News and Events

The Hannah Arendt Center (HAC) and Bard Athletics joined together last weekend to organize a campus-wide “Spring Cleaning” event. Working quickly in anticipation of the upcoming admitted students weekend, fellows at the HAC and student athletes gathered supplies and began recruiting volunteers to clean up across Bard’s Annandale campus, drawing more than 40 volunteers to help. The large turnout came as a pleasant surprise to the organizers, with volunteers covering six zones across the campus, picking up everything from abandoned soccer balls to discarded Kline dishware. “It’s not usually work that makes people proud,” one of the fellows later remarked. And yet, after an hour picking up trash, the dedication organizers and volunteers put in was enough to leave the whole campus community inspired.

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/