Martha Brooks Hutcheson: Landscape Architect and Environmental Advocate

In 1912, at age forty-one, Martha Brookes Hutcheson found herself at a professional crossroads. For the past decade, she had maintained a highly successful landscape architecture practice, creating designs for and overseeing construction of nearly seventy private gardens and estates. In 1910 she married William Anderson Hutcheson, and the following year the couple bought a working hundred-acre farm in Gladstone, New Jersey, to use as a summer retreat from New York City. When their daughter Martha was born in 1912, Hutcheson decided to close her practice (though she continued to consult for former clients). Rather than retiring into family life, she shifted her intellectual and creative energies to writing and lecturing and to developing her new property, which also featured a late eighteenth-century house. Over the next decades, Hutcheson used Merchiston Farm to explore innovative ecological design, writing and lecturing about her experiences to educate women about landscape design and its connection with health and social improvement. The rapidly expanding Garden Club of America network served as her primary platform.

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Work Title Martha Brooks Hutcheson: Landscape Architect and Environmental Advocate
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Open Access
Creators
  1. Roxi Thoren
License In Copyright (Rights Reserved)
Work Type Article
Publisher
  1. VIEW: The Journal of the Library of American Landscape History
Publication Date December 1, 2023
Deposited January 30, 2025

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