Mary Muriel Lysaght Watt. Horticulturalist, landscape architect and mother (1917-2005).

Mary Watt was born on the 27 March, 1917 and died on 2nd July 2005, (Dunedin City Archives and Dominion Post, 5 July, 2005). Mary was born in New Plymouth to Emily Lysaght. Her family included sisters, Sylvia and Avriel Margaret Lysaght (1903-1984) biologist, science historian and illustrator, based in the UK (Thomson, 2005). Mary married Jack Watt and there was one child, Noeleen Violet (Watt) Clark/e, and five grandchildren.

Mary left Taranaki and began her career in the Dunedin Botanical Gardens in 1936 where she sat the New Zealand Institute of Horticulture exams through the late 1930s and 1940s.

(Dunedin City Archives). Mary was one of a team of a dozen women employed by Superintendent of Parks, David Tannoch (Fitt, 2000). She was granted two years leave from July 1946, "to further her studies in landscape design in England."(Park Dept. Report. 1946-47, P152. Dunedin City Archives). Mary says "she became interested in the work of Gertrude Jekyll, a contemporary of William Robinson, who together introduced the herbaceous border as it is now known in English gardens. Miss Jekyll was the first person I knew about who planned gardens, and I decided I’d like to do similar work," she explained. …"

After graduating at Dunedin she may have moved to Wellington to live with her sister who had graduated from the University of Victoria. Marilyn Reynolds remembers meeting Mary in 1940. She departed Wellington about 1948 and went direct to Scandinavia to attend several landscape architecture conferences held at Stockholm. As a ‘student member’ of the British Institute of Landscape Architects she wrote about her travel experiences in 1949. (Lysaght, 1949). A short report of her return was published in 1951.

A Landscape Architects Qualifications.

Mary was interviewed at length in 1952 where she explained what and where she had studied and described her two year practice as a landscape architect.

In London Mary went to evening classes at the School of Planning and Research for Regional Development. Students did the field work during the weekends, visiting sites for studio work, learning the elements of surveying various aspects of landscape work and the English countryside. After qualifying at the Institute, she spent a year in the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, which she recalls as a wonderful experience.

 The college consists of a number of schools giving training to the applied arts," Miss Lysaght explained. The principal aim is the improvement of industrial design. A New Zealander, Professor Basil Ward, is head of the School of Architecture, and Ian Reynolds of Wellington was one of his staff. …

Mary’s mentor while she studied in London was the late Peter Youngman CBE (1911 -2005). Youngman was interviewed in the 1970’s and he said about his "design projects" that "apart from my early years in practice (when there were a few foreign students for brief spells and a New Zealander for a year or so) I have worked entirely on my own…"(Harvey, 1987: 123).

In the years Mary studied under Peter Youngman he was working on the construction of the landscape of a now famous, in the architectural history discipline, the Welsh factory called Brynmawr constructed in South Wales that was demolished late last century (Anon. Factory at Brynmawr South Wales. In, Architectural Review, March 1952. [G. P. Youngman: ‘Landscape Architect’. P 162.] pp. 145-164.)

Youngman was also working on the 1951 London Festival site and if Mary returned to New Zealand, as she said in her interview, in January 1951 she would have been assisting with the landscape construction for the London Festival site. All the contemporary landscape architects of her generation were associated with the Festival’s construction including Brenda Colvin, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, Sylvia Crowe and Peter Youngman.

CONCLUSION

Francis Porter who met Mary while she was a practicing landscape architect described her as a "modest women," She remembers that the Burmese honeysuckle was a favourite of Mary’s. Porter says she was "not into native plants" and had "no lawn grass on her property."

Mary Lysaght’s Wellington practice must have been busy as the journalist who interviewed her in 1952 saw "finished and unfinished plans in piles in corners of the room" in which the interview took place. Mary said that at this time that "most of the clients who ask her to landscape their sections intend to do the work themselves, following her plan, and only occasionally is she required to let contracts and supervise the work."

The 1952 interview is the only document along with the 1949 paper had a very strong focus on modern European architecture and landscape architecture and this before she began her studies in at Royal College of Art in London. Much is still unknown about her New Zealand practice and her clients. She has said of her landscape interest in 1952 that,

"I’m specially interested in designing public and semi-public parks and gardens, …Large gardens,…Large spaces such as parks, institutional gardens, show grounds and hospitals offer more scope for imaginative planning with a long-term result in view. Once you’re planning, say a hospital, providing for the various needs of patients and staff, the institution goes on being a hospital, and you know your planning will be useful – unlike some private homes where the owners leave for various reasons soon after they have begun work on the planned garden."

Known Landscape Projects

Dr William B. Sutch garden Brooklyn, Wellington 1952-1955.

Contributor to second prize entry for Wanganui War Memorial Hall, 1956.

Williams’s family garden Hawke’s Bay, 1960s.

Watt family garden Brooklyn, Wellington.

Acknowledgments

Librarian at Landscape Institute, London and staff at Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington; Alice Lloyd Fitt and Michael Finlay, Dunedin; Marilyn Reynolds, Helen Parsons and Denis Oldham, Auckland; Lew Martin, Francis Porter and Helen Sutch, Wellington.

References 

Lysaght, Mary. 1949. First Impressions of Foreign Travel by a New Zealander. In, Journal of the Institute of Landscape Architects. No 15. pp.9-12.

Hoskins, Pauline. Unusual Career. Landscape Architecture Is Her Career. The Weekly News, 25 February, 1953. P10. C4-5

Thomson, A. D. 'Lysaght, Averill Margaret 1905 - 1981'.　 Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 2 July, 2005. URL: http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/

Anon. Wanganui Competition evokes wide interest from architects. In, Home & Building, 1 May, 1956. pp. 40-43, 45, 47 and 49.

Obituary. Peter Youngman. The Times, 2 July, 2005

Harvey, Sheila. 1987. (Editor). Reflections on Landscape. The lives and work of six British landscape architects. Gower Technical Press. 155p.

Anon. Factory at Brynmawr South Wales. In, Architectural Review, March 1952. [G. P. Youngman: Landscape Architect. P 162.] pp. 145-164.