Welcome Pollinators to Your Garden This Spring

A bee rests on a dahlia in the Community Garden at Davis-Douglas Farm.

By Marilynn Atterbury, Key Volunteer

With the first day of spring right around the corner, green thumbs across Southeastern Massachusetts are twiddling with excitement. Gardeners are already dreaming of the flowers and produce that will revitalize their eyes, noses, and tongues after a long, dark winter.

But in early spring, protect the pollinators that sustain your garden and local ecosystem by leaving busyness to the bees. Believe it or not, the best thing you can do for your pollinator garden right now is nothing at all!

Many pollinators, especially bees and butterflies, spend the winter nestled in garden debris. If you rake up those pesky leaves too soon, you will literally be throwing away this year’s pollinators. Wait until the weather warms to a consistent 50 degrees—usually in late March or early April—for your garden clean-up.

Another early-spring tip: bees wake up hungry! So, make sure to plant early-blooming flowers, such as bleeding heart, lungwort, or ajuga. Even a little sugar water will help.

And don’t forget a water source: a shallow dish with flat rocks (for butterfly perching habitat) will do nicely.

Follow these simple tips this spring, and soon your gardens will be alive with pollinators!

Marilynn (center) helps two high school students restore the Community Garden during Summer of Service.

Marilynn is a primary gardener at Davis-Douglas Farm, and the founder of our pollinator garden. She is also a Wildlands board member, Adopt-a-Preserve lead volunteer, event decorator, and more! Say hello the next time you visit our Plymouth headquarters.

Human History of Wildlands: Great Neck Conservation Area

Key Volunteer Skip Stuck guides volunteers through Great Neck Conservation Area during a January 2024 trail work day.

By Skip Stuck, Key Volunteer 

In 2016, as a new Adopt-a-Preserve volunteer, I was introduced to Great Neck Conservation Area by Wildlands’ Director of Field Operations, Erik Boyer. I was immediately struck by the diversity and beauty of the place. But shortly after beginning our walk-through, we got lost, something we continued to do for the rest of the day. Even though Wildlands had owned the property for over 40 years, little had been done to develop a navigable trail system. Sure, there were trails, but a spaghetti hodgepodge of them. Neighbors had created many trails beginning at their property lines and ending God-knows-where. These trails ran up driveways, across private land, and within eyesight of homes and backyards. 

It was quite a jigsaw puzzle. We contacted the New England Forestry Foundation and received permission to link our trails through their property. With Erik’s permission and support from neighbors (thank you, Butch!), we set out to remap the preserve, closing some trails and opening others to create a course that would allow visitors to enjoy all that Great Neck had to offer. Through trial by fire, I learned how to build and maintain eco-conscious trails. Several months and a lot of work later, the puzzle came together, and as access to its beauty opened, Great Neck came alive for me. 

We hope it does for you, too. 

One quick note: because Great Neck Conservation Area comprises several historically independent parcels, distilling the area’s disjointed recent history into a unified narrative proved difficult. Many more stories could be told than you will find here. If you or someone you know has information about Great Neck’s past, we would love to hear from you! Share your insight (and/or photos!) by emailing Communications Coordinator Thomas Patti at tpatti@wildlandstrust.org. 

Native American Era

• Glacial history is carved into the landscape of the Great Neck (AKA Indian Neck) region of Wareham. Drumlins, kettle ponds, glacial rocks, and sandy shoreline all had something to offer to Native Americans, who utilized the area's resources for thousands of years. The many arrowheads, tomahawks, and other artifacts found here attest to its popularity among Native peoples. The conservation area’s inlets, the Crooked River from the north and Mink Cove from the south, were used for shellfishing and fish weirs. The forested hillsides were used for hunting, and lowlands for farming. 

• In the early 1600s, the area was inhabited by the Nepinnae Ketit band, known to the English settlers as the Agawam Indians. 

Colonial Era  

The original sitting room in the 1683 Burgess House. By Bill Whelan for Wareham Week.

• The English began to settle this area in the 1630s. In 1666, the Plymouth Colony bought an 8,000-acre tract of land known as the Agawam Purchase from the Native Americans. In 1682, Plymouth sold the property to seven settlers in the area that would become Wareham. 

• Some of Wareham's earliest English settlements were on Great Neck, including the Burgess House (circa 1680), the oldest house in Wareham. 

1700s  

• English settlers cleared much of the land for agriculture, with the lowlands devoted to vegetables and the rocky glacial uplands converted to pastures for cattle and sheep. Swamps and bogs were logged for the stands of valuable white cedar trees that grew there. Salt hay was an important resource from the surrounding marshes. Iron and charcoal were mined from bogs and woodlands, all to be smelted in the several local mills. 

1800s 

• The Crooked River that flowed through the property was dammed in at least two places, creating a tidal area, a freshwater marsh (Jack's Marsh) that was ultimately converted to a cranberry bog, and a freshwater pond (Swan Pond) to irrigate the bog.  

• In the later 19th century, though cranberries continued to be grown, the early English settlement began to give way to a summer community. In 1880, the Weld and Minot families began to acquire smaller parcels in the area. 

1900s 

• By 1900, the Welds and Minots owned most of the property on Great Neck. Among other things, they developed their own golf course, now known as Little Harbor Golf Course, one of the first in the country.  

• In 1909, the independently owned cranberry bogs were consolidated to become the United Cranberry Company. 

• In 1920, parts of the Weld and Minot land were planted with red pine and Norway spruce in hopes of selling the timber. The red pine eventually died due to a root virus. However, the spruce did well and still grows wild on Great Neck. 

Great Neck Conservation Area 

• In 1969, Grace Minot Peirce and John Wylde donated 53 acres of the property to The Nature Conservancy on the condition that they would only hold it until a local conservation group could assume responsibility. In 1975, the land was deeded to Wildlands Trust. The Saltonstall family donated their ~60-acre property northwest of Mink Cove to the New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF). 

• In 1979, Wildlands also took ownership of the 26-acre Mink Cove-Elkins property. 

• In the 1990s, NEFF approved Wildlands’ plans to build hiking trails through their property, thus completing a 4-mile trail system and linking all the properties. 

Learn more: 

To learn more about Great Neck’s human history, visit our conservation area to find evidence for yourself of its Indigenous, colonial, and agricultural past. Also, explore the resources we consulted for this piece: 

• Visit wildlandstrust.org/events to find a schedule of group hikes and volunteer opportunities at Great Neck and other Wildlands Trust preserves. 

• Read our property description: wildlandstrust.org/great-neck-conservation-area 

• "History of Wareham.” Town of Wareham website. 

• "A Resource Inventory and Management Plan for the Minot-Weld Conservancy and the Mink Cove-Elkins Reservation." Caroline Norden, Wildlands Trust, 1986. 

• “The Welds of Harvard Yard: History Through a Family Lens.” Craig Lambert in Harvard Magazine, 1998. 

Remembering Herb Emilson

Center: Herb Emilson. Left: Herb’s daughter, Karen McArdle. Right: Wildlands President Karen Grey. Photo by Drew Lederman.

By Karen Grey, Wildlands President

When Herb Emilson retired in 1995 as President and Chairman of the Colonial Group, he found a second career: helping others and supporting the organizations that strive to improve people’s lives. On the South Shore of Massachusetts, where Herb and his wife Paulie focused much of their philanthropy, the name Emilson is synonymous with giving.  

However, it was more than simply “giving” that motivated Herb. Having befriended and worked alongside the father of modern business management, Peter Drucker, Herb was driven to help non-profit organizations improve their management and functionality. He had a knack for sniffing out solid organizations that needed a boost, both from his philanthropy and his business acumen. When Herb wrote you a check, he believed in you and your organization. 

Wildlands Trust was honored to be among the cadre of groups the Emilsons supported over the years. Their generosity protected several parcels of conservation land, including Willow Brook Farm, one of Wildlands’ most important ecological treasures. Herb died last month, two days shy of his 95th birthday, but not before being honored in Wildlands’ anniversary book, 50 Remarkable Years, 50 Remarkable People. We will miss him very much.

---

Read more about the Emilsons’ impact on regional land conservation in our 50th anniversary blog series, “The Next Remarkable Chapter”: click here. Purchase our anniversary book, 50 Remarkable Years, 50 Remarkable People, at wildlandstrust.org/shop50.

Human History of Wildlands: Shifting Lots Preserve

Ellisville men set out with their boats for a day of sea mossing, circa 1969. Sea mossing was a rite of passage for many Ellisville teenagers. Photo courtesy of Roger Janson, via Friends of Ellisville Marsh.

By Skip Stuck, Wildlands Key Volunteer

You probably would not be reading this if you were not already familiar with Wildlands Trust, its mission, the properties it protects, and the value of wild places in Southeastern Massachusetts. 

Interestingly, where we live, "wild" does not mean untouched by human hands. Just as important as our region’s natural history—our wildlife, forests, seashores, rivers, and ponds—is its human history, crafted by the many hands that have touched and shaped this special place. In fact, there are few if any places in America that offer a richer human history than right here in Southeastern Massachusetts. 

Today, each of Wildlands’ wild places has had many other lives—as hunting grounds, farms, villages, and homes, stewarded, inhabited, and explored by diverse groups ranging from Native Americans to settlers from around the world. With a well-trained eye, much can be learned about these preserves’ natural and human history from their present-day landscapes—the plant and animal life, the geology, the relics of historic land use. But missing from this picture are many of the human stories that give these lands color and context. To this end, we at Wildlands hope to increase our understanding of the human history of the landscapes we protect. 

Following, you will find a brief history of one important property, Shifting Lots Preserve in the Ellisville village of Plymouth. This account is far from exhaustive; it is a living document that we will update as we receive more information from the community. This is the first of hopefully many entries in a series about the human history of Wildlands preserves. 

Al Marsh (lower right) and his father Percy Marsh (center) working with the lobster cars in Ellisville Marsh in the 1940s. Photo courtesy of the Marsh family, via Friends of Ellisville Marsh. Read more about Al’s story in his 2020 account, “Ellisville History,” linked in the “Learn More” section below.

We need your help! We will soon be reaching out to volunteer trail monitors, property abutters, local historians, and others to paint a more complete picture of our cherished lands’ storied pasts. If you have stories to share about a Wildlands preserve, please contact Communications Coordinator Thomas Patti at tpatti@wildlandstrust.org. 

Stay tuned...

---

A Brief History of Ellisville harbor and Shifting Lots 

Ellisville Harbor has been coveted for many uses by many parties (human and otherwise) dating back to pre-colonial times. As a result, conflict is a recurring theme of the area’s history, with environmental degradation frequently among the collateral damage. Protection efforts by state, nonprofit, and volunteer groups over the past three decades have begun to restore the area to its original scenic and ecological beauty. 

1600s 

• For hundreds of years, the area was seasonally used by members of the Wampanoag tribe for shellfishing, farming, and hunting waterfowl. In the 1620s, Europeans arrived and settled the harbor area. 

• Ellisville Harbor was named after Lt. John Ellis, Commander of the Sandwich Militia, who was killed in King Philip's War. Also known as Harlow's Landing, Ellisville was the family's homestead for over 250 years. 

• Farmers and fishermen settled the natural harbor to grow salt hay, tend sheep and cattle, and harvest codfish, lobsters, and herring from the sea. 

• A natural spring that fed into the bay is still in use today. 

1700s and 1800s 

• Saltmarsh Lane was a main road north to Boston. A 1711 inn, now a private home, welcomed wayfarers including Henry David Thoreau. 

• Farming and fishing continued as the area became more settled. 

• For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, local fishing families also harvested Irish moss, a seaweed with uses in the production of toothpaste, yogurt, chocolate, and more. It was trucked from Ellisville to Scituate, the American hub of the Irish moss industry, to be processed.   

• With more use, Elllisville Harbor saw more silting in, and despite being protected by a barrier beach, periodic dredging began. 

Lobster boats moored along the Ellisville channel. Photo courtesy of Don Maricle, via Friends of Ellisville Marsh.

1900s 

• By 1900, several significant changes occurred. Plymouth and Cape Cod were becoming vacation destinations. While traditional uses continued until the mid-1900s, with the last lobstering and moss boats moving out in the early 1980s, summer visitors were increasingly attracted to the undeveloped barrier beaches. Overuse by off-road vehicles resulted in increased beach damage and littering, troubling the year-round residents. 

• In addition, the digging of the nearby Cape Cod Canal in the early 1900s changed the tidal patterns and expanded the barrier beach, often closing off the harbor outlet and increasing silting, thus requiring a breakwater. The harbor mouth moved 0.5 miles south. 

• The Ellisville Harbor area was designated an Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) by the Massachusetts Secretary of Environmental Affairs in 1980.   

• In 1991, an event that came to be known as the “Perfect Storm” closed the harbor outlet altogether, requiring the resumption of dredging. (This happened again in 2005.) 

• Also in 1991, the state purchased the Harlow property and created Ellisville Harbor State Park on the north side of the harbor. 

2000s      

• The south side of the marsh and harbor remained unprotected from development until 2003, when it was donated to Wildlands Trust and named the Shifting Lots Preserve. 

• Recognizing the importance of Ellisville harbor for nesting and the rearing of endangered birds and wildlife, regulations for preserve access and use were soon implemented. 

• In 2009, a History Channel documentary segment portraying the 1620 landing of the Pilgrims used Shifting Lots as one of its filming locations. 

Learn More: 

To learn more about the history, ecology, and importance of Shifting Lots and Ellisville Harbor, take time to visit and experience it for yourself. Also, see these resources: 

• Visit wildlandstrust.org/events to find a schedule of group hikes and volunteer opportunities at Shifting Lots and other Wildlands Trust preserves 

• Our property description at wildlandstrust.org/shifting-lots-preserve 

• The Friends of Ellisville Marsh at ellisvillemarsh.org 

• Rescuing Ellisville Marsh: The Long Fight to Restore Lost Connections by Eric P. Cody, founder of the Friends of Ellisville Marsh

• “Ellisville History” by Albert Marsh, 2020. Shared with permission from the Estate of Albert B. Marsh.

Wildlands Pilots Volunteer Training Series

Programs at the Stewardship Training Center will prepare entry-level volunteers to contribute to local conservation.

By Thomas Patti, Communications Coordinator

Volunteers donate their time, energy, knowledge, and skills to conservation initiatives across the state. Investing in their generosity is one of the most efficient and effective ways to invest in our natural and scenic lands. Who will lend these helping hands a helping hand? 

Wildlands Trust’s Stewardship Training Center aims to do just that—equip volunteers with the confidence and know-how they need to care for the conservation lands they cherish, and then connect them with opportunities to put those skills to work. 

Last July, Wildlands convened a focus group of 12 municipal conservation professionals to assess training needs for local volunteers. The consensus was clear: volunteers bring a wide range of skill sets to land stewardship projects. Developing a standardized training program would not only build cities and towns’ stewardship capacity, but also help them evaluate that capacity and plan projects accordingly.  

“Over a quarter of Massachusetts is protected conservation land, and we need to grow our capacity to care for it,” said Wildlands President Karen Grey. “A corps of committed volunteers can play a significant role, which is why we’re offering programming at the Stewardship Training Center to create a critical mass of trained volunteers to help municipalities and land trusts steward their properties.” 

Enter Wildlands’ Tier 1 Volunteer Training Series, a pilot program this winter and spring at the Stewardship Training Center. After completing four two-hour modules, volunteers will return to the trails with proficiency in core stewardship areas: 

• Feb. 24: Basic First Aid & CPR 

• Mar. 7: Public Advocacy & Challenges 

• Apr. 18: Hand Tool Use & Maintenance 

• May 9: Trail Monitoring & Maintenance 

Except for Basic First Aid & CPR, these programs are free to all current and prospective volunteers. No experience is required. Volunteers are strongly encouraged to attend all four modules and receive Tier 1 certification, detailing the skills they learned from experienced Wildlands staff and partners. Wildlands will offer these modules again in the future. 

"There is a significant community of enthusiastic volunteers just waiting for us to bring them in on advancing local and regional land conservation,” said Wildlands volunteer Rob MacDonald, who played a key role in the conception of these programs. “The Tier 1 Training Series will help connect this base to towns, cities, and nonprofits that need their help.” 

All current and interested land stewardship volunteers are welcome. In addition to skill-building, these sessions will offer an avenue for physical activity, scaled to individual ability. They will also introduce trainees to a tight-knit community of like-minded peers and to new ways to get involved with local conservation efforts. 

To learn more about the Tier 1 Volunteer Training Series and other opportunities at the Stewardship Training Center, visit wildlandstrust.org/training or contact Stewardship Programs Manager Zoë Smiarowski at trainingcenter@wildlandstrust.org.