#ThrowbackThursday: Princeton in the Spring

John Peale Bishop, Class of 1917, devoted his class poem to the spring, his favorite season on campus:

... Princeton is the place of places

Where first she lingers in her traces.

Flowers are many and grass is deep,

And all the ways are calm as sleep

And rich as a dream. There she stays

And half forgets to count her days.

The University owes much of its springtime appeal — what Bishop’s classmate F. Scott Fitzgerald called its “lazy beauty” — to famed landscape architect Beatrix Jones Farrand, whose work at Princeton began in 1912 and spanned more than three decades. The pink saucer magnolia featured on PAW’s June 11, 2008, cover was a Farrand favorite. A bench outside the University Chapel honors her contributions with a simple, grateful inscription: “Her love of beauty and order is everywhere visible in what she planted for our delight.” READ MORE: Princeton’s Palette: How planners preserve the legacy of master gardener Beatrix Farrand