Smithsonian Landscape Chief Grateful for Training in College

When Jeff Nagle was a student in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, he used to dream up landscaping plans for local homes and present them to homeowners as projects for a landscape design class. Today, eight years later, he is no longer just dreaming up landscaping plans—he is turning them into reality and supervising their execution. Best of all, thousands of visitors to one of the nation’s best-known attractions get to enjoy them.

His creative course in landscape design taught him to envision what landscapes should look like and how to transform his plans from just good ideas to real-world surroundings. But Nagle never dreamed that one day he would get to make all of the major landscaping decisions at a museum as large as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Nagle, 30, of Arlington, Virginia, is the Smithsonian’s supervisory horticulturalist. His job requires that he oversee the upkeep and maintenance of the gardens and plants on Smithsonian museum grounds. He heads a staff of about 10 other horticulturalists, biological science technicians, and volunteers. “They work the grounds that surround the museums, and, together, we discuss the long-term plans for the Smithsonian landscape,” Nagle says.

Nagle, who graduated from Penn State in 1998, and staff take care of seven different museum outdoor areas and three main specialty gardens that are considered to be the most frequented outdoor museum spots around the Smithsonian. Nagle says that the Smithsonian’s lavish gardens are generally regarded as meeting spots or gathering places where frequent museum visitors like to meet up with friends and colleagues, to take nature walks, or simply to sit and relax.

Nagle credits Penn State for having a renowned horticulture study program that helped him land his job at the museum. “Penn State was one of the few schools in the nation that had a horticulture major when I was looking at colleges,” he says.

While Nagle was a student, he participated in the university’s work-study program, in which he did landscape work around the Agricultural Administration Building on the University Park campus. During his summers off from school, Nagle held prestigious internship positions, landscaping with popular commercial landscaping companies such as the Shearon Environmental Design Company in Plymouth Meeting, Pa.

Nagle enjoyed his time in commercial and residential landscaping but knew that he wanted to take on a more interactive, nature-based approach to landscaping. “When you work for a commercial landscaping company, you go to the same worksite every day to complete your job on a certain home,” Nagle says. “But doing the landscape for the Smithsonian is just a more satisfying, hands-on, long-term kind of activity.”

Nagle recalls that his landscape design class was his favorite at Penn State. “It required a lot of creativity and a lot of drawing,” Nagle says. “We would go out to a house, draw-up a new landscape, and present it to the homeowners there. It really prepared you in terms of what it would be like to have clients.”

One of the reasons Nagle enjoys his current occupation so much is that landscaping the grounds of one of the nation’s largest and most celebrated museums is like having the opportunity to create several grand artistic masterpieces in nature. “People come from all over to tour the Smithsonian gardens, to take leisurely strolls through Smithsonian parks, and to picnic among the beautiful fall foliage or the colorful scenery of the garden’s seasonal flowers,” he says.

The best part about his job as supervisory horticulturist, Nagle believes, is that he gets to see people enjoying the grounds that he cares for, firsthand, every day. “It’s incredible, the number of people who get genuine enjoyment out of the work I do,” he says. “You can see it in the way people remark about the different displays and stop to smell the flowers.”

— Natalie Inger