Blythe Bickel Edwards left the world and her family on Nov. 1, 2024.

She was born on June 1, 1941, in Pittsburgh and educated at Farmington and Wellesley College.

She majored in philosophy at Wellesley but even so she was drawn to courses in art and design, an interest that became a passion as it matured among the hills of Western Massachusetts in her time at Amherst and Deerfield Academy with her first husband. It ripened further during her three years in Paris, where she married Robert H. Edwards. They lived across from the Île Saint-Louis, walking among the glass palaces and dining in the intimate nooks and crannies of the city she cherished.   

But during her husband’s tenure as thirteenth president of Bowdoin College, Blythe’s greatest love became the Bowdoin campus. Working with an accepting faculty and staff as the college grew, she became a force in recruiting architects and landscape designers, quietly making sure that their solutions strengthened the enduring ideas of the campus—and that they created interior spaces that would delight students. Barry Mills, the college’s fourteenth president, observed, “One cannot walk around the Bowdoin campus without feeling the thoughtful and intelligent perspective on campus design and function that Blythe brought to Bowdoin.” These same instincts caused her to work closely with the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden in Boothbay, Maine, during the years of its foundation.

Upon leaving Bowdoin she and her husband moved to Edgecomb, Maine. There, she turned to photographing the textures and colors of the granite, mosses and wildflowers of Maine’s woods and meadows. In her declining days, she was comforted by Psalms 23 and 121 and by the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5.

She leaves her husband, Robert Edwards, two sons by her first marriage, William Bickel Kaufmann of San Francisco and Jonathan McKelvy Kaufmann of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and four grandchildren.