The Bucket List - 1

For two months, Betty and I adhered to both the letter and the spirit of Massachusetts’ ‘shelter-in-place’ order.  We went once a week to the supermarket during ‘senior hours’ shopping time, we socially distanced ourselves from friends, and our car’s gas gauge barely budged.  Our lone extravagances were trips to the Community Garden and long walks around Medfield to avoid packing on the ‘Quarantine 15’.

We adjusted as we went along; learning how to navigate the pandemic in a way that didn’t cause us to go crazy in the process.  Principal among these was skipping those ‘senior hours’, when 50 of us would be in line at 6 a.m.  We now go at 9 a.m., walk directly into the store, and find the shelves are fully stocked.  We also made two, 88-mile runs out to Andrews Greenhouse for vegetables, perennials, and annuals.  You have to support local agriculture, after all; and if you get an exhilarating, traffic-free drive out the Mass Pike in the bargain, so much the better.

The last tine my hair was this long, it
was brown and Nixon was president

Two weeks ago, Massachusetts began a cautious return toward a ‘new normal’.  On May 27, I was my barber’s fourth customer.  It was my first trim since the middle of February.  My hair hadn’t been that long since 1969.  Two days later, our favorite bakery re-opened and a pair of chocolate croissants graced our breakfast table.  These are the important things in life.

But there is more to life than chocolate and shorter hair.  There are gardens and open spaces. 

You can walk neighborhoods only so long before they all start to feel alike and, by mid-May, our walks were getting frankly repetitive.  Then, Trustees of Reservations gradually opened its most-lightly-trafficked properties.  We walked one less than three miles from our home that we had ignored for decades because it was ‘just a trail through the woods’.  Oh, were we wrong.  We even enjoyed getting lost by missing the turn in our trail.

Phlox stolonifera at Garden in the Woods

Then, came the electrifying emails: the opening of several gardens to members on a timed-ticket basis.  We jumped at the opportunity.  Our first excursion was to Garden in the Woods, the Framingham home of Native Plant Trust (formerly the New England Wildflower Society). May 29th was a beautiful day and the woodland garden was in its peak spring glory.  A field of blue phlox greeted us. Trilliums were everywhere. 

Yellow lady slippers

Frogs and turtles basked on tree trunks semi-submerged in a pond.  Native Plant Trust may have taken social distancing too far: there were just three cars when we arrived at 10 a.m., and seven when we departed at 11:30.

Tower Hill was in its spring glory

Next was Tower Hill Botanical Garden, the home of the Worcester County Horticultural Society.  The site is an old farm high above the Wauchusett Reservoir. When we go to Tower Hill, it is usually for an indoor event and, while we always knew the gardens were there, we had never walked all of them at once.  We corrected that error on June 2nd. 

Everywhere, plants were awaiting
their new homes

We were the first car through the gate at 9:50 a.m.  When we departed a few minutes before noon, there were perhaps 30 cars in the parking lot, though I suspect more than a few of those belonged to volunteers and staff, because everywhere we went, beds were in the process of being planted.

It is a beautiful garden with a lovely mix of annuals, perennials, shrubs and mature trees.  Its lone drawback, at least in my view, is the dominance of Asian cultivars. American gardening is bending toward native specimens, and to see so many Japanese and Chinese trees and shrubs – despite their beautiful, variegated leaves and sinuous branches – is disappointing when conservationists and naturalists are demonstrating the critical role of native plants for pollinators.

At the top of Tower Hill....

We walked each of Tower Hill’s gardens and savored them.  We sat in Adirondack chairs overlooking the reservoir.  We hiked to the peak of the eponymous hill to see scenery little changed by time.  It was a picture-perfect morning.

Yesterday (June 3), we made the 55-mile drive to Crane Beach in Ipswich.  In my opinion, this is the crown jewel of the Trustees of Reservation; it had opened only a week earlier, and only on an ‘experimental basis’.  On-line tickets were snapped up in a few hours.

So much beach, so few people...

We know Crane Beach intimately.  Its four miles of fully-protected and undeveloped, white-sand beach backed by dunes is a treasure.  Also, as retirees with a highly flexible schedule, we can go when the crowds aren’t there.  But nothing prepared us for the sight of the beach on a perfect, 75-degree day with only sparse family groups on the ‘lifeguard’ section of the beach, and only the occasional walker along the other 95 percent of the coastline.  The endangered piping plovers that call the dune home were the lone competition to the sound of the ocean.

Warnings amid the dunes

We stayed two hours (our ticket was good for all day, so there are definitely kinks to be worked out in the reservation process) and left tired but rejuvenated.  Of course, being so close, we also ticked off two more ‘to do’ items on our post-pandemic bucket list: fried clams and onion rings at J.T. Farnham’s, and homemade ice cream at White Farms.

Our next outing will be to the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden.  But that’s a story for another time.