Mary Rutherfurd Jay

Mary Rutherfurd Jay (1872–1953), the great, great granddaughter of American Founding Father John Jay, was one of America's earliest landscape architects and an advocate of horticultural education and careers for women. She grew up in Rye, New York from the age of 3 years old surrounded by the gardens of her ancestral homestead in Westchester County overlooking Long Island Sound. Her education was fostered by travel abroad with her mother and domestically through classes in design and horticulture taken at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Bussey Institute in Forest Hills, Massachusetts.

Jay's first commission was a "plaisance" or pleasure garden in 1907 for the home of her sister Laura Jay Wells in the Round Hill neighborhood of Greenwich, Connecticut. "From this modest but well-measured beginning, her portfolio grew to more than 50 articulated projects for private residences all along the East Coast. Her projects varied widely in composition and plant material and demonstrated a comprehensive knowledge of English, French, Dutch, Indian, Italian, Turkish and Japanese design. With great facility, she learned the horticultural and architectural vocabulary of the grand estates of Europe and Asia - pleached allees of trees, plaisances, pergolas, moongates, parterres, rock gardens, pools and teahouses - and adapted these distinctive landscape elements to American gardens and soil conditions.” An avid student of the French planner of Versailles, Andre Le Notre, Jay called herself a "garden architect." She shared her knowledge freely with others as a lecturer in people's homes and as a contributor to magazines with large circulations such as House Beautiful and House & Garden as well as smaller niche journals such as The Touchstone.

Her plans were created for friends and clients as notable as New York architect, historian and social reformer Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, author of the monumental series The Iconography of Manhattan Island; the families of financiers William Avery Rockefeller and William Goodsell Rockefeller of Greenwich, Connecticut; Remington Arms President Samuel F. Pryor; and yachtsmen C. Oliver Iselin and Henry R. Mallory. By 1926, with one of the very few offices leased by women in the Architects Building at 101 Park Avenue in Manhattan (the others being Marian Cruger Coffin and Ruth Dean) her private practice had transformed properties as far south as Palm Beach, Florida and as far north as Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. Her colleagues included notable architects such as Addison Mizner, J. Alden Twachtman and Francis Keally; she collaborated with peers like Martha Brookes Hutcheson.

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