Flume & Donald Marvin Daylily Garden

The Flume was constructed in 2010 after a design competition was initiated by the Heritage Museums & Gardens Board of Trustees.  Stephen Stimson Associates of Cambridge, MA submitted the winning design that eventually became the Flume.

According to the landscape architect, “the design was inspired by the gristmills and historic flumes found throughout New England.” The flume is first viewed from the main entrance as a narrow pool that extends 208’ and pours 26’ down into a pool filled with waterlilies.

The water garden is defined by native granite stone edges and invites visitors to explore the water wildlife and garden collection. The trees lining the Promenade are mostly 90 (plus) year old Hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) planted in the 1920’s by Charles Owen Dexter.

• American Society of Landscape Architects | Award of Excellence in Design 2019
• Boston Society of Landscape Architects | Honor Award 2014

Located at the base of the Flume, the Daylily Garden is in its glory from mid-June through late-August. Heritage has a Daylily (Hemerocallis) collection of approximately 800 cultivars and most are located in this garden. A few are scattered throughout the rest of Heritage Museums & Gardens. The collection mostly dates from the 1980’s and 1990’s. The colors range from near-white to yellows and to orange, pink, purple to near-red. Each year a few new cultivars are added to the collection.

The north side of the Daylily Garden is lined with English Holly planted during the initial planting when Heritage was being developed as a public garden in 1968-1969. These hollies hide the concrete foundation remains of the greenhouse Charles Owen Dexter used to start the many seedlings of his various rhododendron breeding programs.

There are several significant trees in this garden including a beautiful Stewartia pseudocamellia near the Flume Pool and a very large Sourwood, Oxydendrum arboreum. Both trees appear to date from the time of Charles Dexter (1921-1943). Also of significance are a large Japanese White Pine (Pinus parviflora) and a Japanese Maple (Acer palmatum var atropurpureum).

This functional work of art was created for Heritage in 1981 by James Moss.

The sundial style is known as an armillary sphere – a skeletal frame of a globe with additional rings representing various astronomically important features such as the ecliptic, equatorial, and prime vertical. Our sundial has 4-inch meridian and equatorial rings with smaller arctic and antarctic rings. The sundial is 40 inches in diameter, weighing over 1,000 pounds, and an accompanying plaque instructs visitors on how to read the sundial.

These spherical frameworks of rings represent lines of celestial longitude and latitude and other astronomically important features such as the ecliptic.

The Heritage Sundial is registered with the North American Sundial Society and located at 41° 44.950′ N 70° 30.498′ W