The Duck Pond, Beaver Brook.
The Duck Pond, where the ancient Waverly Oaks once roamed.
The trees you see here are more than 100 years old, but they are mere children compared to their parents, the ancient oaks that were between 500 and 1000 years old, a rare stand of 32 white oaks that were in this neighborhood.
People from all over the United States came to see these trees. Storms and old age forced the grandparents and parents of these trees to be removed by 1920.
You can see the beauty in this preserve, Beaverbrook Reservation, which was the first state preserve in the U.S., and was created to protect the Waverly Oaks.
The Duck Pond is man-made and was built in 1888.
A small sign in the background of some of these photos states that it is The Duck Pond, Beaverbrook Reservation.
Down the road a bit is the Mill Pond, which was a mill.
There is the Mill Stone in this pond, as well.
I have been coming to this pond regularly for years.
This is across the street from McLean Hospital, Harvard University's psychiatric institution, equally old as the ancient oaks.
Originally a sanitarium but early on it became a place of rest for the psychologically afflicted, believing that a rest in the country would help such souls.
Frederick Law Olmstead, America's first landscape architect, who designed Boston's Emerald Necklace system of open spaces, plus Concord Cemetery, Mount Royal Park in Montreal, the Mall in Washington, New York's Central Park, also spent his last days at McLean.
James Taylor and his two siblings went here, and were part of the movement that became music therapy, as he would play his guitar.
He and Kate and Livingston were part of the generation of souls whose parents did not understand them, and so put them in these um, hospitals, to um, straighten them out.
The uptight, white, anglo-saxon protestant world of days gone by, had strict codes of, well, um., everything.
Also A Girl, Interrupted, lived in Belmont and went to McLean Hospital.
Such episodes are tragi-comic now, considering that a failure to understand how someone could have creative bents instead of wanting to fit into the WASP mold, but it was a dark time in the not-so distant past.
\
The photos below were last May.
This wooden structure, a shelter, was built before 1920, because it is featured in a town photo, circa 1920, when this was a picnic area for people who had stopped to see the Waverly Oaks.
It is now a spray pool.
I took this at a stoplight, into the sun and shadow.
We had a very late blooming this year.
In 2010, the flowering trees, the Dogwood and Magnolia were in full bloom by April 18th, but this year, the 2011 snow storms, AKA The Montreal Express, quelled the early bloom.
