Morgan Dix Wheelock, who infused a healing nature into his landscape architecture designs, dies at 81
by Bryan Marquard, Boston Globe Staff, August 7, 2019 (with slight modifications)
Mr. Wheelock ran a design firm out of Brookline for four decades. While planning each of his landscape architecture projects, Morgan Dix Wheelock listened as much, or more, to the ground beneath his feet as he did to the words his clients spoke. Through that approach, he anticipated the future while rearranging the present. Nature, he told the Globe in 1987, “has a way of taking over very quickly. You have to have humility toward nature — to think about how things will grow and weather and how the environment will be maintained.” Letting the land’s own inclinations resonate in his designs, he added, ultimately improved each project. “I try to create harmony between the manmade and the natural, to do what feels good,” he said. “I think beauty is what is perceived as right.”
Mr. Wheelock, who ran his own firm for more than four decades, and who divided his time between Brookline and West Palm Beach, Fla., died July 20, 2019. He was 81 and had been diagnosed with cancer several years ago.
In his designs, Mr. Wheelock’s tried to “let nature speak, to find the best in nature, as he did in people,” said his longtime friend Ted Stebbins (H’60). “One discovers in one’s journey through time countless lessons; some are learned, some ignored, and others denied only to recur until they are finally digested and applied,” Mr. Wheelock wrote in 1980 for the 20th anniversary report of his Harvard College Class of 1960. He applied life’s lessons to numerous projects over the years, including a Normandy, France, memorial garden he designed a quarter century ago. The project honored those who had fought during World War II. “It called upon me to interpret the battle of Normandy and the impact on American soldiers and their families, the sacrifice the whole country made in the liberation of France,” Mr. Wheelock told the Palm Beach Daily News in 2012. His research included meeting with elderly veterans of World War II and listening to their stories.
His many other designs included “A Woman’s Garden,” in the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden; the Philip Hulitar Sculpture Garden in Palm Beach, Fla.; a roof garden that covered more than two acres atop a 17-story building in Montreal; and a variety of projects for Aga Khan (H’59), a business magnate he had met while they both attended Harvard.
“He always got so excited about the projects he was doing, and the relationships he developed with people as he was doing them,” said his wife, Judith Taylor, an artist, whom he married in 1976. Morgan wrote in 2000 for the 40th anniversary report of the Harvard Class of 1960: “We have been so privileged to draw on such a powerful inspirational source as is embodied in Judith’s and my work.”
“He was really a beloved figure,” said Stebbins, who is curator of American art emeritus, for the Harvard Art Museums. “He was generous and loving to the end,” Stebbins added. “You could sit there and talk with him about the meaning of life. You could talk with him about death, and what that might be like. There was nothing you couldn’t talk with him about, and he was interested in every subject.”
Mr. Wheelock, whose honors included being inducted into the New England Design Hall of Fame in 2012, had formerly chaired the Architectural Commission of Palm Beach and served as a trustee of St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H.
“I have been most privileged to have a career which beautifies our planet,” he wrote in 2000, adding: “Can you imagine going to work every day and feeling like you are the honored guest at Mother Nature’s table?”
The youngest of three brothers, Morgan Dix Wheelock Jr. was born in New York City on July 9, 1938, a son of Morgan Wheelock Sr. and Sylvia Bender. Mr. Wheelock grew up in New York and at the family’s home in Bedford, N.Y., and he graduated from St. Paul’s School before following five previous generations of his family to Harvard College, where he was a member of Lowell House (recently entirely renovated and updated) from which he graduated in 1960. He studied English literature, helped illustrate the Harvard Lampoon with cartoons, and as a senior, he took a history of landscape architecture course taught by renowned landscape architect, Norman Newton. “It opened my eyes to a whole new world,” he told the Globe in 1987. “I made a book of drawings and plans illustrating the course and gave it to Newton. I knew immediately that I wanted to be a landscape architect.”
His family had other ideas, however, and Mr. Wheelock initially worked for his father. The Wheelocks ran a prosperous real estate development firm in Manhattan, and Mr. Wheelock found himself helping broker deals for projects. The time wasn’t wasted. “I’m glad I did that,” he recalled in 1987. “I learned about the power that it takes to bring off big projects.” Nevertheless, he added, “I found myself on the wrong side of deals. Here I was raising financing for developers who were making ugly buildings. I could have become very rich doing what I was doing, but I decided I wanted to design projects myself.”
There was the matter of training, though, and his bachelor’s degree in English wasn’t the usual background to get into the Harvard Graduate School of Design. As luck would have it, Professor Newton remembered the illustrated book Mr. Wheelock had created and championed his admittance. After graduating with a master’s in landscape design in 1964, he worked for Sasaki Associates in Watertown, where he became a principal.
Mr. Wheelock, whose first marriage ended in divorce, launched his own firm in 1978, the year he turned 40. At times, Morgan Wheelock Incorporated had some 40 to 50 projects going at once. “The work is extremely exciting and rewarding, and affords the perfect mix of art and theatre,” he wrote for the 25th anniversary report of his Harvard class. “I can truly state that I love my job.”
In addition to his wife, Judith, Mr. Wheelock leaves his two sons, Timothy of Natick and Morgan III of Chestnut Hill; his daughter, Cornelia Wheelock Birmingham of Sherborn; two stepsons, Edmund Twining IV of Sherborn and Taylor Twining of Rumson, N.J.; his brother, Dr. Frederick Wheelock of Philadelphia; and 11 grandchildren.
A memorial service was held on September 11, 2019 in Memorial Church in Harvard Yard in Cambridge.
“Design is to be lived,” Mr. Wheelock wrote in his 2013 book “Dancing with Nature.” By letting nature’s harmonies resonate through designs he created, he saw his work as something more than simply landscape architecture. “I am a healer. As a kid, I always wanted to be the doctor. I was taken with that figure of a god in a white coat,” he said in the 1987 Globe interview. “Now I’ve come to think of my own work as being partly about healing,” he added. “I try to help a client to feel happy, to heal himself, by expressing himself through his own environment. It can make a person feel wonderful.”
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