2011 Interns Make An Impression

This week our 2011 Wakefield Estate Landscape Interns will complete their sixth and final week and they have proven to be a fantastic crew. Each year, the intern crew is selected from applicants who are 16-20 year-old greater Boston area students. This year, we have a crew of ten, including students from Milton, Canton and a wide array of Boston Public High Schools including Boston Prep, Boston Latin, and John O’Bryant. In addition, this year we were especially excited to have students from Norfolk Agricultural for the first time, and a pair from UMass Amherst. This season’s interns have done exceptional work sprucing up the formal gardens and trails throughout the property, helping care for the sheep and chickens, and continuing our efforts to rehabilitate overgrown and poorly maintained areas of our collection. Our two young women from UMass Amherst served as Landscape Documentation Interns, working most of their hours with staff member Deb Merriam in her effort to develop and implement a system to properly document the estate’s horticultural collection. These students will return to Amherst to begin their sophmore year, while several of the interns are heading off to college as incoming freshmen, and the others returning to their high schools in September.