A History of Watertown's Life-Friendly Garden Tour

A History of Watertown's Life-Friendly Garden Tour

How One Woman's Passion Became a Watertown Tradition

by Pam Phillips and Sharon Bauer

Since being founded in 2011, Watertown Community Gardens has been committed to organic gardening. So it’s only natural that our history is intertwined with the Life-Friendly Garden Tour and its message of gardening without chemical pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers.

Each year, Watertown gardeners invite the community into their chemical-free gardens. Whether you have a community garden plot, a home garden, or look forward to having a garden some day, you are invited to visit these gardens to see the many ways plants and animals can thrive.

Over the years, the Life-Friendly Garden Tour has become a unique Watertown tradition, as we do our best to carry on the energy and enthusiasm infused into the event by its founder, Henrietta “Penny” Light.

What got her so fired up?

Henrietta's Vision

Henrietta's passion for gardening began early, with a vivid childhood memory of accompanying her mother to Woodlawn Cemetery in Dayton, Ohio. As they opened the door to the greenhouse, she was enchanted by the moist, fragrant air, heavy with the scent of gardenias. 

Years later, as a young mother herself, she immersed herself in horticulture. She joined the Belmont Garden Club and worked in the Claflin greenhouse. For a time, she worked at Hillside Gardens, where she often served as an unofficial advisor to customers seeking advice on designing their gardens. She also took adult education and horticultural courses at MassBay Community College.

Throughout that time, one thing stood out to Henrietta:

The smell of malathion [a powerful chemical insecticide] was commonplace in every greenhouse I had ever worked in.

Then her studies brought her to the Lyman Estate Greenhouses in Waltham. Henrietta learned that the greenhouse director had become ill from pesticide exposure at a previous job. In response, he had switched entirely to organic growing methods.

This was a revelation to Henrietta.

She had always been taught that insecticides were necessary to grow healthy plants. Now she saw that healthy gardens could flourish without them.

From Personal Discovery to Community Movement

By then, she had moved to Watertown and joined Watertown Citizens for Environmental Safety (WCES). Turning her passion to spreading the word about gardening without chemicals, she organized the Chemical Use Reduction Education (CURE) task force, which held various educational events. They built a three-part display, well stocked with informative pamphlets, which Henrietta handed out at many Faires on the Square. From the beginning, the Life-Friendly Garden Tour was especially inspiring to the group.

As Henrietta recalled in her invitation to the eleventh Life-Friendly Garden Tour in 2013:

The whole thing began in August of 2006. Members of CURE – “Chemical Use Reduction and Education” – were jubilating about the lushness of vegetables and flowers all around us in late summer gardens. “That is it!” we said. “Our thriving chemical-free gardens are true living proof of the success of growing without chemicals. We must show the doubters!” It was too late to successfully organize a tour that year, but we were ready in September 2007.

Seventeen planting spaces, large and small, were on that [first] tour, and some of the hosts counted seventy visitors. More than once the query was heard, “You can do this without chemicals?” We felt that at last we had an educational hook for our mission of educating about the dangers to living creatures and the environment of synthetic chemicals, and our mission of educating about life-giving alternatives.

The tour was such a success that it quickly became an annual tradition, with some years featuring both spring and fall tours.

A Growing Tradition

The theme of the tour has often been growing food and a healthy harvest, so when Watertown Community Gardens opened the Nichols Avenue Community Gardens in 2011, it was quickly included on the tour. WCG's other community gardens, past and present, have continued to be featured on the tour: Grove Street, Union Market, and Arsenal Park. WCG has proudly co-hosted the tour with CURE throughout much of its history.

By the time Henrietta was composing her 11th invitation in 2013, Belmont was preparing to hold its own chemical-free garden tour for the third time. Similar events had also sprung up in Lexington and Newton, all emphasizing life-friendly gardening.

Meanwhile, WCES became Watertown Citizens for Peace, Justice, and the Environment, and created many other working groups, including Friends of Bees. With similar concerns about pesticides, Friends of Bees have helped organize the tour since 2014.

In 2020, there was no tour due to COVID-19, but that year, the Department of Public Works (DPW) reached out to Friends of Bees for advice on planting a pollinator garden at their headquarters. In 2021, the tour was revived and included public pollinator gardens at the DPW and the Senior Center. As more pollinator gardens were created, more were added to the tour: the bumpouts near School and Boylston Streets, Knowles Delta, and the butterfly gardens at Filippello Park.

Finally, in 2022, with COVID still lingering, visitors maintained social distancing at the pollinator gardens, front yards, planting strips, and roadside gardens.

Carrying Henrietta's Legacy Forward

Over the years, both Watertown Community Gardens and the Life-Friendly Garden Tour have grown and changed. The tour has explored many ways chemical-free gardening helps living things: native bees, the Monarch butterfly, Homegrown National Park, and even owls!

But core aspects remain unchanged: We strive to educate the community and demonstrate that gardens can be both beautiful and natural.  Our garden hosts are simply Watertown gardeners who have not used chemical pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers for at least a year.

Sadly, after tending her garden nearly every day of her life, Henrietta passed away last May at the age of 95. She generously shared her garden with us for every Life-Friendly Garden Tour. In the brochure for the Spring 2012 Tour, she also shared a recollection of one of her garden’s regular visitors:

For many years, I have had sightings, in late February or March, of a fairy-like Antiopa or Mourning-Cloak butterfly, distinguished by wings of dull black with a cream-colored border. In England it is known as Camberwell Beauty. The life cycle of the butterfly is such that it goes into fall and winter as a winged adult. For such a fragile creature, how skillfully it must protect itself from the elements during a severe winter! Often the edges of the wings are ragged, testimony to some trials.

From the time of our first chemical-free garden tour in 2007, that butterfly has been a symbol to me. If such a vulnerable creature can survive a New England winter, how important is it that man be supportive, and not pollute its environs with toxins which could lessen its chances for survival!

In 2026, as Watertown Community Gardens turns fifteen years old, Friends of Bees has merged with WCG's Pollinator Pathways Committee, thus joining us under one roof to hold the 29th Life-Friendly Garden Tour this September 27, 2026.

We thank Henrietta for her vision of gardens without chemicals and the vibrant community she built.

Sources

• Interview with Henrietta Light conducted by Sharon Bauer (2013) for Henrietta’s memory of Woodland Cemetery and her quote about greenhouses.
• Typewritten draft, personal papers of Henrietta Light for the 2013 Life-Friendly Garden Tour invitation content.
• Archive of Life-Friendly Garden Tour brochures and maps (2007–present)