Carol R. Johnson

Carol Roxane Johnson (September 6, 1929 – December 11, 2020) was a landscape architect and educator notable for being one of the first women in her field. She founded Carol R. Johnson Associates, a landscape architecture firm in Boston, and designed large-scale projects throughout the United States. She was also a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Johnson retired in 2016. She died on December 11, 2020, in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, at the age of 91.

Background and education Carol Roxane Johnson was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on September 6, 1929. From a young age she enjoyed a connection with nature, partaking in hiking, camping, and writing poems about the landscape. Her family enjoyed vacations in Vermont and at Martha's Vineyard. As a child she inherited her brother's small time newspaper, The Boulevard Bugle, and increased its readership twenty-fold, marking her first foray into business.

She received her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College in 1951. Johnson worked briefly at the New England Nursery where she did plant propagation and sold plants to the surrounding community. Here, she began giving design advice to customers and became involved with the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Johnson went on to earn a graduate degree in landscape architecture from Harvard in 1957. Johnson held honorary degrees from Wentworth Institute of Technology and Gettysburg College.

Career After graduate school, Johnson took a position with The Architects Collaborative in 1958. Between 1959 and 1970, Johnson operated her practice initially out of her apartment in Cambridge and then out of a small office on Mount Auburn Street in Harvard Square. In 1970, the firm changed its name from Carol R. Johnson, Landscape Architect, to Carol R. Johnson & Associates to reflect the growing importance of the employees to the practice. In September 1975, the firm was incorporated in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as Carol R. Johnson & Associates, Inc.

Johnson's work is recognized for the emphasis she placed on sites' natural and cultural contexts and history. She also focused on the social purpose of design and was part of President Johnson's Model Cities Program while working on North Common in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1972. She also served as a Trustee for the Hubbard Educational Trust, which seeks to support education in landscape architecture across the United States. She was also a leader in her field, irrespective of gender. She began her practice when the field was first starting to establish itself. The transformation began in the late 1970s and was completed in the early 80's. It was an early example of Johnson's firm's ability to meld its interest in history (in this case Charles Elliot's approach to scenic and natural resource values) with state-of-the-art environmental sciences. A separate land reclamation and restoration effort at a former power plant site on Lake Cayuga in upstate New York helped to restore the site to a natural meadow landscape, which would subsequently go through the normal process of becoming forest again.

Johnson died on December 11, 2020, in Boothbay Harbor, Maine.