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The Botanic Garden of Smith College encompasses the college’s
147-acre campus, including a variety of specialty gardens and the Lyman Plant House,
our 12,000 square-foot glass conservatory. In its entirety, the botanic garden contains
more than 5,000 labeled and mapped plant taxa, is the seventh oldest botanic garden
in the country, and is one of the few college botanic gardens with a history of continuous operation.
Visit
the Web site of the Botanic Garden >
For more than a century, the botanic garden has played a vital role
in the college’s overall curriculum and has been an essential resource for the Department
of Biological Studies. Smith College offers undergraduate courses in Horticulture, Landscape
Plants and Issues, Plant Biology, Plant Physiology, and Plant Systematics. These and other courses
use the plant collections as living libraries and the conservatory displays for the study of
biogeography. Within the Smith campus, students can collect and analyze plant samples, study
plant anatomy, learn about plant reproductive mechanisms, and observe examples of natural habitat.
The Conservatory comprises 13 buildings erected between the 1890s
and the 1980s as well as a recent addition to its public spaces. The original structure was completed
in 1895 by the firm of Lord and Burnham, internationally acclaimed for their beautiful balloon-style
glasshouses, like the Palm House at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Artfully situated to overlook
Paradise Pond, the Lyman Plant House was the crowning touch of the campus-wide botanic garden
and arboretum designed by the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted. The completion of a two-year, $5
million renovation project in 2003 expanded the public and teaching spaces and provided access
for persons with disabilities.
The Conservatory now houses more than 2,500 species of plants selected
from a wide variety of families and habitats and one of the best collections of tropical, subtropical,
and desert plants in the country. |
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