Boston Flora

Tag: Lauren Stimson

  • Tuesday, September 23, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm Eastern – Lauren Stimson and Stephen Stimson: Restraint + Wildness, Live and Online

    The Harvard Graduate School of Design hosts the Sylvester Baxter Lecture on September 23 at 6:30 pm in the Piper Auditorium, and livestreamed, with Lauren Stimson and Stephen Stimson. Free and open to the public. Register HERE. STIMSON is a collective of 40 designers led by partners Lauren and Stephen Stimson. With a shared love of design, crafts, plants, and landscape, the studio’s work is varied, including public parks, museums, college and school campuses, farms, and gardens. Stephen Stimson founded STIMSON in 1992 and has been practicing landscape architecture for 35 years, after growing up on a dairy farm and studying landscape architecture at UMass Amherst and Harvard. Lauren Stimson’s interest in art, landscape, geology, and history was nurtured at Bates College in Maine, and she earned a dual degree in landscape and planning from UMass Amherst. She joined the studio in 2006, and the pair have been working alongside each other ever since. Raised just two towns apart in New England, they returned to central Massachusetts fifteen years ago to homestead and begin a more remote branch of their practice. Charbrook, a lifelong project that connects designers to the land, serves as their home, studio, working farm, plant nursery, and site of experimentation and open-minded inquiry. STIMSON earned the ASLA’s Firm Award in 2021. Both Stephen and Lauren are ASLA Fellows. Lauren was awarded the 2023-24 Rome Prize, and they spent a year at the American Academy in Rome with their children.

  • Friday, August 16, 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm – Eco-Tour: Ecology and Agriculture at Charbrook Farm

    Charbrook Farm is the modern homestead of Lauren and Stephen Stimson and their family at 71 Gates Road in Princeton, Massachusetts. Located down the road from the historic Stimson Farm and Charbrook Nursery, this working farm has become a field station for the STIMSON landscape architecture practice. A Master Plan for Charbrook Farm has been in process since 2008. Seasonal events, lambing, plant walks, nursery digs and studio retreats are all integrated into the culture and life of STIMSON. Long-term goals for the property include an agricultural arboretum, demonstration perennials and working gardens for a future design studio. A guided tour by Lauren and Stephen on August 16 from 3 – 5, sponsored by the Ecological Landscape Alliance, will discuss the concept of integrating ecology, agriculture and landscape architecture. $23 for ELA members, $33 for nonmembers. Register at www.ecolandscaping.org

    Lauren Stimson, ASLA, holds a Master of Landscape Architecture and a Master of Regional Planning from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her B.A. from Bates College in Maine where she studied Theater and Geology. She is a licensed Landscape Architect in the state of Maine. Lauren has a deep love for New England, where she was raised, and an interest in the overlap between the built environment and the rural landscape, especially as it relates to historic villages and farms. She is an avid oil painter and uses the medium to document the familiar character of regional landscapes and agrarian patterns. Painting helps inform her design thinking as a landscape architect and conceptual approach to graphic representation. She learns a great deal about plants from her garden and is passionate about food and cooking. Lauren has been a studio instructor at the University of Massachusetts, and has given talks and lectures at the International Symposium of Landscape Ecology, the Ecological Alliance, the ABX Symposium, Smith College and the Boston Society of Landscape Architects. She currently serves on the Stewardship Council for the Cultural Landscape Foundation.

    Stephen Stimson, FASLA, is Principal and Owner of STIMSON. Born and raised on a dairy farm, Stephen’s agrarian heritage has inspired and shaped the landscapes he has created across New England and the country. He received his education from the University of Massachusetts and the Harvard Graduate School of Design and has been practicing landscape architecture for over thirty years. He founded the firm in 1992 and is licensed in thirteen states.

    Stephen’s work has been widely recognized with numerous awards from the Boston Society of Landscape Architects and the American Society of Landscape Architects. He has taught at Harvard Graduate School of Design and the University of Massachusett, and has lectured and served on award and design juries throughout the country. Stephen was elected as a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 2004 for his outstanding achievements in the field of landscape architecture. For over a decade now, he has been cultivating Charbrook Nursery on his family’s historic dairy farm, for project use and field research related to native plant propagation, collected species, planted form and soil specifications. He remains passionately involved in design and projects at all levels throughout the studio and loves to draw by hand. When he is not in the studio or at a site visit, he can usually be found on a tractor somewhere on the farm, with his daughter and son on his lap.