Heritage Museums and Gardens Trip!!

Heritage Museums and Gardens (100 acres), formerly the Heritage Plantation of Sandwich, is located at 67 Grove Street, Sandwich, Massachusetts. The public garden, with its nationally significant collection of rhododendrons hybridized by Charles Dexter, over 1,000 varieties of daylilies and extensive hosta collection, is complemented by three gallery buildings containing a world-class collection of American automobiles, American folk art and a working 1919 carousel and rare carousel figures. Heritage is open April – October 7 days a week, and on weekend evenings between Thanksgiving and Christmas for its annual Gardens Aglow festival.

The gardens’ principal interest is its collection of thousands of rhododendrons, which now include 125 of the known 145 Dexter cultivars. Their typical bloom time is from Memorial Day Weekend to mid-June. This collection has been painstakingly recovered since 1972, as Dexter’s own named cultivars had been scattered without records. Each cultivar had to be recollected from gardens and nurseries up and down the East Coast. The site was prepared in 1972, and by the summer of 1977 it included over 300 plants representing nearly 100 cultivars, with an additional 25 cultivars as small plants in the nursery. All are now mature plantings.