Suzanne B. “Bunkie” Hopkins, a botanist and horticulturist who collected and sold rare plants, died July 27 at the Broadmead retirement community in Cockeysville from complications of a stroke.

The former Monkton resident was 88.

The daughter of George H. Bunker, a sugar industry executive, and Katharine Stevenson Bunker, a homemaker, the former Suzanne Bunker was born in New York City and raised in Yonkers, N.Y., and Chappaquiddick, Mass.

She was a 1946 graduate of Garrison Forest School and studied at the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She also attended Bennington College in Vermont.

In 1950, she married David Luke Hopkins Jr., a banker, and the couple settled in Bedford, N.Y., and later in New York City, where they raised their four children.

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In the late 1960s, Mrs. Hopkins began a long tenure at the New York Botanical Garden, where studied botany and horticulture and received certificates.

While there, she volunteered in the native plant and rock gardens and with the garden’s propagation range. She later chaired the horticulture board.

Mrs. Hopkins and a colleague searched throughout the East Coast for rare and unusual plants, which they brought back to sell at an annual New York Botanical Garden auction.

For five years during the 1970s, she owned and operated a business that designed and planted terraces, rooftops and back yards in Manhattan.

“One day, she had just finished planting a garden on a rooftop and was walking down Fifth Avenue in dirty blue jeans carrying a shovel,” said her son, Robert Dixon Hopkins of Butler. “Two hours later, she was dressed in an evening gown and going off to the opera.”

She later had her own landscaping business and often worked with Peter F. Wyer Landscape Design Inc. in New York City, Westchester and Connecticut.

Mrs. Hopkins, who was known as “Bunkie,” moved to Monkton when her husband was named managing director of Alex. Brown & Sons. He later helped establish Brown Investment Advisory and Trust Co., of which he was the first CEO. He died in 2012.

Mrs. Hopkins was a member of the board of Ladew Topiary Gardens in Monkton and the Irvine Nature Center in Owings Mills.

An opera fan, Mrs. Hopkins had been a member of the Metropolitan Opera Guild.

A resident of Broadmead since 2007, she was a world traveler. She also enjoyed spending summers at a cottage in Northeast Harbor, Maine.

She was a communicant of St. Mary’s by the Sea Episcopal Church in Northeast Harbor, Maine, where a funeral service will be held at 4 p.m. Aug. 25.

In addition to her son, she is survived by two daughters, Cassandra Hopkins Watson of New York City and Suzanne Bunker Hopkins II of Cambridge, Mass.; seven grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. Another son, David Luke Hopkins III, died in 2007.

fred.rasmussen@baltsun.com

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