Home & Garden
Free Garden Tours Of Portsmouth's Prescott Park Held On Fridays
Staffers from the city's Portsmouth Parks and Greenery Department will enlighten attendees about specific plants and how they are cared for.
PORTSMOUTH, NH — The city of Portsmouth Parks and Greenery Department is inviting the public to join members of its gardening team for free weekly tours on Friday.
The tours are held at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. and are guided by Vincent Brigagliano, Sean Fagan, and Erin Finken. Each tour lasts about an hour.
The tours start at the Liberty Pole on Marcy Street. They explore the extensive garden beds of the South Lawn and the formal garden planted around the anchor at the end of Prescott Park, closest to the river. Staffers will be able to answer questions, identify plants, and explain plant selection and care.
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“The gardens of Prescott Park serve the purpose of being both beautiful and educational,” Corin Hallowell, the parks and greenery foreman for the city, said. “We are happy to identify the plants and flowers, so visitors who might want to choose something similar for their own gardens know what they are — and we are always happy to share more information. The Friday tours are an ideal way for residents and visitors to get answers to their questions about the gardens in the Park.”
According to the city, the park was created when the Prescott Sisters purchased the waterfront acreage in the 1930s and willed it to the city in 1954 for public enjoyment. In 1975, at the suggestion of then-Park Supervisor Michael Warhurst, the park's trustees agreed to invite UNH to move its All-American Selections Program trial gardens from Madbury to Prescott Park, and created 40 formal garden beds on the South Lawn of Prescott Park.
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The formal association with the All-American Selections Program ended about a decade ago. Still, the city continued to purchase All-American Selections seeds and had the plants grown out in the greenhouses of UNH.
Those trial gardens, planted with “a living catalog of flowers,” were designed to study which varieties of specific ornamental plants performed best in the Seacoast environment.
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