Marta McDowell consults for private customers and public gardens while teaching landscape history and horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden. In September 2017, she published The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Frontier Landscapes that Inspired the Little House Novels. In 2015, All the Presidents' Gardens was a New York Times bestseller and received an American Horticultural Society book award. The Garden Writers Association awarded Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life a Gold Award in 2014, and it is now in its sixth printing. Marta is now revising Emily Dickinson's Gardens, her first novel.

Marta is a board member of the NJ Historical Foundation at the Cross Estate in Bernardsville and one of the organizers of the Chatham Community Garden. Kirke Bent, her husband, sums up her life as I am therefore I dig, and their pet cockatiel is named Sydney.