Hello Reader,

Under the grow lights at Rabbit Run, the seed trays are full. The growing season I've waited so long for is almost here.

Alongside the trays and the scattered seed packets, sits a book I've started. A first edition, published in 1923. The cover is worn like all well-loved things. I've been turning the pages slowly, looking at the photographs, at the handsome chapter titles, at the quality of attention.

The book was written by Martha Brookes Hutcheson. And somehow, across a century, she already knows exactly what I'm trying to figure out at Sugar Hill.

​Martha Brookes Hutcheson was born in New York City in 1871, at a time when landscape architecture barely existed as a profession and certainly didn't exist for women. She studied at MIT, one of the few programs that didn't officially exclude women, though it made the path difficult. She graduated in 1902 and built a practice designing country estates across New England and New York. In 1923 she published The Spirit of the Garden, a book that was both a critical and commercial success and is still in print today.

But it wasn't her biography that stopped me. It was her words.

She was writing about past gardeners in 1923. I am reading her words now and writing about past gardeners today. The chain doesn't break. It continues.

When I looked up her garden — Merchiston Farm in Gladstone, New Jersey, now open to the public as Bamboo Brook Outdoor Education Center — I was inspired. The photographs showed stone paths laid into sloping ground, terraced garden rooms at human scale, spaces divided with the kind of quiet confidence that only comes from someone who has truly solved a problem. Bamboo Brook has slopes. Sugar Hill has slopes. Martha Brookes Hutcheson already worked this out.

My husband and I are planning to visit this historic property. I want to walk where she walked. And experience this space in person. To understand how she terraced slopes, established axes, and used the native New Jersey stone.

Finding Your Guide

There is a particular kind of relief that comes from finding the right guide. Not instruction — something quieter. The sense that someone already stood where you are standing, looked at what you are looking at, and found a solution.

Martha found her guides in the gardens of Europe. I am finding mine in her. And somewhere out there, someone is finding theirs in a newsletter they read on a Wednesday morning, standing in their own garden with their own unsolved slopes and their own seed trays full of possibility.

Held and Inspired by Gardens

Near the end of the book, Martha Brookes Hutcheson wrote:

"And we are held and inspired by it." I keep returning to that sentence. Not because it's the most beautiful thing she wrote, but because it's so true. The garden holds us across seasons, across boundaries, across time. It held Martha. It holds me. And it will hold whoever comes next.

The seed trays are full at Rabbit Run. The first blooms have appeared under the grow lights. Somewhere in New Jersey, a stone path is waiting to be walked.

The gardeners who solved our problems are still out there — in their books, in their stone walls, in the gardens they left behind. They are still there to guide us.

The Spirit of the Garden has more to teach than one issue can hold. In the weeks ahead, I will move through the design principles Martha Brookes Hutcheson laid out in her book — the ones that speak most directly to the work of developing our own gardens. The same conversation Martha started in 1923, continued here, in 2026, one garden at a time.

Thanks for being here.
Sue