Betsy Anderson ’04

Betsy Anderson ’04 is a landscape architect for the National Park Service, where she facilitates both landscape-scale and site-based planning and design projects for national parks along the West Coast and in the Pacific Islands. She has additionally held positions in cultural landscape preservation, plant conservation, architectural journalism, and municipal park and trail system design and planning.

Betsy discovered her love of landscape stewardship and scholarship while at Smith College, living and learning within a campus that is also a botanic garden. At Smith she studied French and landscape history, and thanks to Smith’s focus on interdisciplinary education she was able to pursue as many courses about plants as possible and served in her senior year as the Cary MacRae McDaniel Education Intern at the Botanic Garden. These experiences shaped her career pathway, leading from the gardens of Edith Wharton at The Mount, where she worked as garden historian; to a landscape history fellowship with the National Trust’s Plant Conservation Programme in the U.K.; to a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Washington. Betsy is committed to communicating the importance of place through her practice by expressing ecological systems and human histories.

Betsy is honored to support the work of the botanic garden as the Chair of the Friends of the Botanic Garden Leadership Council.