The Jeremiah Lee Mansion hosted a party in its garden called Cultivating History for children over the weekend.
Marblehead Museum Executive Director Lauren McCormack said every activity at the party had an ecological or historical connection to Marblehead.
The event included a garden scavenger hunt, botanical coloring pages, seed-planting, and thaumatrope-making.
The Marblehead Garden Club helped set up the event. McCormack said the club has been caring for the museum’s garden since the 1930s.
“So everything today is based off of those plants and what they were used for, either for food or medicinal purposes,” McCormack said.
Garden Club member Beth Willard said the club tends to the garden every Tuesday morning. During the event, Willard offered seed-starting kits. In the kits were horehound and peppermint seeds, because they are both “medicinal herbs.”
“We are teaching kids how to plant seeds,” she said.
Education and Family Programs Coordinator Melissa Vickers said she coordinated the event because the museum “really want to start engaging the community more on a multi-generational level.”
She said she wants to incorporate more programming for children at the museum and shed light on the Garden Club because of all of its hard work.
“This is to shed light on that and to bring some appreciation hopefully from the community into their work on the gardens as well, as we move forward trying to incorporate whether it’s more medicinal aspects of events or more culinary sides. All of that is something that we can take from a garden,” Vickers said. “This is just kind of that first step to say, ‘Hey, come out, enjoy it.'”
