Landscape Firm Tom Stuart-Smith Joins Blithewood Garden Rehabilitation Project
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.— Bard College’s Friends of Blithewood Garden and the Garden Conservancy are pleased to announce that the firm Tom Stuart-Smith, a renowned landscape design practice with an international reputation for making gardens that combine naturalism and modernity, will be commissioned for the planting plan phase of the Blithewood Garden rehabilitation project.Once the current architectural rehabilitation phase at Blithewood is complete, the Stuart-Smith team will help reimagine the garden and the surrounding landscape to fit seamlessly into the space. The team will coordinate with the preservation architect and review historical records, photographs, and prior reports to inform the new design. They will also work with Bard College to integrate educational and opportunities for students and the broader community throughout the process. Once complete, Blithewood’s landscape will be Stuart-Smith’s only public garden in the United States.
“After almost a decade of planning for Blithewood’s return to glory, I’m thrilled to be collaborating with Tom Stuart-Smith’s team to rethink and refresh Blithewood’s plantings,” said Amy Parrella, director of Horticulture and Arboretum at Bard. “Gardens are dynamic living art works that are at their best when they are reinterpreted from a current lens, while still maintaining their cultural and design integrity.”
“The most enduring historic gardens continue to evolve,” said Pamela Governale, director of preservation at the Garden Conservancy. “By engaging the renowned landscape practice of Tom Stuart-Smith, we are embracing a living future for Blithewood—one that honors its past while reimagining its plantings for challenges of the decades ahead. This is preservation not as stasis, but as cultural continuity. The restoration of Blithewood Garden is a powerful example of what happens when visionary institutions and world-class designers come together to steward a nationally significant landscape.”
Blithewood Garden is considered a nationally significant Beaux Arts, Italianate garden with significant connections to the evolution of American landscape design and is one of the few intact Hudson River estate gardens that remain from the Gilded Age. Situated on a steeply sloping bluff approximately 130 feet above the Hudson River, Blithewood is a 45-acre section of Bard’s campus that was once part of a historic estate comprising a manor house, outbuildings, drives, gardens, lawns, and meadows. Bard College has partnered with the Garden Conservancy, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to preserve and share America’s gardens, on the restoration of Blithewood Garden.
Blithewood Garden is open to the public from dawn to dusk every day. For more information, visit https://www.bard.edu/arboretum/gardens/blithewood/
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About the Garden Conservancy
The Garden Conservancy is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to preserve, share, and celebrate America's gardens and diverse gardening traditions for the education and inspiration of the public. We work with partners and communities across America to preserve outstanding gardens, and since 1989 we have helped preserve over 100 gardens. Our signature program, Open Days, welcomes visitors to private gardens annually, and since 1995, more than 4,000 private gardens have participated, with 1.4 million visitors in states across the country. Through all of our programs and outreach, we champion the vital role that gardens play in our history, our culture, and our quality of life. For more information, please visit gardenconservancy.org.
The Garden Conservancy is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to preserve, share, and celebrate America's gardens and diverse gardening traditions for the education and inspiration of the public. We work with partners and communities across America to preserve outstanding gardens, and since 1989 we have helped preserve over 100 gardens. Our signature program, Open Days, welcomes visitors to private gardens annually, and since 1995, more than 4,000 private gardens have participated, with 1.4 million visitors in states across the country. Through all of our programs and outreach, we champion the vital role that gardens play in our history, our culture, and our quality of life. For more information, please visit gardenconservancy.org.
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About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place and Massena properties, Bard’s campus consists of more than 1,200 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; advanced degrees through 13 graduate programs; nine early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 165-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at the main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
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This event was last updated on 04-02-2025
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