Welcoming Our New Landscape Curator Lily Carone

We’re thrilled to announce that Lily Carone has been appointed as the new Landscape Curator. Carone has been an integral part of the botanic garden team for the past three and a half years, serving as a greenhouse horticulturist in the Lyman Plant House. Her background in organic farming, landscape horticulture, and education makes her an exceptional fit for this role.

“The best part about my job is getting to work with such a skilled and enthusiastic team of gardeners, arborists, and students,” Carone shared as she stepped into her new position.

Carone grew up in New York and Connecticut. Though she once considered attending Smith, she enrolled at Mount Holyoke College, where she studied for two years before pausing her undergraduate education to travel and pursue a career in agriculture. Her journey began with a Mount Holyoke Summer Research Fellowship in early childhood education and women's health in northern India and continued with farming and educational experiences in Italy, Spain, and Portugal through WWOOF International.

Upon returning to New England, Carone took on a variety of agricultural roles: organic vegetable farming at Holbrook Farm (Brookfield, CT), Atlas Farm (Deerfield, MA), and Natural Roots Farm (Conway, MA); dairy farming and leading educational tours at New Pond Farm (Redding, CT); working with goats and cheesemaking at Fat Toad Farm (Brookfield, VT); and fruit production at Clarkdale Fruit Farm (Deerfield, MA). She also oversaw the opening of the Atlas Farm Store in 2013 and managed its operations, along with Atlas’s Boston farmer’s markets, for five years—helping grow these ventures into beloved community institutions.

In 2017, Carone returned to Mount Holyoke College as a Horticultural Assistant at the Botanic Garden, where she worked primarily in landscape horticulture while also supporting Talcott Greenhouse. There, she cultivated both plants and community—designing spring bulb shows, collaborating on art installations with students, advising the student-led Food Justice Society, helping develop the student vegetable garden, and building on the garden’s social media presence. During this time, she also earned her Bachelor of Science degree from UMass Amherst, focusing on ethnobotany, herbal medicine, and Indigenous studies.

As Landscape Curator, Carone will be responsible for working with our outdoor horticulture team to ensure that collections building and stewardship are aligned with our goals as well as nurturing the partnerships that characterize our work today. She brings a collaborative spirit and a deep commitment to education and sustainability into this role. “Our entire campus functions as an arboretum, and our crew cares for several named gardens. Collaborating and engaging with the community through plants and on the landscape is so rewarding and meaningful to me,” she said.

“Lily has an exceptional range of experience and capacity in public horticulture, which makes this role such a perfect fit for her,” said Director and former Landscape Curator John Berryhill. “All of us here, including our students, have learned so much from her approach to her work and desire to center student experiences.”

At Lyman Plant House, Carone previously managed the cool growing collection, including the Cool Temperate House’s trees and shrubs, and the collection of camellias and citruses. She has contributed fresh ideas to the Spring Bulb Show and has brought expertise in herbal medicinal practices that have shaped the display and interpretation of our medicinal plant collections. Her dedication to mentorship has enriched the experiences of many Smith students, including through collaboration with the Design Thinking Initiative on a J-term course in papermaking which she has continued to teach for the past three years

“I am so grateful for the opportunity to serve as a steward of this land, particularly at this moment of such ecological and environmental upheaval,” she said.

And we are so grateful to have her in this role. 

Carone shared more about here time at the botanic garden thus far and what she is excited for in her new role. 

1. What are you most excited to do in your new role?

To grow plants! To steward beautiful, resilient, diverse and dynamic living landscapes! 

First and foremost, I’m just excited to get back outside–to feel engaged with the environment, working with plants in the ground and observing the rhythm of their life cycles. I’m eager to feel the sun and the wind and the rain, to sense the temperature change throughout the day and seasons, to hear birdsong and to greet people passing by. 

Beyond that, I’m excited about the opportunity to work collaboratively with members of our community to envision, create and support a resilient and healthy landscape that serves as many different people and other living beings as possible. I hope to learn from other institutions and to engage meaningfully in conversations about what our landscapes can be and what it can do. 

I am excited and grateful to be moving into this role at a moment when the mission of the botanic garden has been clearly redefined and for the opportunity to work with colleagues who are committed to elevating the caliber of our work to align with that mission.

2. How do you think your previous work experiences will guide you in your new role?

Aside from the four years I just spent working in Lyman, my entire career has been spent working outdoors. So I feel really at home getting back onto the land. Throughout my career, and especially inside Lyman, sharing knowledge about the botanical world is this thread that I’ve kept pulling on. Teaching has always been really fulfilling and meaningful to me–as I learn new things, I find myself wanting to share the learning with other people. It began early on when I was first farming vegetables. I was in awe of the things I was discovering every day and wanted to marvel with others at the fact of the bright orange carrot–edible!! delicious!! food!!--emerging like a mirage from beneath dark, rich soil. Over the years, my approach to work has been grounded in a desire to teach and learn in community, and one of the joys of working at Smith is that this approach is welcomed, even expected, here.

Over the past four years in Lyman I was encouraged and supported to pursue the sharing of information and I learned a lot, particularly from my colleague Sarah Loomis, about what is called interpretation in the world of museums and botanic gardens; signs that provide information for visitors. I think there is a lot of room for developing interpretive material that can be embedded in the landscape in really creative and compelling ways.

3. Do you think you will be able to weave your artistic side into this work?

Yes! Of course! Garden design is in and of itself an artistic endeavor. Beyond that, though, I am particularly excited about working with students and other members of our community to bring art into the gardens and onto the landscape.

4. What are you most proud of in your time working as greenhouse horticulturist?

Nurturing plants is always really rewarding, and I learned so much from my colleagues Jimmy Grogan and Dan Babineau who are both profoundly talented and experienced horticulturists. I was able to see real change in the health and vigor of numerous plants in our collection over the course of my time in Lyman. Initiating a pest management plan that incorporated the use of beneficial insects and nearly replaced all other pesticide use in the greenhouse was definitely an important and successful pursuit. The bulb show commission is up there, too. It’s been so much fun getting to work with and mentor students through that process and to see them embed and express themselves in this hundred year old tradition.

5. What do you hope to bring to this role that perhaps hasn't been a part of it previously? 

I’m really hoping to build relationships across departments, and to move into an era where we work with the college to responsibly steward this piece of land.