Pioneer Information
Raised in San Diego, California, McGuire earned a B.S. (in 1954) and an M.S. (in 1956) in landscape architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. After building her career as a landscape architect, she became the principal at the New England-based consulting firm McGuire & Watson, Landscape Architects and Site Planners. In 1965 McGuire arrived at the Radcliffe Institute in Boston as a Radcliffe College Bunting Fellow to study landscape from an historical perspective. While there, she taught a course for the Radcliffe Seminars Program entitled “The Intellectual History of Garden Art.” Due to its success, a landscape-design certificate program was built around it, and in 1968 McGuire became the first director of the Radcliffe Seminars Program in Landscape Design (now The Landscape Institute at the Boston Architectural College), a position she held for five years. In the 1970s McGuire supervised landscape modifications, including the expansion of the campus and road realignments, at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
In 1957 McGuire published an article entitled “Early Site Planning on the West Coast: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Plan for Stanford University” in Landscape Architecture Magazine. She edited Beatrix Farrand's Plant Book for Dumbarton Oaks (1980), Beatrix Jones Farrand, 1872-1959: Fifty Years of American Landscape Architecture (1982), and American Garden Design: An Anthology of Ideas that Shaped Our Landscape (1994), which contains essays by Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson Downing, Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., and Beatrix Farrand. She co-authored Beatrix Farrand’s American Landscapes: Her Gardens and Campuses (1985) and authored Gardens of America: Three Centuries of Design (1989). McGuire served as an advisor to the Gardens at Dumbarton Oaks and also served on the board of the Beatrix Farrand Society. She died after suffering an accute illness at the age of 85.
