Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture

The Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture is the shorthand name for a school that was founded in Groton, Massachusetts in 1901 for women to be trained in landscape architecture and horticulture. Under its original name of Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture, Gardening, and Horticulture for Women, the college was one of the first in the world to open the profession to women. In 1915 it was renamed the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture for Women, and in 1945 it was absorbed into the Rhode Island School of Design as the Lowthorpe Department of Landscape Architecture.

The school was founded in 1901 as Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture, Gardening, and Horticulture for Women by Judith Eleanor Motley Low, a Groton native who was either the granddaughter or great granddaughter of Benjamin Bussey. Low had spent time in her youth at the Bussey Institute at Arnold Arboretum, studying agriculture, gardening, and botany. A one-page brochure announcing the establishment of the school offered instruction in the subjects of "landscape gardening, elementary architecture, horticulture, botany and allied subjects." The brochure announced an October 1901 start date, but instruction did not actually begin until the following fall.

To be admitted, a prospective student was required to have a high school diploma and some knowledge of both drawing and botany. The school's population of students ranged from single digits in the early years up to 30 or 40 in the 1930s. Instruction focused on private residential design rather than public gardens, as such work was at the time considered most suitable for women.

The Groton campus included 17 acres (69,000 m²) of meadows, orchards, gardens, greenhouses, and an administration building. The gardens were largely the work of school students and were mostly laid out in geometrical arrangements; the herb garden, for example, was in the form of an Elizabethan knot. Although the naturalistic style of Edwardian-era English garden design (embracing both the English landscape garden and its later variant the cottage garden) was the prevailing aesthetic taught at the school, the more formal style of Italian landscape design was also taught and influenced how the gardens were organized.

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