Pioneer Information
Born to physician parents in Chicago, Illinois, Wightman was educated in progressive schools—initially at the first Montessori school west of the Mississippi founded by her mother in Omaha, Nebraska, and eventually at the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, from which she graduated in 1930. Wightman attended Oberlin College, Middlebury College, and spent two summers studying painting with artist Emil Bisttram in Taos, New Mexico, before transferring to the University of Illinois, earning a BLA in 1938. With Works Progress Administration funding, the city of Springfield, Illinois, hired her to rehabilitate 4,000 acres to design new residential developments, roads, parks, playgrounds, beaches, a marina, and a wildlife refuge around a lake (1938–1943). Upon moving to Seattle, Washington in 1943, she initially worked at the Washington Park Arboretum before joining landscape architect Edwin W. Grohs’s practice.
By 1948, Wightman had established her own practice. Over the course of her career, she created hundreds of residential designs, as well as educational, religious, medical, and commercial projects across the Pacific Northwest. Recognized for her naturalistic approach, her projects include the Everett Community College campus; the Georgia Pacific Plywood Co. Headquarters, Olympia (1953, with NBBJ); and the Susan J. Henry Memorial Library (now Capitol Hill Branch Library), Seattle (1956, also with NBBJ). In 1959 she designed the grounds of Seattle’s Northwest Hospital, and remained a consultant for more than three decades. Wightman was a founding member of the Washington Society of Landscape Architects (1946) and the first president of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (1959). She briefly taught landscape design and construction classes at Edmonds Community College (1971). Writing and lecturing widely about horticulture, gardening, and landscape design, Wightman also sustained an interest in music, theatre, and ballet. She retired in 2000 and died ten years later in Seattle at the age of 98.
