Mary Pitts

To our enduring sadness, Mary Santoro Pitts unexpectedly but quietly passed away on May 24. Mary was a touchstone and central force for her loving and devoted family, and also for her many friends. Born in New York City on October 2, 1940, to Annarosa (Mamoliti) and Nicholas Paul Santoro, she grew up in Tenafly, New Jersey, and received her higher education at Hood College, NYU and Columbia. After earning an MA in teaching French at Columbia, she spent a year at the Sorbonne, where she deepened a lifelong love of France and French literature. In her early years teaching French at Mayfield High School in Ohio, she inspired a number of now internationally distinguished university faculty to pursue their careers in education. She was, in addition, a photographer of internal landscapes and portraiture. She earned an MFA in Photography at San Francisco State University, studying there with prominent Bay Area photographers including Oliver Gagliani, Lisette Model, and Don Worth. Her work includes a series of Mothers and Daughters, which was shown in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.

For the past 25 years, she focused intensely on the San Francisco Botanical Garden, for many years as a docent and for the past ten years as a member of the SFBG Society’s Board of Directors. Mary was passionate about the Garden’s role in teaching ecology and biodiversity, and its being a living museum of plants and trees. She loved the seasonal beauty of the Garden, nearly unique among the world’s botanical gardens for the breadth of its collections of plants from around the globe. She led innumerable walks around the Garden for interested visitors and botanical groups and included memorable stories about the plants themselves, their features, propagation and interrelationship with the other plants and the animals around them. She both believed and taught the ‘web of life’.

Mary is survived by her husband Lawrence Pitts; her daughter Jennifer Pitts, son-in-law Sankar Muthu, and grandchildren Lucia and Nicholas, who live in Chicago; and her son John, who lives in London; her nieces Alyce Santoro, Anne Pitts Londergan, and Caroline Adams Pitts; and her nephew Michael Pitts. Mary was a joyous, generous, excited, engaged and loving wife, mother and friend. All of us whom she loved and who loved her miss her dearly.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made in Mary’s name to the San Francisco Botanical Garden Society.