When you think of Massachusetts, chances are you think of the Pilgrims, The Mayflower, the first Thanksgiving, Boston and, perhaps, Cape Cod and its islands. But there’s another side of the best-known of the New England states that’s blooming beautiful. In other words, the state is full of fantastic public parks and gardens.
SO MANY, IN FACT, THAT FOR THE SECOND YEAR, Massachusetts will be promoting them in London’s iconic May 20-25 Chelsea Flower Show.
This affection for gardens, you might say, dates back to the early 17th century when the first Pilgrim settlers discovered they could only survive in the New World by planting gardens of native vegetables and fruits, reputedly with considerable aid and advice from the Native Americans. Hence the big feast after the first harvest that inspired today’s all-American food-fest, Thanksgiving.
Today, you can visit a re-creation of their Plimoth Plantation where ‘interpreters’ in colonial costumes still tend the gardens, tidy up their rustic dwellings, work at traditional crafts and are among the hosts at a gala annual November Thanksgiving feast.
There’s also much that’s green and growing in Boston itself, where hilly, 50-acre Boston Common, crowned by the impressive State House, was established in 1640 as America’s oldest public park. During World War II parts of it even served as a ‘Victory Garden’ and today it’s home to everything from summer softball games to winter ice skating.
Next door, Boston’s more formal Public Gardens, founded in 1837 as America’s first public botanical gardens, are resplendent, with everything from chestnut and California redwood trees to Asian gingkos and weeping willows, while its lagoon is graced with popular, pedal-powered Swan Boats. From there, a series of six parks and waterways known as the ‘Emerald Necklace’ lead to 365- acre Arnold Arboretum, founded in 1872 and designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, best known as the creator of Manhattan’s Central Park. Now run by Harvard University, it is best known for its rhododendron, magnolia, beech and, particularly, its lilac bushes, which inspire an annual, May Lilac Sunday festival.
The city’s most unusual and innovative new parkland is the one-mile-long Rose Kennedy Greenway, which utilises a narrow corridor of land reclaimed after an elevated motorway was replaced by tunnels. Named after the mother of JFK and extending from North End south to Chinatown, it encompasses everything from formal gardens, fountains and interactive sculpture to a farmers’ market, food stalls, children’s playgrounds and even an old-fashioned carousel.
Even the area museums have their special garden areas. At the elegant, Venetian-style and treasure-filled Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum – founded by and named after an avid gardener – it is a lush, central courtyard regularly transformed by seasonal displays that include a hanging nasturtium display in April. At the nearb y Museum of Fine Arts, it’s a Japanese Rock Garden, which honours an esteemed former curator of the museum’s vast Asiatic art collection. And across the Charles River in Cambridge, the Harvard Museum of Natural History has a treat for flower lovers whatever the season with its fabulous Glass Flowers Collection, whereas the serene Mount Auburn Cemetery, America’s first (1831) garden cemetery, is known for its 5,000 trees, flowers and ornamental shrubs, among them daffodils, magnolias and forsythia.
MORE ADVENTURES IN THE GREATER MERRIMACK VALLEY
One of America’s most-famous horseback rides was the April 18, 1775, ‘Midnight Ride of Paul Revere’ west from Boston into the Merrimack Valley. His mission – to warn fellow patriots that the British troops were coming – inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poetic tribute to Revere, and the forthcoming battles around the towns of Lexington and Concord – won by the greatly outnumbered rebels – are considered the beginning of the Revolutionary War and America’s independence.
Today, these charming 17th-century towns are only too happy to welcome the British (and other foreign visitors). You can take a walking tour to the sites of the various military confrontations and to the Concord homes of such 19th-century literary giants as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott and drive out to serene Walden Pond, which inspired writer/ environmentalist Henry David Thoreau’s most famous work, Walden.
Only a half-hour’s drive south in Framingham is the New England Wild Flower Society’s Garden in the Woods, where paths lead you up and down hills, through woodlands and past ponds, all adorned by an array of native flowers and foliage that change with the season. An even shorter drive leads from there to Worcester, where the Worcester Art Museum is renowned for its collection of artworks (Gauguin, Goya and Whistler among them) as well as for its annual January/ early-February Flora in Winter event, which pairs spectacular flower arrangements with the artworks that inspired them. A half-hour away, Tower Hill Botanic Garden, home to the third-oldest horticulture society in America, encompasses everything from the cottage and vegetable gardens adjoining an early-18th-century farmhouse to an heirloom apple orchard and an orangerie.
Visitors enjoy Tower Hill Botanic Garden near Worchester
To the north-west, delightful Historic Deerfield not only offers a mile-long main street lined with lovingly-preserved 18th- and 19th-century homes (some open to the public), plus the Flynt Center of Early New England Life, but is close to horticultural attractions. South Deerfield, just down the road, is home to the Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory & Gardens, with its nearly-3,000, rainbow-coloured insects and tropical vegetation protected from the elements in glass-enclosed, temperature-controlled gardens.
At Shelburn Falls, to the north-west, you’ll find the Bridge of Flowers, one of America’s most-unusual garden attractions and possibly worth visiting by actress Joanna Lumley and the other Londoners who are championing the construction of a much-longer, garden-lined bridge across the River Thames.
For the century-old, now-pedestrianised, former car and trolley bridge that links Shelburne Falls and Buckland just across the river, is a children’s fairytale bower of almost every flower and shrub you can envision. The towns are also full of shops and studios displaying beautiful glass, ceramic, wood and other crafts and jewellery, as well as historic buildings including Shelburn Falls’ old-time pharmacy, which is complete with soda fountain. Every mid-August about 400 diners converge on the Bridge of Flowers’ adjacent Iron Bridge for a festive al fresco group dinner.
DISCOVERING THE FLORAL DELIGHTS OF THE BERKSHIRE HILLS
Head south-west toward the New York State border and you’re in Pittsfield, full of its own attractions and a gateway to many others in the picturesque surrounding Berkshire (pronounced Burk-sheer) Hills. History and garden lovers head first for the town’s fascinating Hancock Shaker Village, home for many years to the unique celibate religious sect founded by Mother Ann Lee from Manchester. Among its 20 historic buildings is the most famous of all Shaker structures, a huge, round, stone barn that houses heritage breed animals; within the garden plots are traditional flowers and vegetables as well as the herbs Shakers used for cooking and medical purposes; and the site’s shop is full of reproductions of the group’s exquisite, highly-collectible furniture and crafts, particularly the chairs and round and oval wooden baskets. Pittsfield’s Springside Park is home to the Hebert Arboretum, which includes a butterfly and hummingbird garden.
Literature and home decor devotees, on the other hand, might head first for Lenox just down the road, where they will find the elegant, classical revival Mount, home for many years to Edith Wharton, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth, as well as of books on architecture, gardens, interior design and travel.
The white mansion she helped design, now designated a National Historic Landmark, is surrounded by three acres of delightful gardens, which she envisioned as elegant, outdoor rooms. Among them are a walled Italianate garden and a rustic rock garden. Lenox is also home to the renowned Tanglewood Musical Center, which stages summer concerts by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as well as jazz, opera and theatre. Nearby Becket hosts the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.
Stockbridge, the next town to the south, is home to Naumkeag, an opulent, 44-room Gilded Age ‘cottage’ built for wealthy19th-century attorney Joseph Hodges Choate. Filled with family furnishing and memorabilia, it is surrounded by terraced gardens, including a parterre-designed one that gives the impression of an Oriental carpet, a walled-in Chinese garden and its signature Blue Steps, descending down a hillside and enhanced by blue-painted grottoes, a channel of running water, white birch trees and ornamental railings.
Also found in Stockbridge are the 80-year-old, 15-acre Berkshire Botanical Gardens that showcase more than 3,000 regional specimens, a museum to Norman Rockwell, America’s best-known and best-loved illustrator/artist, and Chesterwood, the home, studio and garden of renowned sculptor Daniel French, whose creations included the huge seated statue of President Abraham Lincoln in the Washington, DC, Lincoln Memorial building.
Tyringham, just 20 minutes east of Stockbridge, is best known for elegantly-simple Ashintully Gardens on property owned by contemporary composer John McLennan. Set in a tranquil glade bisected by a stream, its features include a fountain rising from a round pond and woodland pathways up the steep surrounding hillside.
Other Berkshire towns famous for their cultural attractions include North Adams, site of the huge Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and Williamstown, where the Clark Art Institute is known for its outstanding works by Degas, Renoir and John Singer Sargent.
For something completely different, you could take the summer weekend-only Cape Flyer train from Boston to Hyannis, a major tourist centre on the renowned Cape Cod peninsula, which juts like a beckoning arm out into the Atlantic Ocean. There, you can visit the John F Kennedy Museum, which offers an insight into the down time JFK and his family and friends spent on the Cape, and continue on to Sandwich, site of the outstanding Sandwich Glass Museum and the Heritage Museums & Gardens. Not only do they feature thousands of rhododendrons, which are at their peak in late May to mid-June, plus numerous other varieties of trees, shrubs and flowers, but also a 19th-century windmill and three galleries featuring everything from American folk art and splendid automobiles to a vintage carousel. It’s a great place to spend a few days before your flight back to London, particularly as there are wide, sandy beaches and welcoming inns nearby.
The Flume
Fountain is one of the key attractions of Sandwich’s Heritage Museum & Gardens
