A New Era of Botanical Exhibits and Interpretation at Lyman Plant House

In 2019, we invited our botanic garden community to be part of crafting our first-ever strategic plan. Staff, students, alums, faculty, and other campus and community partners came together to forge a road map that energized the botanic garden and placed our work squarely within the mission of Smith College today. The projects that have stemmed from that effort have been transformative—from collaborative exhibits to new student leadership experiences, to conservation and sustainability initiatives, to important new partnerships in the Smith community and beyond. As we close out the last few months of this half-decade plan, we are excited to share the profound new direction that we will be taking in how our guests experience the Lyman collections including a reimagining of our Fall Mum Show as a perennial series of botanical exhibits.

To paraphrase a reminder that President Sarah recently gave our community as we look ahead to crafting Smith’s next strategic plan, we must also decide what we will let go of if we wish to do our very best work. In that spirit, our Lyman team has explored ways to push back against the limitations of time and infrastructure in order to present our cherished collections at their very best. If you have been a regular visitor to the glasshouses in recent years, then you have undoubtedly noticed exciting changes as the plants and spaces have been managed more dynamically—ensuring plants can thrive and reveal themselves through flowering, fruiting, and optimal health. Through skillful horticultural practice, the team here has been able to manage the growing spaces almost entirely without the use of chemical pest controls—a remarkable feat!

Efforts to build on these successes continue. Long-standing ambitions to let the collections speak through innovative exhibits and interpretation are taking shape. In recent months you may have seen some already, including a display of the diversity of the genus Amorphophallus, best known through its most charismatic member, the corpse flower. Also, student work has been given a spotlight, such as the exhibit created by Gretchen Hammell ’24, A Reimagining: what is a label? These new projects have bumped into the extraordinary challenges of preparing for our two annual flower shows which offer our guests colorful and welcome bookends to the growing season. More specifically, the Fall Mum Show comes up again and again as a major obstacle when we ask ourselves, “How can we do more?”

The Fall Mum Show started as an extension of a horticulture class exercise teaching students the process of controlled plant hybridization. While these techniques are no longer part of the curriculum here at Smith, the show still is. What is not easily apparent to guests is that the mum show requires significantly more time, resources, space, and chemical inputs, than its springtime counterpart, the bulb show. It also draws only about a third of the audience. These challenges have loomed larger and larger as we have sought to find the bandwidth to build the kind of programming and displays that align best with our strategic plan. As such, this fall’s show will be the last of its kind and will be replaced with a wide variety of botanical displays and exhibits.

These exhibits will range from special exhibits revealing the stories behind exceptional plant groups in Lyman to student works to reappearances of past Church Gallery exhibits that were only given a short time to be experienced many years ago. The Lyman team has already brainstormed up years of ideas that we are eager to act on and invite our student partners into the creation process. It is also extremely important that this move will eliminate approximately 90% of the pesticide usage at Lyman, which is already at about 10% of what it was less than a decade ago.

We are also very glad to share that this new model of exhibits will allow us to craft new members-only experiences such as exclusive tours and visiting hours. (Learn more about being a Friend of the Botanic Garden.)  Please stay tuned in the year ahead as we develop this exciting new programming.