My wife and I read the Gazette quite thoroughly when it arrives each week at our home in Boston, but neither one of us can recall any news stories concerning the declared bankruptcy of Edgartown and Oak Bluffs. We must have overlooked them because clearly both townships have critical financial problems. Otherwise there would seem to be no explanation for the deplorable landscaping (landscaping?) that graces the famous roundabout on the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road. We’ve just returned home after a visit to the Vineyard that was perfect in all aspects except the disappointing experience of rounding the roundabout. This recently completed highway improvement continues to look, for all intents and purposes, as though it has been transported completely intact from a derelict neighborhood in downtown Detroit.

Have we missed some reasonable explanation for such an eyesore in the middle of this major Vineyard thoroughfare linking Vineyard Haven to Edgartown, traveled daily by so many Vineyard residents and summer visitors alike? How is it possible that this extremely expensive road investment — completed after so much study, so much controversy so much delay (and so much ill-informed protest) — could be finally inaugurated and left to look like it does, with its pathetic bed of junkyard beach grass and the single immature oak tree anchoring the center of the circle? That miserable little scrub oak is supported by stakes as if it were some highly exotic and valuable gift from the Polly Hill Arboretum. Is this somebody’s idea of a joke?

Since when do scrub oaks (or is it a scrub maple?) need to be supported by stakes? And since when, for goodness sake, are they considered ornamental trees? Come out to Wasque Point on Chappaquiddick where we live in the summer and we’ll give you enough scrub oaks to last a lifetime, free of charge. We can’t cut the ugly, invasive little critters down fast enough, and neither can The Trustees of Reservations, nearby. Come on. Whatever bureaucracy is responsible for this ugly travesty — and for all we know it may be the commonwealth or the federal government — get with it.

Take a ride up the road to the sweet little center-strip garden at the gateway to Edgartown and see what a few well-placed flowers can do for the look of a community, not to mention the spirits of passers-by. Whoever you are (and you must know who you are) you have some of New England’s best nurseries on the Vineyard. We’re pretty sure that any of them would be willing and able to suggest something more fitting and beautiful than the visual wasteland that presently rings the renowned roundabout.

Yours for flowering bushes and shrubs.

Tim Leland and Julie Hatfield-Leland

Boston and
Chappaquiddick