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In an age that worships creative disruption and entrepreneurial imagination, surprisingly little attention is given to the practice and virtues of reinvigorating venerable institutions. Sustaining older institutions and keeping them fit, relevant and forward-looking in a fast changing landscape offers social continuity and the communal benefit of prudent risk-taking and social change. Worcester, Massachusetts—New England’s second largest city—is something of an exemplar as a number of the city’s pre-eminent cultural and civic institutions, whose origins were in the nineteenth century, remain leaders in their respective fields today. Examples include the American Antiquarian Society (1812), the Children’s Friend (Worcester Children’s Friend Society 1849), the Ecotarium (Worcester Natural History Society 1884), the Worcester Historical Museum (Worcester Society of Antiquity 1875) and the Worcester Art Museum (1898). As progressive as each of these institutions has been and continues to be, it would be hard to match the transformational resilience of the Worcester County Horticultural Society (WCHS) which was founded in 1842—with roots in the Worcester Agricultural Society (1819). Relocated in 1986 from downtown Worcester to a magnificent site twelve miles away in the countryside of Boylston and officially retaining its original name, WCHS is now far better known as Tower Hill Botanic Garden. John Trexler, the animating spirit who led the transformation, has written an account that is fascinating in its own right, but which may inspire others to take a fresh look at the untapped vitality tucked away in older institutions.

Constructive institutional change is never easy. It takes vision, persuasiveness, support from diverse quarters, persistence and more than a little of what might be called romantic pragmatism. Above all it takes leadership, a “benign dictator” as John Trexler refers to himself in the title of this wonderful memoir. Horticulture can be ephemeral in the particular—a flower’s prime bloom is lovely but momentary—but when considered as a system, as a botanic garden, then horizons shift from weeks to decades and well beyond. Writing about gardens a century ago, Alice Morse Earle, a Worcester native and historian of early America, said, “Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination … to be content with the present and not striving about the future is fatal.” A lover of plants and gardens, John Trexler reveled in their presence from an early age, but his distinguishing gifts have been his ability to imagine the future and his vigilance in bringing that vision to life.

John’s arrival in Worcester in 1984 as the new Executive Director of WCHS was inauspicious. His immediate predecessor, Fred Roberts, had served for less than half a year before moving on to what would became a distinguished twenty-two year career as director of Pierre S. du Pont’s Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square. When John arrived in Worcester—inadvertently on a holiday—the Society had just two other employees, an outmoded facility in downtown Worcester, thoughts of moving outside the city, and no chairman of the board. John used the holiday to read through nearly one hundred and fifty years of the Society’s annual reports. Even if the future looked bleak, the history was intriguing.

Formally established in 1842, WCHS had its origins in the Worcester Agricultural Society which had been founded in 1819 to promote not only agriculture and livestock, but local manufacture as well. The Agricultural Society became a victim of its own success as its annual cattle show was a social high point of the year and its horse races attracted betting and public drinking, which detracted from its higher minded original goals of education and the promotion of local products. The founding of WCHS—interestingly, initiated and sustained by more than a few leaders of the Worcester Agricultural Society—was a testament to Worcester’s nascent emergence as a steam, rather than water-powered, manufacturing center. Commercial prosperity in finance, manufacturing and trade was surpassing agriculture in the county. As was already evident in England and to a lesser extent through much of coastal America, gardening was superceding farming as a community pursuit. And one need not be rich to garden. Writing in 1936, Albert Farnsworth called the period from 1830-1860 as the “Golden Age” of gardening in Worcester, a period when he noted “everybody had a garden.” That might be a contestable claim, but it certainly made the 1842 WCHS mission of “advancing the science and encouraging and improving the practice of horticulture” both timely and popular.

Worcester County has a long agricultural tradition, even if it lacks an agricultural identity relative to, say, the Pioneer Valley or the South Coast in Massachusetts or the Hudson Valley in New York. The recent USDA census of direct farm to consumer sales by county offers the surprising fact that Worcester County ranks sixth in the United States in total dollar volume. Sweet corn, tomatoes and lettuce play a role, but it’s really due to the diversity of products grown. Orchards and nurseries throughout Worcester County combine with farm stands to create a remarkably robust, if under-recognized, horticultural region.

What does all this have to do with John Trexler and this wonderful memoir? The timing of John’s 1984 arrival on Elm Street in Worcester was more propitious than anyone could have appreciated at the time. Ever since the founding of WCHS, birthed as it was out of the Worcester Agricultural Society, there had been a natural and unresolved tension between the city and the surrounding hinterland. Worcester and other smaller county towns like Southbridge, Fitchburg, Whitinsville, Athol, Clinton, Ware, Gardner and Leominster had sustained exposure in the industrial sun. The hinterlands slipped into the shadows as cities and towns became increasingly dependent on the industrialized food chain which sourced products from all over the world at increasingly low cost, especially after World War II. While WCHS never lost interest in supporting farmers and orchardists, the emphasis had shifted over the years toward flowers and ornamental trees. The high point of the WCHS year was the annual flower show, an ambitious and socially popular production held at the organization’s 30 Elm Street headquarters in downtown Worcester. Popular as it was, the show was an energetic spike in a generally flat year and WCHS was at something of a crossroads. When John arrived, the board was considering one of three options: maintain the status quo; merge with a compatible organization or; as improbably ambitious as it must have sounded, “develop a horticulture center in an accessible location.” The rest, as they say, is history.

Only thirty-two in 1984, John promoted the bolder and far more adventurous path of moving WCHS out of Worcester and establishing Tower Hill Botanic Garden in Boylston. Clearly, he was a shrewdly enlightened, not just a “benign,” dictator. He had the good sense and imagination to engage and, herein, generously credit a diverse cast of supporters—loyal staff, national experts, local philanthropists—to help him create what has become one of the most appealing horticultural institutions in the Northeast. Alexander Pope famously advised the Earl of Burlington on gardens for his newly built Chiswick House to “Consult the genius of the place.” John did just that, not only with his plans for the remarkable Boylston property with its majestic view of Mt. Wachusett, but also through his deft engagement of people and institutions throughout Worcester County itself and beyond. Thanks to John’s leadership, attentiveness to detail and overall vision, WCHS did not so much leave Worcester as it helped reconnect the second largest city in New England with its ecologically essential and aesthetically inspiring countryside.

In doing so, he used fifty years as his planning horizon—a remarkable perspective for a youthful activist. John Trexler’s accomplishments in developing Tower Hill bring to mind an observation made in 1876 by another local horticultural luminary, Edward Winslow Lincoln, who, with his cousin Stephen Salisbury III, developed the Worcester park system: “It is given unto men to see visions and to dream dreams; yet it is vouchsafed to few to behold their realization.”

Tower Hill: The First Twenty-Five Years is a wonderful account of a dream realized—an account that will appeal to anyone who visits Tower Hill, but even more importantly, a story that should inspire anyone with the imagination and commitment to re-invigorate and make current a venerable institution at an existential crossroad.

Jock Herron

Instructor in Architecture

Collaborative Design Engineering

Harvard Graduate School of Design

Cambridge, MA

TOWER HILL

The First Twenty-five Years

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

A medley of extemporanea;

And love is a thing that can never go wrong;

And I am Marie of Romania.

—Dorothy Parker, Not So Deep as a Well (1937)