New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill

The garden is the home of the Worcester County Horticultural Society, founded in 1842 and one of the oldest active horticultural societies in the United States. For much of its history the society ran flower shows and exhibitions in the city of Worcester itself.

By the late twentieth century the society wanted a permanent home where it could build gardens rather than stage temporary shows. In 1986 it purchased Tower Hill Farm in Boylston, a former dairy farm on a breezy hilltop, and began the long work of turning fields into a botanic garden.

The gardens opened to the public in stages over the following decades, adding formal plantings, a visitors center, the glasshouses, and miles of trail. The 2021 renaming to the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill marked the institution's ambition to serve as a regional garden while keeping the Tower Hill name that generations of visitors knew.

One of the garden's quiet treasures is its collection of preserved heritage apple trees, an orchard of old American varieties that were slipping out of cultivation as commercial growing narrowed to a handful of familiar names.

The trees trace back to a preservation effort begun decades ago to save apple varieties grown in America before the twentieth century, kinds with regional histories and flavors that the modern grocery store had left behind. Grafted and replanted here, they form a living library of the apple's American past.

In bloom in spring and heavy with fruit in fall, the orchard is a reminder that a botanic garden is not only about ornament. It is also about keeping the genetic and cultural diversity of useful plants from disappearing.

The garden's glasshouses are what set it apart from a fair-weather destination. Under glass, subtropical and Mediterranean plants keep growing through the New England cold, so a January visit can mean stepping out of a snow squall into a room of camellias, citrus in fruit, and warm, humid air.

The conservatory spaces were designed to evoke the orangeries and winter gardens of earlier centuries, when wealthy estates kept tender plants alive through winter for the pleasure of green in a gray season. Here that pleasure is open to everyone.

Because the plantings are changed and refreshed through the year, the glasshouses reward return visits. What is blooming in deep winter is different from the show you will find in early spring.

Outside, the garden is a patchwork of experiences: formal beds and lawns near the visitors center, a systematic garden that arranges plants by family, sculpture set among the plantings, and woodland trails that wander off into the trees at the hill's edges.

The hilltop setting gives the place its signature view. From the terraces the land drops toward the Wachusett Reservoir, the largest water body of its kind in the region, with Mount Wachusett on the horizon beyond.

Seasonal displays anchor the calendar, from spring bulbs and summer perennials to fall color and a winter evening lights event, so the garden has a rhythm that pulls locals back again and again.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.