly see—invaluable lessons that last a lifetime. Most importantly, they brought me deep joy, rekindled whenever I return to Northampton.

Jane L. Levere ’72 has worked as a full-time freelance journalist for the last 30 years, writing for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, CNN.com, BBC.com, NBCNews.com, Architectural Digest, Condé Nast Traveler, and Travel + Leisure, among others.

This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Smith Quarterly.