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Did you know Bennington has one of the largest public gardens in the state featuring native plants and ferns?
The George Aiken Wildflower Trail in the Hadwen Woods at Bennington Museum is an engaging woodland garden that’s free to the public and open from dawn until dusk. It’s intended to showcase the many native plants and ferns that Aiken — a two-term Governor and six-term U.S. Senator who for many years had a nursery in Putney — loved, grew, sold, wrote about and urged others to grow.
The wildflower trail is actually a series of inter-connected trails winding through six acres that includes a sun-lit meadow, a shaded trail along Jennings Brook, and open areas that include maple, birch, oak, pawpaw, linden, and sycamore trees. At the start, the Hadwen Woods had been mainly a pine forest, but over time most of the pines were taken down because of root rot or knocked over in winter storms, and were replaced with hardwoods. Now only a few towering evergreens remain, but the hardwoods allow for the growth of wildflowers and ferns that too often had been shaded by the evergreens in the past.
There are more than 300 species of native plants and close to a dozen native ferns along the trails, some of them just small clusters of plants but in other cases large tracts of Anemone, Virginia Bluebells, Bloodroot, Mayapples, Mountain Mint, Turtleheads, Azaleas, Rhododendrons, Elderberry, Columbine, a half dozen different kinds of Goldenrod and Ironweed. Many of the plants are those that Aiken wrote about in "Pioneering With Wildflowers", which was first published in 1935 and which went through five printings.
Aiken was considered a progressive Republican, whose father had embraced the ideals of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” party. He was born in Putney in 1890 and in 1912 borrowed $100 to begin planting raspberries. Within five years he had 500 acres devoted mainly to fruits and berries and in 1926 began the commercial growing of wildflowers and ferns, which he sold in large part through a mail-order catalog business with the motto: “Grown in Vermont — They’re Hardy”.
The idea for the trail came from Jackie Marro, who had been given a copy of "Pioneering With Wildflowers" by Aiken back in 1967 when her husband was an intern in Aiken’s Washington office. She had become increasingly interested in native plants after many trips to the Garden in the Woods in Framingham, Massachusetts, the premier wildflower garden in New England. In the autumn of 2009 she wrote to Stephen Perkins, then the Museum director, asking if he would be interested in having her try to put together a group of volunteers to create a wildflower garden in the Hadwen Woods, both as an enhancement to the Museum’s property and as a memorial to Aiken as a wildflower pioneer. Perkins quickly replied that he would.
Since then a small core group of volunteers has removed thousands of invasive plants, such as burdock, bittersweet, briars, buckthorne, garlic mustard, thistles, and burning bush. They turned what had been a single narrow path into a half dozen groomed trails, and planted thousands of wildflowers. They put in place a stone wall entrance, set up more than a dozen benches for resting, and researched and cataloged the native plants and animals. The trail crew continues to meet on the weekends during the warmer months and encourages the participation of any interested community member. Send a note to info@benningtonmuseum.org to receive email updates.
Recently, the Museum received grants from the Vermont Community Foundation and the Harris and Frances Block Foundation to create informational signage along the trail. As the weather warms up, we invite you to take a walk and explore this outdoor exhibit that connects the history of the region and the Museum's collection to this microcosmic New England landscape.
“What a wonderful thing it would be if just outside every city or large town there could be established a wildflower preserve,” Aiken wrote in his book. That’s what now has been created in Bennington, and while it’s still a work in progress and will be well into the future;
and while there are many more things in bloom between May and October than in April; the George Aiken Wildflower Trail is the perfect place to celebrate Native Plant Month.
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