With its Newtown Memorial competition design, Billie Cohen ltd.’s intention was to engage the entire site, to create a place of respite and serenity that will reveal the restorative qualities of nature, with ponds, trees, and meadows, rich with textures and colors that change with the seasons, attracting birds and butterflies that will come and go; to create a place with the resonance of chimes that lead from the tangible to the intangible, a place of hope and beauty.

Paths connect throughout the site. Walking one path may bring you through an arbor covered in flowering vines, where you may ring the harmonic chimes and experience their sound as it spreads to the embracing curved stone wall. Another path may take you through groves of flowering magnolias, redbuds, and river birch to sit on one of the granite benches, or to wander to a deck overlooking the two ponds, their surfaces reflecting the woodlands, mosses, and ferns. The light of the meadow beyond, framed by sheltering evergreens creates the sense of a secret garden.

The landscape offers a place to pause, to breathe and balance; to find calm, to feel connected to, and supported by the earth, to walk in shadow and sunlight, to gather or to sit quietly in meditation.