Boston Common and the Public Garden

There is a simple reason every first-time visitor to Boston ends up on Boston Common, whether they planned to or not: the city has been gathering here since before there was a United States. Boston Common was set aside in 1634, when the town's freeholders bought the Shawmut Peninsula from the Reverend William Blackstone and reserved part of it as a training field and common pasture. That makes it the oldest public park in the country, and it has been public ground ever since — fifty acres in the heart of downtown, bounded by Tremont, Park, Beacon, Charles, and Boylston Streets, with the golden dome of the Massachusetts State House rising over its northern edge.

The Common's early life was working life, not leisure. Cows grazed here — famously, the town later limited each household to a set number of animals on the ground — and the local militia drilled on the training field. In the years before the Revolution, British troops camped on the Common, and it was from here that redcoats marched out toward Lexington and Concord in April 1775. The ground has also carried darker chapters: public punishments and executions took place here in the colonial era, including the hanging of the Quaker martyr Mary Dyer in 1660, and the park's long history as a place of protest runs from abolitionist rallies to civil rights marches and the demonstrations of our own time. Few parks in America have seen so much of the country's story on one patch of grass.

By the nineteenth century the Common was becoming the people's park we recognize today: tree-lined malls, promenades, fountains, and monuments, maintained for strolling rather than grazing. The Brewer Fountain, a bronze copy of a Paris original, has splashed near the Park Street corner since 1868. The Parkman Bandstand, on the Tremont Street side, hosts concerts and rallies. And at the Beacon Street edge stands the monument every Freedom Trail walker meets first: Augustus Saint-Gaudens' bronze relief of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the Black regiment of the Civil War, unveiled in 1897 and regarded as one of the great American public sculptures.

Walk the Common's paths and the monuments do the storytelling. The tallest is the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, a 126-foot granite column on the park's highest ground, dedicated in 1877 to the men of Boston who died in the Civil War. It was designed by the Boston sculptor Martin Milmore, and its base carries four bronze statues — Army, Navy, Peace, and History — along with bas-reliefs of soldiers departing for war and returning home. Its inscription reads, in part, that the grateful city built it "that their example may speak to coming generations." It is one of the grandest Civil War monuments in New England, and it rewards a slow walk around its base.

At the Common's eastern end, near Beacon Street, lies the Central Burying Ground, established in 1756, where generations of Bostonians rest, including the painter Gilbert Stuart and the composer William Billings. And at the park's center is Frog Pond, the shallow basin that has been the Common's playground for generations. In warm months it is a spray pool where children wade; in winter it becomes a skating rink, with a carousel turning nearby. The pond's name reaches back to the Common's marshy origins, and its present-day life — ice skates in January, splashing toddlers in July — is as good a picture as any of what a city park is for.

The Common is also where the Freedom Trail begins. The red-brick line starts at the Boston Common Visitor Center on Tremont Street and leads walkers across the park toward the State House and the Park Street Church. Standing at the trail's start, with the Common's elms overhead and downtown rising on every side, is the right way to begin any first visit to Boston: the city introduces itself here, on ground it has shared for almost four hundred years.

Cross Charles Street and the mood changes. The Public Garden, twenty-four acres of formally landscaped ground, was established in 1837, when the philanthropist Horace Gray petitioned to turn a marshy, unfinished piece of the city's new landfill into the first public botanical garden in the United States. Where the Common is open and unstructured — lawns, ballfields, rally grounds — the Garden is composed: winding paths, flower beds replanted with the seasons, weeping willows along the water, and a small lagoon at its center. It was designed in the manner of an English landscape garden, and it remains the most manicured, most photographed green space in Boston.

The Garden's plantings are its main event. Beds along the central walkway rotate through the year — tulips in spring, roses and annuals in summer, chrysanthemums in fall — and the tree collection mixes native and exotic species, from American elms to dawn redwoods and a single California redwood. The Garden's statues are part of the planting, in a sense: the equestrian statue of George Washington, sculpted by Thomas Ball and unveiled in 1869, commands the Arlington Street entrance, while the Ether Monument, commemorating the first public use of ether as an anesthetic, stands near the Arlington Street gate. In 1987 the Garden gained its most beloved residents: Nancy Schön's bronze family from Robert McCloskey's 1941 children's book "Make Way for Ducklings" — Mrs. Mallard and her eight ducklings, installed near the Beacon and Charles Streets corner, where children climb on them daily and Bostonians dress them for holidays.

Crossing the lagoon is the Garden's other icon: the footbridge, designed by William Gibbons Preston and opened in 1867, once the world's shortest functioning suspension bridge. Its graceful curve is the Garden's most photographed silhouette, and it frames the view every visitor wants: the lagoon below, the willows, and the city beyond.

No visit to the Garden is complete without the Swan Boats. They have operated on the lagoon since 1877, when the shipbuilder Robert Paget launched the first of them, inspired by the swan boat in Wagner's opera "Lohengrin." The boats are pedal-powered, each carrying passengers in a bench seat behind a great white swan at the stern, while the guide pedals from inside the swan itself. Four generations of the Paget family have run the boats, and the ride — a slow circuit of the four-acre lagoon, past the willows and the bridge — has barely changed in a century and a half.

The Swan Boats are a seasonal tradition, running in the warmer months, and they are best enjoyed as Bostonians enjoy them: unhurried, with no agenda beyond the fifteen minutes on the water. Children press to the front; couples take the back bench; first-time visitors spend the whole ride taking photographs of the bridge. The boats are also the Garden's living link to the children's book that made it famous — in McCloskey's story, the Mallard family nests on an island in this very lagoon, and the book's illustrations of the swan boats and the footbridge are drawn from the real place.

If you ride only one thing in Boston, ride this. It is gentle, it is old-fashioned, and it is the rare tourist attraction that locals love exactly as much as visitors do.

The best way to see both parks is to treat them as one walk with two moods. Start at the Park Street corner of the Common, where the Freedom Trail begins, and cross the park diagonally toward the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, taking in the Brewer Fountain and the Shaw Memorial on the way. Pause at Frog Pond — wading in summer, skating in winter — then cross Charles Street into the Garden. From there, follow the paths to the Washington statue, the ducklings, and the footbridge, and finish with a Swan Boat ride when the boats are running.

Come in spring if you can, when the Garden's tulips are at their peak and the Swan Boats return for the season, or in autumn, when the Common's elms turn and the crowds thin. Summer brings concerts on the Common and the Garden at its greenest; winter brings the Frog Pond rink and the Garden's bare, elegant bones. All four seasons suit these parks, because they were never designed as a single-season attraction. They are Boston's front lawn and its flower garden, side by side, and they have been open to everyone — that was the point from 1634 onward — for nearly four centuries.

Address: Boston Common, 139 Tremont Street, Boston, MA 02111; Boston Public Garden, 4 Charles Street, Boston, MA 02116 — the two parks adjoin across Charles Street, between Beacon Hill and Back Bay

Transit: Park Street station (Red and Green Lines) at the Common's northeast corner; Boylston station (Green Line) on the Common's south side; Arlington station (Green Line) at the Garden's west side

Hours/Admission: Both parks are city parks open to the public daily; the Swan Boats run seasonally in the warmer months and Frog Pond skating is seasonal — check the City of Boston parks pages and swanboats.com before visiting for current seasons, hours, and fares

Best timing: Spring for the Garden's tulips and the Swan Boats' return; autumn for foliage and thinner crowds; allow half a day to walk both parks at leisure, starting at the Freedom Trail's start on the Common