Elm Bank Horticulture Center
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The Elm Bank Horticulture Center 36 acres (14.6 hectares) is the home of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, located at 900 Washington Street (Route 16), Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA. The site includes open fields and meadows, streams and pools, wooded areas and formal gardens.
Elm Bank was given its name in 1740, when Colonel John Jones acquired the land and planted elms along the banks of the Charles River. The site was later occupied by the Loring, Broad, and Otis families before being sold for $10,000 in 1874 to Benjamin Pierce Cheney, founder of a delivery company that became American Express. At the time of Cheney's death in 1895, the property contained over 200 acres (80 hectares), and passed to his eldest daughter Alice in 1905. In 1907, Alice and her husband, Dr. William Hewson Baltzell, engaged an architectural firm to build a neo-Georgian manor house, and the most prominent landscapers of the day, the Olmsted Brothers, were hired to design and improve the gardens. In the 1940s, it became a seminary housing a group of Stigmatine Fathers, who constructed a school building and ran a summer camp in the 1960s and 70s. Later, Elm Bank served as the home of the Quinobin Regional Technical School. The entire site was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987 and is currently owned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In April of 1996, the site was leased to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.
Elm Bank currently contains the following gardens:
- Weezie’s Garden for Children - a series of small spiraling gardens, each giving visitors the opportunity to plant, water or interact in some way with the garden’s elements. Children’s classes are held throughout the spring, summer and fall in this special garden.
- New England Trial Garden - a cooperative effort between the University of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Flower Growers’ Association and the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Breeding companies from all over the world contribute annuals for viewing by amateur and professional gardeners. This garden also tests unreleased varieties competing for All-America Selections awards, displays previous winners, and grows hundreds of cultivars submitted for evaluation by commercial breeders.
- Italianate Garden - Restoration of the 1926 Italianate Garden, based on original plans from the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, together with a numbered plant list and even the receipts for the trees and flowers originally planted in the gardens.
- Display Gardens and Tree Nurseries - The Noanett Garden Club, the New England Chapter of the Herb Society of America, and the American Rhododendron Society maintain collaborative demonstration and display gardens at Elm Bank. The Day Lily Society installed a garden in 2004.
