Judy Harmon

Judy Harmon
January 1, 1945 – January 10, 2013
Raleigh
Judy Harmon passed away in Raleigh on January 10, 2013, surrounded by family and friends. The cause was metastatic breast cancer. She was a landscape architect known for her artistic sense of design. She was the only child of Malvern and Frances King, and was born on New Year's Day in 1945 in San Antonio, Texas. A city of graceful live oaks and river walks. She lived there until she was nine. She said that her love of art was shaped by growing up in a beautiful city. She was born Mary Vance King, but her hospital nurses called her Judy, the name she used for the rest of her life. When her parents divorced she moved with her mother to Houston, then to Durham, North Carolina, where she graduated from Durham High School in 1962. She attended Sullins College in Bristol Va. for two years, then transferred to UNC where she studied art, graduating with a degree in art education.
Judy then moved to Washington DC, enrolled in American University to study interior design, and began teaching elementary school in Charles County, Maryland. She lived in an apartment building at the confluence of Hunting Creek and the Potomac River. Her mother remarried to Leon McMinn, a prominent architect in Greensboro, North Carolina. At home for summer classes at UNCG in 1969, Judy threw a party for her North Carolina friends. Her stepfather recommended she invite a young architectural intern working for him, and that's how she met her future husband, Frank Harmon. After a year's courtship they married in 1970 and moved to New York City. There she worked for Saks Fifth Avenue as a returns clerk, once serving Ella Fitzgerald. She continued her art studies at the New School. In 1973 she and Frank moved to England, where she taught at the American School in London. In England she discovered a love of plants and gardening that was to shape her life. The gardens at Hidcote Manor, Sissinghurst, and Great Dixter were her textbooks and role models. She designed and built her first garden in Islington in 1976, the year her son William was born. In 1979, while Judy was pregnant with their daughter Laura, she and Frank left England for Auburn, Alabama, and in 1981 moved to Raleigh. In 1988 she enrolled in the Horticulture program at NC State University. Encouraged by her professors to further her artistic skills, she transferred to the College of Design where she received a Masters Degree in Landscape Architecture in 1992. After interning with Mark Robinson Landscape Architect, she opened her own office in 1996. Judy had an instinctive sense of place. On a trip to Texas two years ago, she found, simply by driving around, the small cottage in Port Aransas where she'd vacationed with her father over 60 years earlier. The places where she grew up in San Antonio -- her neighbor Hal's backyard, Brackenridge Park, the Japanese Tea Garden -- were constituent facts in her memory. Realizing the significance of these places made every place important to her, including the places she designed. Going on a trip with her was a delight. There was hardly a small-town historic district in the South that she did not detour to visit. Judy enjoyed being where she was and with whom she shared the experience. She was never in a hurry to get somewhere else.
While still a student, she built a house and garden for her family in 1991 on Brooks Avenue near the School of Horticulture at NCSU. With its walled garden, it became an oasis in the busy university neighborhood. Typical of her approach, she saved six 75- year-old trees and included them in her design. Her house and garden became a laboratory for plants, design, color, and texture, and was, for two decades, an oasis of calm and beauty for her family and friends. Sarah Susanka and Julie Moir Messervy prominently featured her home and garden in their book Outside the Not So Big House in 2006. Messervy praised her intuitive sense of beauty. She practiced in her office, Judy Harmon Landscape Architect, until her early retirement in 2009. She designed residential gardens in North and South Carolina and Virginia. Her non-residential projects include Millbrook Baptist Church, Farmville United Methodist Church, the North Carolina Pottery Center in Seagrove, NC, Falconridge in Chapel Hill, and a psychologist's office on Oberlin Road in Raleigh. The psychologist's office is an early example of sustainable native plantings chosen for their color and plant texture, reflecting Judy's background as a painter. Her work conveyed beauty, appropriate scale, and a sense of proportion. She was a master of strong aesthetic expression from the large context of her designs to minute construction detailing, while at the same time championing innovative sustainable design approaches that benefitted her clients and the environment. Her approach to design always began with particulars: a place for mothers to sit and watch while their children played, a lawn surrounded by flowers that could be a badminton court, a sunbathing area, or a space for dinner outdoors on a summer evening. After retirement, Judy focused much of her design expertise on the Master Plan Committee at the JC Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh where she was a leading voice for making the JCRA a much more aesthetically significant place. In all of these endeavors, she imagined she was giving beautiful places back to the world, like the place where she grew up in San Antonio. Judy was a mentor to students, architects, and designers, always finding something of value in their work and always giving them firm but encouraging advice. She was that way with her friends, who remember feeling better about themselves for being with her. She was an accomplished painter of still life and portraits of her family. Her painting of Pearl Poole, her children's principal, hangs in the Wiley Elementary School entrance hall. Judy served on the Board of Directors of Trees Across Raleigh, a non-profit organization dedicated to planting trees in public areas throughout the city of Raleigh, and on the Board of the JC Raulston Arboretum.
She is survived by her husband, Frank Harmon, her daughter, Laura Harmon of Brooklyn, New York, and her son, William Harmon of London.
On her dresser, she kept a poem about dogs, which she adored. Readers may also think that the poem could describe Judy:
Dogs are our link to paradise.
They don't know evil, jealousy or discontent.
To sit with a dog on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden,
When doing nothing was not boring,
It was peace.
A memorial service in her honor is being planned at a future date, to be announced.
Donations in Judy's memory may be made to: The JC Raulston Arboretum, North Carolina State University, PO Box 7522, Raleigh, NC 27695.