Pamela HART

HART, Pamela Pamela Hart, landscape gardener, 86.

Of Cambridge, a noted landscape gardener and a longtime Cambridge resident, died, Monday, February 17, after a brief illness. She was 86.

The eldest of five children of Mary (Mitchell) and K. Ward Hooker, she was born in Rochester, MN and raised there, in Rochester, NY and Lewisburg, PA, where her father was a professor at Bucknell. Ms. Hart studied at Goucher College in Baltimore, the Sorbonne in Paris, earning her bachelor's and master's degrees in French. She taught French at several Boston-area colleges, including Northeastern University.

Ms. Hart eventually tired of teaching and earned a second graduate degree in landscape design from Radcliffe College in Cambridge. She started the Pamela Hart Landscaping Service in 1980, with a focus on self-sustaining and organic gardening. She was one of the landscapers to be active in the drive to restore native plants to the local community, working with a group of volunteers to rip out non-native, invasive species from what is now the Fresh Pond Native Garden and the adjoining community garden.

Ms. Hart was a stubborn enemy of anything that didn't belong in the landscape. She was an expert on New England wildflowers and her interest in native plants extended to the Canandaigua Lake area, where she summered for her entire life.

In her retirement, Ms. Hart volunteered at the Bryn Mawr Bookstore in Huron Village.

Ms. Hart was the widow of John Endicott Hart, a bassist and pianist with a series of jazz groups in the venues that replaced Scollay Square. She is survived by her children, Sarah Ouadghiri of Cambridge and Mark Hart of Nantucket; three grandchildren, Amal Ouadghiri-Hassani, Sondra and Giselle Hart; a great-grandson, Jacob Ouadghiri-Hassani; three sisters, Alice, Marianne and Saralinda Hooker; her nieces and nephews, Lucia Huntington, Britt Gappelberg, Miranda, Noah and Emily Hooker, Benjamin Sherman, Caitlin Fose, Mary and Nicholas Tramdack and Alexander Ragus; and many cousins. She was also the sister of the late Kenneth W. Hooker, Jr.

Services will be private.