Martha Brookes Hutcheson

Martha Brookes Hutcheson (October 2, 1871 – 1959) was an American landscape architect, lecturer, and author, active in New England, New York, and New Jersey.

Hutcheson was born in New York City as Martha Brookes Brown, and as a child spent her summers on a family farm near Burlington, Vermont. From 1893-1895 she studied at the New York School of Applied Design for Women, and in the late 1890s toured Europe where she studied gardens in England, France, and Italy. As Hutcheson later wrote in The Spirit of the Garden:

About 1898, one day I saw the grounds of Bellevue Hospital in New York, on which nothing was planted, and was overcome with the terrible waste of opportunity for beauty which was not being given to the hundreds of patients who could see it or go to it, in convalescence. In trying to find out how I could get in touch with such authorities as those who might allow me to plant the area of ground, I stumbled upon the fact that my aim would be politically impossible, but that there was a course in Landscape Architecture being formed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the first course which America had ever held.

In 1900 she entered MIT's new landscape architecture program at age 29, where she studied for two years before leaving without degree in 1902. She subsequently designed the grounds of several residential estates near Boston, most notably Frederick Moseley's large Newburyport estate, 1904-1906 (now Maudslay State Park), and the garden at Alice Mary Longfellow's house (now the Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site) in Cambridge.

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