[2] During the First World War she served in the Women's National Land Army in Britain, at Crown Woods in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire.
[1][2] For the next year, despite her experience in forestry, she was unable to secure another job in the United Kingdom, as priority was given to returning World War I servicemen.
[2] This attitude to women rangers resulted in a financial disincentive for the Forest Service to send Sutherland into the field.
[4] She travelled extensively throughout New Zealand for her job, visiting experimental nurseries and plantations around the country, and writing up her findings in reports, articles and papers.
[4][2][5] In 1929 she undertook research to determine microscopic characters that could be used to identify the many exotic conifer species that had been brought to New Zealand over the previous 80 years for wood, paper, turpentine and resin.
Although the director of the museum, Walter Oliver, described her position as "librarian and part-time botanical assistant", her job status was classified as clerical.
[2] Nevertheless she took on the many roles of a botanist, making field collections of over 900 specimens for the herbarium, helping manage the growing collections, preparing museum exhibits, assisting with the move to the new museum at Buckle St, corresponding with and assisting New Zealand and overseas botanists, and running an international herbarium specimen exchange programme.
Although some sources suggest in 1937 Sutherland returned to the Forest Service as a botanist,[4] museum archives show she was on sick leave from 1937-1940.
[2] She continued to work at the museum once she returned from sick leave, but during the war years she was appointed assistant supervisor of a women's accommodation hostel in Woburn, in the Hutt Valley, until 1946.
[2] Between 1947 and 1949 she published a significant series of articles in the New Zealand Journal of Agriculture on the advantages to be gained when planting trees on farms.
[2] Sutherland's career was cut short when ill heath suffered during field-work in Central Otago during 1954 led to her death.