Mary Magavern Worrell of Providence, Rhode Island, died of cancer on January 30, 2026, in her home and with her family. She was born in Buffalo, New York, on August 17, 1942, and is survived by her husband, Rick, son, Jamie (Kimberly), and daughters Elizabeth Carroll (David) and Hope Martin (Chip), nine grandchildren, and sisters Margy Hargraves (Skip, deceased) and Jane Beebe (Spencer) as well as many nieces, nephews, and godchildren.
In 1960 she was presented at the 20th Century Club in Buffalo and later graduated from The Buffalo Seminary. After two years at Bradford Junior College and one year at Reid Hall in her beloved Paris she graduated from Boston University in 1964. She married a close Dartmouth College friend of her two Dartmouth brothers and settled in Providence in 1964 where she worked as a teacher at Classical High School and later at Lincoln School.
In 1967 she and her husband did much of the work to restore and move into an old (1861) home in Providence’s Fox Point neighborhood which had been boarded up since 1940.
During the 70s she began her devotion to St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, where she served as the volunteer director of its Sunday school, and then as senior warden. That devotion continued throughout her life.
Influenced by her time studying in Paris she answered an undeniable call to landscape architecture, where the full force of her passion for ‘the gentle hand of man in nature’ blossomed. She commuted part-time to the Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, MA, and after much work accomplished the hard-earned designation of Registered Landscape Architect, all the while caring for her family with homemade everything delicious, especially fresh-out-of-the-oven cookies for the kids and their friends after school. Humble and appreciative of the advantages in life, she used to say Rick “gave her the wings to fly” as she reflected on her career as an incredibly talented landscape architect.
Her legacy includes special spaces she envisioned and brought to life collaboratively with talented craftspeople and clients to whom she was devoted. Mary's creativity and appreciation of beauty were a constant in her life. A book of some of her major works was published in 2013 and she inscribed the book to her grandchildren with Voltaire's advice: "Il faut cultiver notre jardin."
She also managed to design and build a family second home with many flower gardens and one vegetable garden on part of a lovely old hill farm in rural Vermont near several ski areas. The Vermont home was a seat of joy where the family was surrounded by forest, fields, mountains, and a river; and where the children and grandchildren were instilled with a love of skiing and outdoor work. She loved nothing more than a day outdoors, playing tennis, boating, skiing, and especially working in the garden to exhaustion. She never took one ounce of sunlight for granted, always planting one more bulb or raking up one more pile of leaves, and used her time on Earth wisely, never one to rest on her laurels or let an opportunity slip by.
Mary loved her boating times out of Westport, Cuttyhunk, the Vineyard, Buzzards and Narragansett Bays and Block Island. She loved her Magavern family tennis at the Clarksburg Club in the hills south of Buffalo as well as with her Rhode Island tennis pals. Mad River Glen and Sugarbush were her regular ski venues, but she also loved to travel to other “far away” mountains. She was a Buffalo gal till the end, mildly competitive by her nature in general but fiercely so in Scrabble or in making a good pun.
She shared her expertise and energy with her community, serving for many years on the boards of Swan Point Cemetery and Southside Community Land Trust (SCLT). Mary was the first woman on Agawam Hunt’s Board of Governors in 1984. In 2003 she fell in love with SCLT, passionately dedicating hours to develop, promote, and sustain urban agriculture, believing strongly in community gardening and farming’s fundamental ability to empower and connect people.
GRACE…The one simple word that defined Mary. Throughout her life a natural grace always seemed to shine through as she strove to manage the complexities and demands of her family, personal, professional and community life. Her solve came from her bottomless well of generosity. She always thought of everyone else first and never, even in the hardest of her long health struggles, complained. She made it look easy. She was loved. She shared this grace with all, lived first concerned with others, grateful for life’s gifts, especially friends, family, and nature’s beauty.
ELEGANCE…Friends often spoke of Mary’s simple, subtle elegance. Her physical beauty contributed to that, but friends insisted that she always looked elegant whether dressed for a normal day’s work, a formal event, or just rubber boots and a bandana in a muddy garden, but always with her bright pink lipstick. She seemed naturally to project that subtle elegance.
She left at peace, with gratitude for all she had experienced, having shown us all how to love and live. Her family thanks her many caregivers over the years and towards the end.
There will be a memorial service for Mary at St. Martin’s Church, 50 Orchard Avenue, in Providence at 11 a.m. on April 11, 2026. Burial at Swan Point will be private. Contributions in Mary’s memory may be made to Southside Community Land Trust, 404 Broad St. Providence, RI 02907.
