Students who’ve enjoyed relaxing, sunning or studying on UD’s Green owe a debt to Marian Coffin, a trailblazing landscape designer of the early 1900s.

How to beautify a campus

Article by Diane Stopyra Photos by Evan Krape and courtesy of Winterthur Museum, Anna Wik and University Archives and Records Management March 14, 2025

Honoring the legacy of Marian Coffin, one of the nation’s first female landscape architects

The University of Delaware was founded by men, constructed by men and attended, at least for the first 140 years, by — you guessed it — men. So it may come as a surprise that the person largely responsible for creating the renown look and feel of campus is a woman. Brilliant, impassioned and way (way) ahead of her time, Marian Cruger Coffin was a landscape visionary.

“She really planned the entire scope of campus in the early 1900s,” said Chandra Reedy, director of UD’s Center for Historic Architecture and Design. “You know she had a strong backbone in order to overcome prejudice from people who found a woman in this role very inappropriate. She persevered.”

“Gardens are the living representation of the passage of time, where growth and decay dance in harmony.” —Marian Coffin

Marian Coffin grew up straddling two worlds. In 1888, at the age of 7, the New York native lost her father, leaving her penniless. But because the tragedy forced her and her mother to move in with wealthy extended family, Coffin forged many connections with aristocrats of the East Coast elite. She became an anomaly: a low-income member of the upper class.

Coffin found herself drawn to the arts, but — by her own assessment — she had scarce talent in the traditional mediums: painting, music and sculpture. So when a friend suggested she explore landscape architecture, something clicked. Coffin had long felt inspired by the beauty of the Finger Lakes near her childhood home, and she immediately applied to a competitive program — then the only one open to women — at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The university initially denied her enrollment (she’d had no formal education up until this point), but Coffin was not deterred. She underwent rigorous tutoring until, at age 25, MIT accepted her application. Coffin became one of only a handful of female students in the program.

"We were pioneers,” she once said of those early days. “And we were determined to show what enthusiasm and hard work could accomplish."

While Coffin completed all of her course requirements, MIT did not grant her a degree — women were considered “special students” and weren’t eligible. And, after leaving Massachusetts, she struggled to break into existing landscape architecture firms. So Coffin started her own, intentionally hiring women with similar aspirations and paying them a fair wage. She quickly developed her own style — formal, naturalistic and heavily influenced by European trends — and became known for her attention to detail.

Leveraging the upper-class contacts she’d made through her upbringing, Coffin attracted high-profile clients, including lifelong friend and pen pal Henry Francis du Pont — the pair wrote long letters back and forth about the thrill of collecting every variety of daffodil. Du Pont commissioned Coffin to design the Italian Renaissance-inspired garden at his Winterthur estate*, now a world-renowned museum and the co-sponsor of two UD graduate programs. For Rodney H Sharp, then a University trustee, Coffin designed the sweeping grounds of his Gibraltar manor, a Wilmington property spanning 80 acres that now doubles as a learning laboratory for UD students and interns. Known as the Marian Coffin Gardens, the space is open to the public.

Landscape architecture students get their hands dirty at the Marian Coffin Gardens in Wilmington.

“It was designed as this pleasure ground of the gilded age,” said Anna Wik, associate professor of landscape architecture and a board member of the Preservation Delaware nonprofit that maintains the space. “Now it’s this beloved secret garden that people of all walks of life enjoy.”

At the time Coffin was tackling these major Delaware projects, UD’s campus consisted of only a handful of buildings but two separate colleges: the men’s and the women’s. Sharp and other UD leaders planned a major expansion and, in 1915, they acquired the marshy no-man’s land between the two institutes. They hired the cutting-edge Day and Klauder architecture firm of Princeton University fame to lay out the space, but initial designs left much to the imagination: “They showed a big box that read, simply: ‘grove,’” Wik said. To breathe more life into this half-mile stretch — what would eventually become UD’s famed Green — Marian Coffin stepped in.

An aerial shot captures the beauty of UD’s Green, designed by horticultural hero Marian Cruger Coffin.

The challenge was great. Coffin’s task — to unify the two colleges in an aesthetically pleasing way — proved a tall order, given that the aforementioned stretch of land between them was, in fact, crooked. To give the illusion of alignment, she designed Magnolia Circle, where UD’s fountain is now, and she used similar hardscaping when creating her walkways on both sides of campus. But Coffin also gave each gendered area its own distinct feel — imbued with symbolism. For the men’s side, she opted for straight Georgian brick pathways and majestic American elm trees: broad, tall and stately. On the women’s side, she incorporated more curvilinear paths, considered more feminine, and softer, more romantic fauna.

“She chose honey locust trees, which are feathery and beautiful,” Wik said. “But they also have sharp thorns — a tongue-and-cheek way of saying there’s more to women than meets the eye.”

Marian Coffin, a pioneer amongst female landscape architects, is the visionary behind these plans, better known as The Green.

Time has brought much change to the University. Marian Coffin could never have envisioned the merging of the men’s and women’s colleges, let alone the construction of Morris Library or Building X or UD’s entire STAR Campus. But while UD has experienced expansion after expansion — and renovation after renovation — “the bones are still there,” Wik said. “People have honored her vision.”

One of these people is Josh Twardowski, a landscape architect and a manager on UD’s grounds crew. The entire department works every day to maintain what Coffin started more than a century ago — you might even catch arborists carefully removing the thorns of those original honey locust trees (“If we don’t do this, they’ll grow up to a foot in length and pose a danger to students,” Twardowski said, proving that Coffin’s little wink to the women of campus is alive and well.) And, when something unexpected happens — like Coffin’s American elms succumbing to Dutch elm disease — he and his crew work to find a viable replacement that honors the original plan. (It’s now Princeton, Valley Forge and Jefferson elms to thank for shade on The Green.)

“Simplicity is beauty’s prime ingredient.” —Marian Coffin

“Maintaining the original design intent is important because it serves as a reminder,” Twardowski said. “There’s something bigger and older than us out there. It was here before us, and will be here after us.”

Throughout her career, Coffin designed more than 130 private estates, as she completed layouts for Delaware’s Mount Cuba Center and the New York Botanical Garden. But it’s more than her landscapes that endure — it’s her legacy. While never a UD student herself, she embodied all the character traits of a Blue Hen: grit, creativity and purpose. Her story lives on not in her plantings, but in the spirit of all students who walk the Georgian brick pathways at UD, inspired to bring their own beauty into the world.

*Winterthur has produced a podcast on Marian Coffin’s influence. Listen on Spotify, YouTube and Apple Podcasts.