Gardens Without Borders

The frog was a surprise. But that amphibian wasn’t the first unexpected find. After layers of concrete liner were removed from a pool deep in the woods in the Wellesley College Botanic Gardens (WCBG), water didn’t bubble back up as Anne Beckley, senior gardens horticulturist, had anticipated it would.

Beckley describes the ephemeral pool’s restoration as both a technical and ecological achievement. “We started peeling away the concrete and discovered tiles draining the area,” she says. But after they pulled out the first couple, “water just immediately started coming in.” The structures turned out to be mid-19th-century clay drainage tiles, evidence of a long-ago farmer’s cultivation of the wetland.

Relieved, Beckley went on vacation. When she returned, she ventured down to the pool—and found the frog. “I wasn’t expecting that so soon,” she says.

The ephemeral pool exemplifies the Gardens’ dynamic life, says Kristina Niovi Jones, WCBG director and adjunct assistant professor of biological sciences. “Already there are fern fiddleheads popping up. After a summer rain, there were a ton of birds in the little pools. It’s already alive,” she says.

From the beginning, the Wellesley College Botanic Gardens—celebrating their centennial this year—have been spaces teeming with life. In 1925, the College established them to serve as “a center that shall be of interest to all,” fostering both scientific and humanistic engagement with plants. This vision was led by alumna and Botany Chair Margaret C. Ferguson, class of 1891. To promote the study of plants native to the region and across the globe, she advocated for the academic use of the 20-plus acres that comprise the Alexandra Botanic Gardens, H. H. Hunnewell Arboretum, and the Margaret C. Ferguson Greenhouses, known collectively as the Wellesley College Botanic Gardens.

The gardens provide opportunities for scientific, artistic, contemplative, and playful learning. Students can monitor soil, map invasive species, draw specimens, or simply sit quietly under a venerable oak. “There’s something here for everybody—whether it’s a walk, a break from studies, or an independent project,” Beckley says.

Wellesley students have played a role in restoring the pool and its surrounding hillside, removing invasive species and salvaging native plants. “We dug up ostrich fern, royal fern, sedges, even a tiny leatherleaf shrub that had survived in just an inch and a half of soil above the concrete,” Beckley says. “Now we’ve got them potted up behind the greenhouses and will plant them out next year.”

That little frog underscores the Botanic Gardens’ capacity to surprise. “These habitats are always in flux—that’s what’s exciting about them,” Beckley says.

Living and Learning in Landscape

Margaret C. Ferguson believed in hands-on learning and direct engagement with nature. She envisioned the College’s greenhouses as “laboratories under glass,” spaces where students could observe and interact with plant life. “I am always indebted to Margaret Ferguson and her vision,” says Jones. “Every time I think I have a good idea, she’s already had it.”

Inspired by co-founder Henry Durant’s dream of a school of botany, Ferguson and early faculty envisioned the gardens as living classrooms. “She wanted students to learn from nature directly,” Jones says, “not just from books or lectures.”

The program weathered shifts. Botany merged into biological sciences mid-century. “The number of course offerings dropped,” partly due to agricultural technological advancements during the Green Revolution that focused only on “water, fertilizer, and sunlight,” says Jones. By 2001, environmental studies emerged, and a hands-on, field-based approach began to thrive again. And the Botanic Gardens offered the perfect place to do that work.

“At other colleges, visiting gardens involves a field trip, but at Wellesley, students can step out the door and be in a curated learning environment,” Jones says. She adds that Ferguson insisted on locating greenhouses at the heart of campus so students could encounter plants as part of daily life. “You can be doing an observational study where you need to go by every day; it just opens up a huge range of possibilities,” Jones says.

“We reframed the gardens with plants-as-food,” Jones adds. “That places them in an ecological web of life. Anyone interested in sustainability, restoration, and the opportunity to work hands on with the land can do it right here.”

The Edible Ecosystem hillside exemplifies this shift. Previously overrun with invasive plants, it was transformed after consultation with permaculture designer Dave Jacke, the son of Ellen Van Deusen Jacke ’47. Once a hillside hayfield below the Whitin Observatory, it is now a space filled with fruit trees, herbs, blueberries, and vegetables. “This is ecology meets food; many students love being part of that. If you don’t have hands-on experience with what it takes to grow a plant, you just are divorced from reality,” Jones says.

Thanks to a gift from trustee emerita Mary White ’79, the Global Flora conservatory, which replaced the beloved but decaying glass greenhouses, broadened the mission. “We had this opportunity … to grow plants from most places,” says Jones. Yet such collections raise questions. “The whole notion of a botanical garden is a pretty colonial construct: bringing plants as a collection of objects from other places.” The work now is “really about rebuilding relationships with plants and with land.”

Student-Focused Spaces

Biology major and environmental studies minor Lucia Chen ’26 gravitated to the Botanic Gardens on her first day at Wellesley. Chen had read about the Botanistas student organization in College admission materials. “During our first org fair, I beelined over to the Botanistas,” she says. “It’s a great community.”

Chen’s involvement with the gardens has influenced her academic path. “Being passionate about plants definitely played a very important role in my choosing my courses, especially ecology classes,” she says. While her focus is currently microbiology, “I’d like to expand my view,” she says.

She says the Botanic Gardens are “a hub for everything. You get to see all the hard work that the staff and student assistants put in. In the Edible Ecosystem there are blueberries, fig trees, persimmon trees, and rose bushes. I collected some catmint because my roommate had a cat.”

Her favorite spots are the quieter corners, the hidden staircases and paths, the azalea hill in spring, wooden benches tucked among trees. In Global Flora, she’s on the fish team that maintains brackish and freshwater tanks in the conservatory. “Just seeing schools of fish swimming is a stress reliever,” she says. Wildlife encounters also delight her: herons, turtles basking in the sun, a beaver paddling.

Chen urges people walking around campus to put away their phones. “What if there’s a little baby muskrat munching on grass by Paramecium Pond? If you don’t look up, you’re not going to see it.”

Centennial Reflections

Melchor Hall, associate director of the botanic gardens, took up her position recently. “It’s interesting to come in during the centennial, thinking about history, colonial legacies in botanical collections, and looking forward to a more progressive mission focused on reciprocal relationships and land stewardship,” she says. Her role is about cultivating attention to every corner of the gardens. “That’s the core of my job—helping people notice every nook and cranny,” she says.

Hall’s path to this work was unconventional, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the Botanic Gardens. Her doctoral work was in international relations, studying development in Honduras. She pivoted to study Black Indigenous bread makers along the Central American coast. “I hadn’t grown up on farms or gardened seriously, but what I learned stayed with me,” she says. Returning to the U.S., she began reflecting on her relationship to land and farmers. “I didn’t have a Ph.D. in botany, but I had thought deeply about land, relationships to other beings, and engaging those questions with integrity.”

Her role also fosters student exploration. “A wide range of people come here. Some want familiarity, others a less constructed space, and some aren’t looking at all. The Meandering Meadow [behind Paramecium Pond] captivates people unexpectedly.” She shares a favorite anecdote: “A student saw a deer for the first time—it was revelatory. We hope people engage intentionally, noticing birds, insects, and wildlife.”

Hall honors Ferguson’s vision of the gardens as “a center of interest for all.” She says, “Most people don’t think of themselves as part of the environment. But engaging with human impact on the environment is central.”

Plants and Pedagogy

Faculty integrate the gardens into pedagogy. Fiona Maurissette ’07, an assistant teaching professor in the writing program, offers a first-year writing seminar, Black Feminism in the Future. She brings students to Global Flora to explore relationships with nature when they read the poetry of Alexis Pauline Gumbs. “We ask what we can learn from other mammals, particularly aquatic mammals. We’re also communicating with these plants, and they’re communicating with us,” she says.

From journals and icebreakers to reflective exercises, she emphasizes creativity, inclusivity, and curiosity. Favorite spots—the stone circle by the oak tree in the Edible Ecosystem, a tree with red blooms in Global Flora—become spaces for reflection, renewal, and research.

The gardens also support wellness. “I wanted students to know that there was a safe space for them, to reset their nervous systems,” she says.

Maurissette recalls that when she was a student, the gardens offered special solace. “I was always happiest when I was outside,” she says. “I spent a lot of time walking around campus, because I had to go to work at the library, and so I spent a lot of time near the lake and just wandering around. And I always felt better connected, more part of the community when I was outside of the academic spaces. And I want that for the students, too.”

As part of the College’s 150th anniversary celebration, Maurissette planned a dedication of the oak tree in the Edible Ecosystem as “Octavia’s Oak,” with students from her seminar sharing their thoughts and reading quotes about the significance of Black speculative fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, author of Parable of the Sower, and about the significance of nature in human lives. She aimed to make it “powerful, to make people cry. My goal always is, are you crying?”

For Suzanne Langridge, director of the Paulson Ecology of Place Initiative, the Botanic Gardens are much more than beautiful scenery. “You have this space that’s right outside the classroom,” she says. “That’s true all over campus, but from the Science Complex, you can step outside and be in the Edible Ecosystem or down in the kettle.” Those landscapes have become hubs for academic exploration and community events, from mushroom walks with Thomas Hodge, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and professor of Russian, who ties fungi to Russian cultural traditions, to casual “green gatherings” that draw students outdoors.

Faculty across disciplines have found creative ways to weave the gardens into their teaching. Langridge points to a course led by Nadya Hajj, associate professor of peace and justice studies. “A few years ago, she received a grant to use forest bathing as a way of thinking about how conflict might play out differently outdoors,” says Langridge. “She talks about moving into what she calls a liminal space—crossing a threshold into a place that allows for different kinds of conversations.”

The results were striking. Students found that discussions were less tense and more generative, and Hajj published an article on the experience. “The spaces she used were right in the Botanic Gardens,” Langridge says, “and they changed the dynamics of her class.”

Art and writing courses make use of the space, as well. In a photography class taught by Kathya Landeros, Knafel Assistant Professor of Humanities and assistant professor of art, students produced anthotypes—images made using plant emulsions—that were later exhibited in the Camilla Chandler Frost ’47 Center for the Environment in the Science Complex.

“They were making pokeberry juice and other berry-based pigments for their prints,” Langridge says. “The process made students slow down and think about light, shadow, and surroundings. Instead of taking a million pictures, they learned to pay attention. Then they moved through the gardens differently, noticing colors and textures they might have overlooked before.”

Langridge says that when she first arrived at Wellesley, she sensed an eagerness for engagement. “The hardest part was connecting with faculty who might think, ‘That’s not what I do. I don’t do nature stuff,’” she says. But as projects emerged, the gardens proved their relevance across disciplines—whether in psychology, art, peace studies, or environmental science.

Students responded enthusiastically. “We’ve surveyed classes that received grants to use the landscape, and almost always students say, ‘I wish this happened more. I feel more connected to the Wellesley landscape. I didn’t even know these places were here before,’” she says.

What sets Wellesley’s Botanic Gardens apart, Langridge says, is their design. “It doesn’t feel like a garden where plants are separated into neat collections. Instead, there’s this beautiful flow—you can move through the space and find nooks and crannies that aren’t named or labeled but become places for students to discover,” she says.

A Living Mission

On a balmy early September day, WCBG staff hosted a picnic on the grassy shore of Paramecium Pond to introduce the new mission statement: “WCBG inspires generations of changemakers to cultivate reciprocal relationships with plants and land.”

The statement sparked conversation about the role of the gardens as both a learning space and a community hub, embodying the WCBG’s core values of education, community, justice, and ethical practices. Creating community was the overriding theme of the lunchtime conversation: “In the landscape, hierarchy falls away—the gardens don’t care whether you’re a student, faculty member, or staff. Everyone belongs here,” Jones said.

“The gardens are not just about plants. They’re about cultivating a shared sense of place, responsibility, and care,” added Botanista Ailani Fraser ’26, who has worked with the WCBG since her sophomore year.

Margaret Ferguson would surely recognize and applaud what the WCBG has become. In these spaces, history, ecology, creativity, and community intersect, and a frog in a newly restored ephemeral pool reminds us that even after a century, the gardens remain alive with possibility.