Flowering at Yale

Bob Handelman

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Bob Handelman

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Purple blazing stars, yellow black-eyed Susans, red bee balms, pale purple coneflowers, and white Shasta daisies show their midsummer colors at Yale’s Marsh Botanical Garden, an eight-acre oasis a few minutes’ walk from the center of campus. “This is what gives me goosebumps,” says Kunso Kim, the garden’s associate director: “the incredible plants that are blooming from early spring into midsummer into fall.” On the hilltop is the Marsh mansion, watching over its grounds. Othniel Charles Marsh, Class of 1860, left both grounds and mansion to Yale.

Efforts to restore the gardens and the six green-houses are underway, Kim says, and they have an important role in Yale’s work to support biodiversity. Unfortunately, he adds, “an incredible number of people don’t even know about this place.”