Touring Polly Hill is a sensory delight. Bird song fills the air as you walk past flowering trees and plants whose rich smells waft across your path as you take in one beautiful vista after another. A glorious way to enrich your experience is to take one of their many staff- or docent-led arboretum tours.
I attended an engrossing spotlight tour led by curator and Assistant Director Emily Ellingson, who first grounded us in Polly Hill’s history as we gathered around the Japanese Snowbell, with bees buzzing about. Ellingson acknowledged that the land originally belonged to the ancestors of the Wampanoag. The farm acquired by Polly’s family in 1926 can be traced in the historical record to 1669. The arboretum’s offices are housed in the renovated homestead, a building dating from the 1700s. When Polly’s parents, Margaret and Howard Butcher Jr., bought it as a summer home, Margaret named the property the Barnard’s Inn Farm, to honor Barnard Luce and the inn he once operated from the homestead.
In 1957, Polly and her husband Julian inherited the farm. Ellingson says, “She was interested in plants, and at the age of 50, Polly wanted to start an arboretum from seed. She selected and named 85 cultivars, which are bred or selected by a person.” A cultivar (short for “cultivated variety”) is a specific plant or group of plants selected for desirable traits — taste, color, or pest resistance — that is intentionally maintained by humans. Unlike natural varieties, cultivars do not occur spontaneously in the wild, and must usually be propagated through cloning methods like cuttings, grafting, or tissue culture.
In 1998, 40 years after Polly first began sowing seeds and cultivating the property, Polly Hill Arboretum became an official nonprofit to carry on her ideals of plant research, education, and conservation. Polly always wanted it to be open to the community, but she never imagined her land would become a public arboretum. According to Polly Hill’s website, in 2001, reflecting on her good fortune, she said, “Who could dream of such an organization? Certainly, I never expected any part of it. Lucky? Yes. Unprecedented.”
At every stop, Ellingson provided not only the name of the specimen but also tidbits about how the names came about, which in Polly’s case, often gave us subtle bits of biographical information. For instance, among the 14 stops, we learned that Polly named numerous cultivars for her family, including Malus ‘Louisa,’ named for her daughter. Its fragrant pink flowers don’t fade, and they grow naturally in an umbrella shape. The Magnolia macrophylla, or ‘Julian Hill,’ will stop you in your tracks with its enormous leaves and impressively large white flowers. It was named for Hill’s husband, because he loved them.
There was also the Magnolia officinalis x M. tripetala ‘David,’ named to honor Dr. David H. Smith, founder and first president of the PHA. We learned helpful information about how to read the information labels. For instance, the “x” in Magnolia officinalis x M. tripetala indicates that the plant is a hybrid — a crossbreed of two different species within the same genus.
Polly also had a talent for translating nature into poetic titles, such as with the condensed cluster of three Rhododendron cumberlandense that sit side by side. ‘Chalif’ is the earliest to bloom, named for Chalif Mustard, which is a yellow-tan to orange color. Next to flower is ‘Sizzler,’ with its fiery orange flowers and paler blue-green leaves, and finally ‘Sunlight,’ whose color is a blend of orange, rose, and gold set off by its dark blue-green foliage.
The Rhododendron blooming in a large, fenced-in area, “Polly’s Play Pen,” are a particular delight. Here, among others, we saw Rhododendron ‘Tsuneshige Rokujo,’ named after Dr. Rokujo, a medical doctor and plant breeder, with whom Polly exchanged letters, plants, seeds, and books for 42 years.
Our last stop was a lovely dwarf red cedar, Juniperus virginiana ‘Martha’s Vineyard,’ found wild on Hines Point in Vineyard Haven. Of this, Polly said it was “a true child of the Island. It thrives in our dry, impoverished, sandy, acid soils.”
Along the way, we learned handy tips for the horticulturalists among us. For instance, to help with ticks, Ellingson shared that her natty, easy-to-don, Velcro-lined wrap-around Lymeez Tick Gaiters were treated with permethrin and quite effective. Asked if they have a deer problem, since Polly Hill is ungated, we were told they are fairly successful at keeping them at bay by alternating the sprays Bobbex and Deer Out.
Although we covered a lot of ground in an hour, with 25 cultivated acres, each tour offers different delights. And as wonderful as all the information was, simply walking through Polly Hill’s gorgeous setting is reason enough to keep returning to bask in one of the Vineyard’s gifts to nature lovers.
Staff-led tours take place every other Friday through Sept. 18, from 10 to 11 am. The docent-led tours run every Tuesday and Thursday at 9:30 am through September. For more information, visit pollyhillarboretum.org.