Christina Bartlett Hutton was born on November 27, 1950 and passed away peacefully on October 5th following complications from treatment for plasmablastic lymphoma.
Chris grew up in Southington, Connecticut, as the third of seven children of her loving parents, Richard and Virginia Hutton. She graduated from Skidmore College, earned an MFA in Visual Arts at Indiana University, and taught at a number of colleges, including UMass Boston. Her work, which incorporated printmaking, mixed media, and photography, is included in the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In her fifties Chris began a second career in landscape design after studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She created Bartlett Gardens and over the next two decades designed countless beautiful gardens all over Massachusetts and beyond.
She and her husband of 53 years, Frederick (Rick) Schnure, raised their three daughters in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, and recently renovated a home on Barters Island in Maine, realizing a long-time dream of Chris’s. They also moved to a condominium in Hingham, MA to be closer to Emily and their grandchildren. She was closely bonded and devoted to her four grandchildren, who call her Kiki. She loved to sail, travel, bake with her grandkids, and to feel the wind blowing off the Sheepscot River in Maine.
Chris’s incredible visual sense, honed by years of studying and making art, gave her the ability to make everything around her more beautiful; her home, food, and gardens all carried this brilliance. She was safety, love, and warmth embodied—someone who laughed easily and whose wit and care brought joy to all those who knew her. She was a treasured wife, mother, grandmother, sister, and friend who is sorely missed.
Her love lives on in her husband, Rick; her three daughters, Virginia Simon, Emily Schnure, and Martha Schnure; her sons-in-law, Alex Lanstein and Jack McCallum; her four grandchildren, Alice, Eleanor, and Timothy Lanstein, and Lucy McCallum; her siblings, Sally Telzrow, Douglas Hutton, John Hutton, Martha Hutton, and Nancy Farrell (she was predeceased by her brother, David Hutton); her dear friends; and all the many beautiful gardens she designed.
A private service will be held for family and close friends in early 2027. For those who would like to honor Chris with a gift, her family suggests donations be made in her memory to either the Maine Coastal Botanical Gardens (please select “in memory of”), or Planned Parenthood. Thank you for your kindness and generosity.
