Gary Smith

With more than twenty-five years of experience in public garden design and master planning, W. Gary Smith has distinguished himself as a landscape architect who celebrates plants and the connections they offer between people and nature. As an ecological designer and professional horticulturist, he combines art, horticulture, and architectural features in innovative ways, exploring the intersection between ecological design and artistic abstraction. “I work collaboratively with professional horticulturists, artists, craftspeople, educators, and community members - with the central goal of creating immersive garden experiences that weave together local ecological and cultural themes.”

Gary’s quote describes perfectly the gifts he brought to the Southern Highlands Reserve. Through his experience and affinity for native plants, coupled with his carefully choreographed plans for color and form relationships, Gary has been able to perfectly craft a garden experience that is subordinate to the existing site rather than being imposed upon it.

In 2006 Smith received the Gold Medal award from the Association of Professional Landscape Designers for the Tropical Mosaic Garden at the Naples Botanical Garden in Florida. His design for Peirce’s Woods at Longwood Gardens, an “art-form garden of mid-Atlantic native plants,” received a 2004 Design Merit Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects. In 2002, he received the national Award of Distinction from the Association of Professional Landscape Designers for his work on three public garden projects: Enchanted Woods at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Delaware, Peirce’s Woods at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, and the Stopford Family Meadow Maze at Tyler Arboretum, also in Pennsylvania. His recent work includes a new design for the John A. Sibley Horticultural Center at Callaway Gardens in Georgia, and the Entrance Corridor Landscape Master Plan for the new Botanic Garden of Western Pennsylvania in Pittsburg. In 2005, he completed a Gardens Master Plan for the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas.

Current projects include the new Santa Fe Botanical Garden; the Southern Highlands Reserve; the Children’s Garden at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center; new children’s features in Bryant Park in New York City; and a master plan for the Children’s Discovery Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. He is the ongoing restoration landscape architect for the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate in Delaware.

His unique approach to combining plants and art makes him a much sought-after speaker at botanical gardens and horticultural societies. He is a frequent lecturer at design conferences and symposia. A tireless advocate among landscape architects for public spaces that focus on plants and horticulture, he led a panel discussion at the 2005 annual meeting of the ASLA, entitled “Don’t Landscape Architects Care about Plants?”, and started a Professional Practice Network in the ASLA on Plants and Planting Design. Formerly an Associate Professor of Landscape Design and Construction at the University of Delaware, he has also served as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas.