Martha Brookes Hutcheson died on September 2, 1959, having spent her final decades at Bamboo Brook, the estate she designed and later donated for public benefit.
Martha Brookes Hutcheson died on September 2, 1959. By the time of her death, she had built a substantial legacy as one of the earliest professionally trained female landscape architects in the United States.
Her death closed a career that spanned the design of numerous private estate gardens, professional advocacy for women entering landscape architecture, and the publication of her influential 1923 book The Spirit of the Garden. In her later years, she had already arranged for the preservation of her own celebrated garden and farm estate, Bamboo Brook, in Chester Township, New Jersey, gifting it to Morris County for public use—a decision that ensured her design philosophy would remain accessible to future generations.
Her passing was noted within the landscape architecture profession as the loss of a pioneering figure who had helped legitimize the role of women as professional designers of the American landscape, at a time when such careers were rarely open to women. Bamboo Brook remains preserved today as a public park and a testament to her design principles, which emphasized harmony between architecture, ecology, and human use of outdoor space.