Boston Harbor's Nut Island blooms in summer

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(This is Sue Scheible's 'A Good Age' column for June 26, 2007.)

The third annual Nut Island Wildflower Festival takes place in Quincy -- an event that would have been considered a nutty idea 20 years ago before the closing of the former sewage treatment plant. The event celebrates the start of a long season of beautiful wildflowers and other native plants and grasses at the site, which reopened in 1999 as a park and headworks. The new building pumps the sewage through a pipe to Deer Island for treatment, after screening out debris.
"In the late '80s, there was a huge treatment plant at Nut Island with open sewage pools and it looked like a place you'd film a Clint Eastwood movie," recalls Mary Smith of Quincy, a landscape architect who designed the renovation of the 14-acre property at the tip of Houghs Neck.
In the mid-1980s, Mary Smith Associates won the contract to grade, shape the hills and lay out pathways around the new headworks. Smith paid a visit to the site to see the possibilities.
"I went down there with one of my children in a stroller and thought, 'This is really awful. No one would want to go here on purpose,'" she said.
Smith, now a Quincy city planner, was inspired by Frederick Law Olmsted, the 19th-century landscape architect who designed many well-known urban parks, including the Emerald Necklace in Boston and World's End in Hingham.
"Nut Island is a large area and to try to maintain it as a lawn didn't make sense," she said. "Looking at a map, I thought that Houghs Neck is at the southern end of what Olmsted had envisioned as the complete Emerald Necklace. We cooked up the idea for the wildflowers and it fit in with what Olmsted did at World's End."
She chose a mixture native to the region -- 20 species including Queen Anne's lace, lupine, coreopsis, dianthus, Indian paint brush, and gaillardia.
"I remember thinking, 'This is going to be gorgeous,'" she said.
The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, created as part of a court-ordered cleanup of Boston Harbor, dismantled the old Nut Island treatment plant, which had discharged sewage wastewater into Quincy Bay. In July 1998, the new headworks opened and in September 1999, the park opened to the public. Part of the Harbor Islands National Park, it is owned and managed by the state water authority.
In 2004, Houghs Neck residents, Lois Murphy and Norma Jane Langford started the wildflower festival. It is a fundraiser for the Houghs Neck Garden Club, which does community beautification.
At 9:30 a.m. Saturday, June 30, there will be a breakfast in the community room at the headworks with casseroles and homemade baked goods, followed by a slide show at 10:30 a.m. on the different wildflowers. At 11 a.m., naturalist Tom Palmer will lead a walking tour of the island. Photographs by Joe Poggi will be on display.
Murphy, 75, works from June through September for the water resources authority as a summer intern, caring for the landscape.
It is a natural fit. Her association with Nut Island and her love for its natural beauty run deep. She grew up just around the corner, on Great Hill, and now she lives a stone's throw away in a converted summer cottage where she and her late husband, former Quincy Police Capt. William Murphy, raised their four children.
From her spacious yard, family room and rear deck, she looks out on the island and keeps watch over the wildlife.
"The birds absolutely love it -- the finches nest on Peddocks Island and come here to feed and feed and go back to their nests," she said.
A friendly and vigorous senior, Murphy is often at work by 7 a.m. raking, pruning, edging and hauling branches to the trash bin. This is her seventh year on the job, and Smith describes her as "truly altruistic -- so determined to make a place really beautiful for everyone."
In the 1980s, Murphy and other neighborhood activists played a key role in preserving the site as a park with the Nut Island Citizens Advisory Commitee. Langford, 74, moved to Houghs Neck from Whitman in the early 1990s because she wanted "a garden and a view." She still teaches an online communications course at Northeastern University.
They turned their mutual passion for the park into a festival. The first year, 41 members of the West Bridgewater Garden Club arrived by bus.


"Lois and her crew are instrumental in keeping the island the way we designed it," Smith says. "If it weren't for her, I think the men who like to mow might have flattened it."
Eight years after the reopening, Smith likes to walk the island pathways and watch people enjoying it.
"I feel a bit as if I wrote a play and now all the people coming here to enjoy the park are in it," she said.
Murphy finds solace in the setting and the work. Her husband died in 2005 and two of her four children -- Kevin and Pamela -- also have died. There is a memorial bench dedicated to Kevin in the park. Her other daughter, Laura, lives in New York, and son William III lives in New Zealand.
"The giving back to the community keeps my spirits up," she said. "The Bible has a saying, 'Bloom where you are planted.' I walk down there at 7 a.m. and say, 'What more could I ask for than to have the opportunity to do this at this point in my life?"
Tickets to the festival cost $10, including breakfast, and can be purchased from Gay Carbonneau at 617-472-2800 or at the park on Saturday. Embed this video
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