This micro is in the beautiful gardens beside the charming Bell Tower on Eel Pond harbor in Woods Hole. The hide is different than the original (archived) listing, so if you've found it before, you can now find it again! Please conduct your search carefully and be mindful of the plantings.
This is a nice short stop on your way to the ferry, fun for kids, and a pretty place for picture taking.
The biggest challenge for this cache will be finding parking in Woods Hole. There are a few spaces near the park at the end of Bell Tower Lane. Although the gardens are wheelchair accessible, the hide itself is not.
About the Gardens
St Joseph Church dates to 1882, built on land donated by Joseph Story Fay to serve the local Irish Catholic immigrants, many of whom were his employees. The Fays were the first summer residents of Woods Hole, and in 1918 also gave this 190'x25' parcel adjoining Eel Pond.
The bell tower and gardens were funded a decade later by another summer resident, Frances Crane Lillie. Mrs Lillie was a Chicago native who first came to Woods Hole in 1894 as a student at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL). Her teacher, whom she married the following year, was Frank R Lillie – later the Director of MBL and founder of the world-famous Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).
Mrs Lillie's gifts to St Joseph Church followed her conversion to Catholicism in the early 1920's. Architect Charles Coolidge (who had built MBL's Lillie Auditorium a few years earlier) designed the bell tower.
The tower is 48 feet tall and was constructed in 1929 of West Falmouth pink granite. Mrs Lillie's brother-in-law supervised the project, and her sisters-in-law donated the bronze bells. The shorter round structure is an oratory (prayer room) which is opened daily in the summer. A ladder leads up inside the tower but this is closed to the public.
The tower is properly called the Angelus Tower because it rings the angelus hours at 7am, noon, and 6pm each day. The two bells are actually chimes, as they remain stationary while struck with an external hammer via an electric signal. Mrs Lillie named the bells after two eminent Catholic biologists: (Gregor) Mendel and (Louis) Pasteur. She hoped their thrice-daily chiming would remind biologists at the local laboratories that science and religion must "work together to understand the mysteries of the universe."
Mrs Lillie was also an art lover who favored a contemporary style. The Italian sculptor Alfeo Faggi created a number of religious pieces for her, including the bronze doors of the oratory (featuring six scenes from the life of St Joseph), the bronze cross atop its roof, and the small "Stations of the Cross" inside (these are his working models for the 14 full-size panels he prepared for her Chicago church). The garden's 95-year-old central statue "The Virgin" is by V.M.S. Hannell. This cast concrete sculpture has a smooth-edged form to resist weathering in the harsh seaside conditions.
The garden on the west side of the bell tower is the Joseph Garden, while the cross-shaped garden to the east is the Mary Garden. Mary Gardens were popular in Europe during medieval times, being filled with flowers named after the Virgin Mary (e.g. marigold, Lady's mantle, Madonna lily – look inside the gray box in the garden for the planting schematic). This plot in Woods Hole was the first Mary Garden in America and inspired an ongoing movement to establish many others.
The garden was first planted in 1932. Mrs Lillie worked with a Chicago horticulturist friend and with Boston landscape architect Dorothea Harrison (the daughter of an MBL scientist) to research traditional English monastic gardens and adjust the selections to suit Cape Cod's wet, windy climate. The plan was completed 5 years later, just in time to be completely washed away by the devastating Hurricane of 1938. The garden was replanted on a simpler scale but again damaged by hurricanes in 1944 and 1954. It was not fully restored to the "Final" 1937 plan until its 50th Jubilee and St Joseph's centennial in 1982.
The garden is now tended by volunteers from the church and has been expanded with spring-blooming flowers – being a summer resident, Mrs Lillie did not include any!