Marian Cruger Coffin (September 16, 1876 – February 2, 1957) was an American landscape architect who became famous for designing numerous gardens for members of the East Coast elite.

Coffin was determined to embark on a career despite the social problems that it would cause for a woman of her class and enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied between 1901–4 as one of only four women in architecture and landscape design.

[3] She found the beautiful scenery of the area, set in the Finger Lakes of upper New York state, an inspiration; she later wrote, "even as a small girl, I loved the country, not so much gardens and growing things, for I had no experience with these ... but simply the great outdoor world.

[4] As a relatively impoverished member of the upper class, Coffin had no independent income and faced a choice between finding a rich husband or taking up a professional career.

[7] Women at the time were looking beyond the traditional female careers of school teacher, nurse and office clerk, but relatively few educational institutions admitted them to study in male-dominated fields such as architecture or horticulture.

One of her formative influences at MIT was Guy Lowell, the director of the landscape design program there, who was an advocate of the classical values of balance, order, proportion and harmony taught by the French Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

[5] Another major influence was Charles Platt, who also followed the Italian tradition of treating the house and gardens as complementary entities, designed as a whole as a series of indoor and outdoor "rooms".

[9] She later wrote: One expected the world to welcome newly fledged landscape artists, but alas, few people seemed to know what it was all about ... while the idea of taking a woman into an office was unheard of.

She was ideally situated; it was the height of the Country Place Era, when wealthy East Coast Americans were eager to develop elaborate European-style gardens for their estates.

A few years later, she wrote about the Sprague garden in Country Life in America and Elsa Rehmann also discussed it in her 1918 book The Small Place: Its Landscape Architecture.

Coffin argued that a "moderately well-to-do" homeowner could create and maintain a substantial and elaborate garden for a modest expenditure, comparable to that of a mid-range car.

She promoted the idea that even the most featureless lot could be beautified through good design: "We certainly cannot create a magnificent view, but we can plan and plant beautiful screens and backgrounds that will be interesting at all seasons of the year.

[10] Among Coffin's significant commissions during this period were the design of a garden for William Marshall Bullitt's Oxmoor estate in Glenview, Kentucky in 1909, probably due to a recommendation from Henry du Pont.

A relative of the du Ponts, Hugh Rodney Sharp, gave her what was to become one of her best-known commissions in 1916, the creation of the gardens of the Gibraltar estate in Wilmington, Delaware.

[15] Coffin's attempts to find business in the Midwest were thwarted by the well-established presence there of several notable landscape architects in Chicago but she was not short of commissions despite this failure.

She took on several major projects, including designing the landscape of the University of Delaware campus in 1919 at the recommendation of Sharp, who chaired the college's Buildings and Grounds Committee.

Coffin often entertained guests in New Haven (and recruited several Connecticut notables as new clients), holding teas, cocktail parties, musical events and buffet suppers.

She preferred the company of young architects, artists, musicians and writers, though she could be curt towards those she took a dislike to; on one occasion, she snubbed Hilaire Belloc when he asked her which of his books she had read.

[22] Coffin's designs were distinguished by her use of "dramatic contrasts in color, inclusion of wildflowers and woodland plantings, and site unity through effective transition spaces.

[25] It was very fortuitously timed for her, as the Wall Street Crash of 1929 wiped out the fortunes of many of her clients and brought to an end the era of commissioning elaborate gardens for large country estates.

[9] Coffin had somewhat better luck with her investments and the enormous fortune of the du Ponts insulated the family from the worst of the Great Depression, permitting work on Winterthur to continue throughout the downturn.

With the money from her investments and the fees from the du Ponts for the Winterthur commission, Coffin was able to maintain two homes, a maid and a chauffeur despite the general economic decline.