Peonies, Sweat, and a Truckload of Plants
The Story of the Sunny Meadow Peony Garden
Every garden has a story. Some begin with a careful plan and a stack of seed catalogs. The peony garden at Sunny Meadow started with something very different. It began with a phone call, a yard full of plants, and a group of people willing to pick up shovels and make something happen.
The Origin—The Great Plant Move of 2013
Back in the spring of 2013, Kyle and Heather Hilton had just moved into a home on Hart Road in Chelmsford. With the house came a surprise. The property was packed with perennial plants. Not a few beds here and there, but hundreds upon hundreds of mature plants. Peonies, hostas, irises, lilies, and more filled the yard. It honestly looked less like a backyard and more like a small plant nursery.
The Hiltons quickly realized that while the garden was beautiful, it was also enormous. Maintaining something that large was not going to work for a family that wanted a lawn where kids could run around and play soccer.
Instead of letting the plants get bulldozed or tossed aside, they did something pretty remarkable. They offered to donate them.
The Chelmsford Garden Club received the call and reached out to Chelmsford Open Space Stewardship. At the time, Sunny Meadow Farm had already started to become a hub for community activity. The town had purchased the property a few years earlier, and volunteers were beginning to develop gardens, trails, and other projects on the land.
Suddenly there was an opportunity sitting right in front of us.
If the Hilton plants could be moved to Sunny Meadow, they could form the foundation of a perennial nursery that could serve the whole community.
That idea turned into what we now remember as the Great Plant Move.
In mid-June of 2013, the digging began.
Over the weekend beginning June 15, volunteers showed up at the Hilton property with shovels, trucks, and a lot of determination. The goal was simple on paper: dig up every plant and move it to Sunny Meadow.
In reality, it meant hundreds and hundreds of plants being carefully lifted out of the ground, divided when necessary, loaded into trucks, and transported across town.
Within just a few days the scale of the project became clear. By June 20, roughly 700 plants had already been moved and replanted at Sunny Meadow. Volunteers also salvaged paving stones, scalloped brick edging, and pea stone so the materials could be reused in the new garden.
The weather did not make things easy.
One weekend we were digging in mud after heavy rain. The following weekend the ground had dried so hard it felt like cement. But people kept showing up, and the plants kept moving.
Joseph Heider from Joseph’s Landscaping brought equipment that made a huge difference. Using his machinery, he moved piles of loam and created trenches where the plants could be dropped in quickly. The Chelmsford Department of Public Works delivered the loam needed to prepare the beds. Volunteers hauled plants in their own trucks from Hart Road to Sunny Meadow.
Water lines were run from the existing tree nursery so the new plants could survive their transition.
By the end of June, the project that became known as the Great Plant Move was largely complete. More than 1,000 plants had been relocated from the Hilton property to Sunny Meadow Farm.
What had started as a yard that needed clearing had become the foundation of a new community resource.
The Idea Behind the Garden
The plan was never just to build a pretty flower bed.
The goal was to create a perennial nursery that could supply plants for projects across Chelmsford.
Those peonies, irises, lilies, and hostas could be divided and shared with schools, town buildings, street islands, churches, and community spaces. Garden clubs could use divisions from the beds for plant sales and fundraisers. Instead of buying landscaping plants year after year, the town could grow many of them locally.
In other words, a single generous donation would continue to give back year after year.
And for a long time, that is precisely what happened.
Over the years the plants thrived. Beds expanded. Plants were split and shared. Many of the perennials you see around town today trace their roots back to that weekend in 2013.
But the garden also became something else.
It became a place people looked forward to visiting every spring.
Where We Are Today
Each year when the peonies bloom, Sunny Meadow changes almost overnight. What was a quiet garden bed suddenly becomes a wave of color.
Those blooms have been shared in many ways over the years.
Volunteers have cut flowers for seniors and for military families. Local garden clubs have used divisions from the beds to help support their fundraising plant sales. And last year something especially memorable happened when the Wish Project cut several hundred peonies from the garden for their annual gala. Seeing those flowers used to support families in need was pretty wonderful.
COSS continues to be part of maintaining the garden and helping keep it going.
But here is the honest truth.
Gardens need care.
The beds need mulch. Some areas would benefit from weed cloth. Plants need to be divided every few years to stay healthy and productive.
And yes… there is weeding.
I will be completely honest about one thing.
I really, really, really hate to weed.
Unfortunately, the weeds seem to love Sunny Meadow.
Another issue we have run into over the years is that someone occasionally comes along and digs plants out of the beds. It seems to happen almost every year. It is frustrating and honestly a little sad.
One of the original goals of the garden was to share plants. In the past we were able to split peonies and donate them to local garden clubs so they could sell them as part of their fundraising plant sales. With plants disappearing overnight, that becomes much harder to do.
The garden is still healthy, but it needs a little help if we want it to remain the resource it was meant to be.
Where We Are Going
If the community wants to keep the Sunny Meadow peony garden thriving, what we really need now is a small group of people who enjoy working with perennial gardens.
Not a huge commitment. Just a few volunteers who would like to spend some time each season helping maintain the beds.
What would help the most is:
Adding mulch and weed cloth where needed
Dividing and resetting peonies and other perennials
Keeping the beds organized and healthy
And hopefully bringing back some of the traditions that made the garden special.
We would love to see volunteers cutting flowers again for seniors, military families, and community groups. The Wish Project example showed just how meaningful something as simple as a flower can be when it is shared.
The Sunny Meadow peony garden started with an incredible act of generosity and a lot of sweat in June of 2013. More than a thousand plants were dug up and given a new home so they could continue to bloom for the community.
Those same plants are still blooming today.
With a little help, they can keep blooming for many years to come.