Excerpt from:
Lexington's Botanic Garden
Why are there planting beds on a wooded hillsidel?
By Meg Muckenhoupt, Patch Poster | Sep 10, 2010 

From 1929 to 1950, Professor Stephen Hamblin of Harvard University's School of Landscape Architecture ran a botanic garden on 11 acres including the hillside – and he perpetuated one. In 1930, Harvard decided that the Harvard Botanic Garden (at the corner of Garden and Linnean Streets in Cambridge, natch) should place "more emphasis placed on the scientific side and less on the horticultural side," and plans called for "a reduction to a minimum of the cultivation of decorative plants such as horticultural forms and hybrids, double roses, fancy tulips and other artificial varieties."

Professor Hamblin, who had been the director of Harvard's botanic Garden disagreed. He saw gardening as the desire to collaborate with nature to create order and beauty, and he believed that decorative plants – especially New England natives – ought to be increased, not reduced. In 1930-31, Hamblin went about transplanting as many of them as he could to the hillside by Diamond Middle School, behind what was to become Lexington Gardens (and is now a building site).

The purpose of the Lexington Botanical Garden was "To grow, test, and display all hardy herbaceous plants." That was the motto of the biweekly Lexington Leaflets Hamblin published from 1931 to '49. These methodical, almost dogged publications – all available in the Cary Library Lexington Room – feature instructions on the intricacies of bog plants, late-blooming perennials and hundreds of other botanical topics. In one early issue, after spending several hundred words describing various Erythroniums, he writes, "By this time, if you have followed this text carefully you are quite dizzy mentally for the 20 or more species do make a terrible tangle."

Unfortunately, Hamblin's Leaflets feature few photos and even fewer descriptions of what was actually growing on those terraces. There are a few enticing clues, such as this paragraph from the first issue of Lexington Leaflets in 1931: "Early blooming wild flowers begin in our woods with Hepatica, two species. These are under the big oak at the corner of the border on Hancock Street. Some day there will be a big patch of them here, for they will like the soil and deep summer shade." I didn't see any – but I didn't locate the big oak tree, either, and Hepatica isn't terribly obvious outside of early spring.

In the end, Hamblin's beauty prevailed. In 1948, he donated more than 100 "old fashion roses" to Harvard's botanical collection at the Arnold Arboretum. The following year, he stopped publishing the Leaflets, dismantled the Lexington Botanic Garden and transplanted what he could to his house on the Cape in Marston Mills. A local farmer took over the flat lands until the site was purchased for a garden center in 1971. And the trees grew up over what was his hillside garden.