Boston Public Garden

Where it sits. The Public Garden is a rectangle of about ten hectares in the middle of Boston, bounded by Arlington, Boylston, Charles and Beacon Streets, with Back Bay to the west and Beacon Hill rising to the northeast. Charles Street separates it from Boston Common, and the two are constantly confused: the Common, laid out in 1634 as cow pasture and militia ground, is rough, open and historic; the Garden, created two centuries later, is ornamental, planted and enclosed. The cast-iron fence around it, the winding gravel paths and the artificial lagoon at its centre are all deliberate — this was designed to be looked at rather than used.

How it was made. The land is filled tidal marsh at the foot of Beacon Hill, reclaimed in the early nineteenth century. In 1837 the philanthropist Horace Gray secured permission to establish a botanical garden here, which makes it the first public botanical garden in the United States, though the early version failed and the site nearly became building lots. The layout that survives is George F. Meacham's, chosen by competition in 1859, with the lagoon shaped to look like a small river, a suspension bridge over its narrowest point, and beds arranged for Victorian bedding-out. Those beds are still replanted twice a year, tulips and pansies in spring giving way to summer annuals, and the Garden holds more than six hundred trees including weeping willows around the water and a dawn redwood near the Beacon Street side.

The Swan Boats. The pedal-driven boats have operated on the lagoon since 1877 and are still run by the Paget family, whose ancestor Robert Paget devised them after seeing Wagner's Lohengrin and hiding the operator behind a large wooden swan. The pilot pedals a paddle wheel from a seat inside the swan while up to twenty passengers sit on benches ahead; the circuit takes twelve to fifteen minutes at a speed that could not alarm anyone. They run from mid-April to early September and are hauled out for the winter. Nearby, at the Charles Street corner, Nancy Schön's bronze Make Way for Ducklings of 1987 reproduces Mrs Mallard and her eight ducklings from Robert McCloskey's 1941 picture book, which is set in this exact spot; the ducklings are dressed in knitted hats and team jerseys by anonymous locals throughout the year.

The bench. The most sought-out object in the Garden is not marked in any way. In Good Will Hunting (1997), Sean Maguire takes Will Hunting to a bench beside the lagoon and delivers the speech that turns the film — the one that begins by asking what he knows about real loss. It was filmed on an ordinary green-slatted park bench on the path along the lagoon's northwest side, facing the water, roughly between the bridge and the Beacon Street gate. There is no plaque and no marker, and the Garden has resisted adding one. When Robin Williams died in August 2014, mourners covered that bench in flowers, notes and chalked quotations from the scene, and photographs of it went around the world within a day; the chalk washed off within a week, and the bench went back to being a bench.

What else to look for. The equestrian George Washington at the Arlington Street gate, cast by Thomas Ball in 1869, was the first equestrian statue in Boston and is the Garden's formal centrepiece, aligned on the axis of Commonwealth Avenue's mall behind it. The Ether Monument in the northwest corner, erected in 1868, is the oldest structure in the Garden and commemorates the first public demonstration of surgical anaesthesia, which took place at Massachusetts General Hospital a few streets away in 1846. The lagoon bridge of 1867, by William G. Preston, was built as a genuine suspension bridge and later stiffened until it became one only in appearance; at about thirty metres it is often described as the shortest of its kind ever built.

Getting there and timing. Arlington station on the Green Line opens directly onto the Arlington Street gate. The Garden is open from dawn until late evening and is lit at night. Mid-April to early June is the peak, when the magnolias along Commonwealth Avenue and the tulip beds inside the fence come together; October gives the best colour on the willows and maples. Winter empties it almost completely, which is when the layout is easiest to read. The Garden sits at one end of the Emerald Necklace, Frederick Law Olmsted's chain of parks running southwest to Franklin Park, and at the start of the Freedom Trail's practical range — the Common, the State House and Beacon Hill are all within ten minutes on foot.