Pioneer Information
A native of Chicago, Louise Stone married real estate and trust company executive Charles Walcott Hubbard in 1906. The garden at their home in Winnetka was well-known for its spring display. Widowed in 1924 she began designing gardens and landscapes along Chicago’s North Shore for high-profile clients. Her design skills were well-suited to the American Country Place movement, and within just a few years, she contributed to some of the region’s best-known estates. Hubbard designed a rose garden, lily pond, rock garden, and tennis court for Rosecrana, the estate of James Simpson, president of Marshall Field & Company, in Glencoe. On this project she worked with Jens Jensen and Root & Hollister. In the late 1920s Hubbard completed designs for investment banker Edward K. Welles’ estate on the edge of Lake Forest’s Onwentsia Club golf course. One of her largest projects in the mid-1920s was Old Mill Farm, the 400-acre estate of businessman and advertising executive Albert Lasker. There she collaborated with classical architect David Adler on the gardens surrounding the house. Working with others, including Rose Standish Nichols, Hubbard was assigned the task of planting the main south garden of Two Gables, the estate of Laurance Armour in Lake Forest. Her extant design for the suburban-scaled landscape of Laurence Scudders’ mid-1920s Colonial Revival home in Connecticut consisted of a large, open meadow, a limestone wall, and a rectangular pool. At the time of her death she was working on a careful restoration of the D.R. Holt garden, attributed by the family to Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., at the Homestead in Chicago.
Hubbard reputedly spent several years in Asia at one point in her life and was consequently considered an expert on Chinese gardens. She passed away suddenly while giving a talk on the subject of Asian gardens in Cleveland.
