August 9th- Tower Hill Botanical Garden

Last Saturday I woke up and had no idea what the day had in store for me. As I was lounging around, getting laundry done and watching a little bit of Olympics, I got a call from a friend John Giles. We have been trying to plan a time to go to the Tower Hill Botanical Gardens in Boylston, MA (right near me) for quite some time and just hadn’t been able to coordinate it. John loves that place. When he was diagnosed with cancer some years ago he would go there to walk around and pray and just enjoy the beauty. It was really nice to go there and see the amazing grounds.





One of the most interesting sites was the Folly. If you don’t know, a Folly is a kind of park that was popular during the 18th and 19th centuries. It usually is designed similarly to Greco-Roman style structures thought to be romantic. It was very nice.


You can also see the stone walls in the area. In New England, these walls boomed in abundance from 1775 to 1825 when farming in the area became more popular. In the 19th century, it became required that they be inspected to make sure that they were structurally sound. I think this is funny because they are rarely taller than knee-height (and that would be considered tall). They were used to keep in animals, mark property lines etc. Most people got the rocks from their own land and started using them because they were already on the land. You see these “fences” everywhere… in people’s yards, in national forests, in the middle of nowhere… a true mark of history on the region.