Hutcheson was born in New York City as Martha Brookes Brown, and as a child spent her summers on a family farm near Burlington, Vermont.

As Hutcheson later wrote in The Spirit of the Garden: About 1898, one day I saw the grounds of Bellevue Hospital in New York, on which nothing was planted, and was overcome with the terrible waste of opportunity for beauty which was not being given to the hundreds of patients who could see it or go to it, in convalescence.

In trying to find out how I could get in touch with such authorities as those who might allow me to plant the area of ground, I stumbled upon the fact that my aim would be politically impossible, but that there was a course in Landscape Architecture being formed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the first course which America had ever held.

[2] After Hutcheson's marriage in 1911, she retired from commercial practice but she began to landscape her own garden (5 acres) on the couple's 100-acre (0.40 km2) farm in Chester Township, New Jersey.

Although Hutcheson executed dozens of commissions, including gardens at Bennington College and Billings Farm (now the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park), most of her works have been lost.