Julia Orme Martin (1926-1999) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to Mary Clarke Cohen Orme (later Mary Cohen Bienvenue) (ca. 1903-?) and Charles Dickerson Orme (1897-1972). Her grandfather was Major John Sanford Cohen (1870-1935) who served as a United States Senator and as an editor and later president for the Atlanta Journal from 1917-1935. After her parents divorced in the mid-1930s, Martin spent part of her childhood in Europe, particularly Portugal and France, with her mother and her sister, Beau. She attended Washington Seminary School in Atlanta, Georgia, and the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C. She attended the University of Georgia and later graduated from Georgia State University in 1968 with a Bachelor of Arts in history. She married Justus C. Martin, Jr. (1925-1993) in the late 1940s. The Martins had two daughters, Maudie Martin Huff and Julia Martin McClelland.

Julia Orme Martin was the principal landscape designer for Julia O. Martin Landscape Design and helped restore and preserve Ansley Park in Atlanta, Georgia. She was a member of the Ansley Park Garden Club and served on the Board of the Ansley Park Beautification Foundation. A longtime member of the Board of Managers of the A. G. Rhodes Homes, she was also a sustaining member of the Junior League of Atlanta, and a member of the Atlanta Town Committee of the National Society of the Colonial Dames in the State of Georgia. Julia Martin designed gardens in the Southeast for two decades, beginning in the early 1970s. Like most women landscape designers of this period, Martin primarily worked in the arena of residential landscape design. Her most notable projects include the A. G. Rhodes Home on Boulevard Avenue, Atlanta, Georgia; the Henry B. Tompkins property on West Wesley Road, Atlanta, Georgia; and the Columbus Museum, once the home of W. C. Bradley, Columbus, Georgia. She is also known for her landscape designs for her primary home located on Westminster Drive in Ansley Park as well as the gardens she designed for Oldfield, her vacation home in Sargentville, Maine.