Along with Beatrix Farrand and Marian Cruger Coffin, she dictated the style of the time and strongly influenced landscape design as a member of the first generation to break into the largely male occupation.

[1] Commenting about the male dominated field to The New York Times in 1938, she said "before women took hold of the profession, landscape architects were doing what I call cemetery work.

She attended boarding school in Baltimore, Maryland, where her interests in the arts emerged and by her twenties she had already started drawing garden designs.

They left school after one year, married, and moved to Plainfield, New Hampshire, in the Cornish Art Colony, which included Maxfield Parrish and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Shipman's colleague and fellow member of the Cornish Art Colony, Charles A. Platt, was an artist and architect known for his interest in Italian gardens.

Among Shipman's earliest collaborations with Platt was the Cooperstown, New York estate of Fynmere in 1913, owned by the Cooper family on the edge of the village.

It was finished in 1912, one of her earliest projects, and one where her job was largely planting oriented, filling the designs of Platt with lush flower arrangements.

It featured mature trees, large clumps of plants such as rhododendron, walking and riding paths, stone bridges and a pond.

Located across the road from Platt's own house in Cornish, New Hampshire, Anson Goodyear hired Shipman to revitalize the plantings and reconfigure the garden walls.