The annual Mahone Bay Home & Garden Tour celebrates the beauty of summer blooms, but the pandemic meant museum staff had to think outside the box for this years tour.
Manager and Curator of the Mahone Bay Museum Lyne Allain says the tour started 20 years ago and has been a key fundraiser that helps cover operational costs for the museum.
When the pandemic led to the cancelling of two other fundraiser’s in April and May staff began considering how they could adjust to the Covid reality but still raise money with the event. Normally people in the area volunteer to open their homes and gardens for the weekend tour and tickets are sold to the event she said.
“When we started planning this event a couple of months ago we just couldn’t bring ourselves to ask people to open their homes to the public and put themselves at risk. That’s when we thought, let’s do a virtual tour that people can enjoy from their own home.”
They approached local photographer Betty Meredith from “Photos by Betty” who agreed to take photos of the exteriors of local homes and gardens. To make the tour extra special they decided to add a video slide show and Picnic Studios stepped in to provide aerial footage of Mahone Bay for the introduction video.
“Betty kept sending us gorgeous photographs and it was so hard to choose what to feature and what to leave out. We ended up with about a 10 minute video with 100 photos from 25 properties, which is a lot more properties than we usually have in our in-person version of the event! So that’s a nice bonus,” said Allain.
There are not too many positives to come out of the pandemic but she said going virtual was much more convenient because the success of the in-person event is weather dependent.
“Betty took photos when the weather was nice and tried to get photos of various types of flowers at their peak so you’ll notice some flowers that peaked a few weeks ago that you aren’t seeing now, are featured in this video. Our in person tour tries to keep all the properties pretty close to town so that ticket holders don’t have to drive too far to each property during the tour. So this virtual tour really gave us more flexibility to feature wonderful properties that are a bit further out of town in the surrounding areas,” she said.
The video will go live today at 1 PM on the Mahone Bay Museum Facebook page, Youtube Channel, and website.
The video is free to watch but museum staff hope that those who enjoy the video will consider making a small donation.
