A message from our CEO

Summer at the Land & Garden Preserve is a season of abundance. The gardens are full, walking the carriage roads provides opportunity to connect with friends and neighbors, and the natural lands seem to invite a closer kind of attention and reflection. Everywhere across the Preserve, there is motion: visitors arriving with curiosity, staff and volunteers tending the landscapes with care, and the quiet, ongoing work of stewardship unfolding in ways both visible and unseen.

This is also the season when the many dimensions of the Preserve come together most vividly. We are at once a place of beauty, habitat, history, horticulture, learning, recreation, and reflection. A single visit might include a walk through a garden border, a conversation beside Little Long Pond, a pause beneath an old, beloved tree, or a moment of wonder at something small and wild. These experiences feel simple, but they rest on a deep foundation of planning, expertise, generosity, and care.

Our work is rooted in a belief that landscapes matter. They shape memory. They sustain ecological life. They connect generations. They teach us to observe more closely and to think beyond the present moment. At the Preserve, stewardship means honoring what has been entrusted to us while preparing thoughtfully for what comes next. It requires daily attention and long vision. It asks us to care for mature trees and young seedlings, historic gardens and changing habitats, beloved traditions and new ways of engaging the public.

I am especially grateful this season for the people who make that work possible. Our staff bring skill, discipline, and heart to these landscapes every day. Our volunteers extend our capacity and deepen our sense of community. Our board, donors, members, neighbors, and visitors all play a part in sustaining the Preserve as a place that is cared for and shared.

I hope you will spend time with us this summer. Walk slowly. Ask questions. Bring a friend. Notice what is blooming, what is changing, and what endures. The Preserve rewards that kind of attention.

And if this place matters to you, I hope you will consider supporting our work with a gift. Your generosity makes it possible for us to care for these gardens, natural lands, carriage roads, and historic landscapes with the seriousness and devotion they deserve, today and for generations to come.

With gratitude,

Patrick MacRae

Photo by Nikolai Fox

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