To Make a Difference in the World

As a preeminent example in North America of world-class landscape design, and an expression of a 150-year commitment to prepare women to be transformational leaders, the Wellesley College campus is inseparable from a Wellesley education. In the decades after Henry Fowle Durant articulated his vision for the College, landscape architects, students, faculty, and alumnae shaped a campus that supported individual growth and the forging of a distinctive, powerful, intergenerational community bound by its connection to the campus and commitments to realize the ideals it nurtured. As Wellesley celebrates its founding, and with the challenges of our time in view—from climate change to resurgent systemic misogyny—through the lens of landscape architecture, this symposium considers what it means to shape a different world. It brings together historians, landscape architects, and Wellesley students, faculty, and alumnae to consider the relationships between landscape, learning, and stewardship.