Sandwich's Service Road Trail Is Getting Its First Spring Planted This Week. Here's How to Lend a Hand.

Ride the Service Road Trail between Chase Road and Robin Road and you'll see a wide, open slope rising from the edge of the pavement on one side. Right now it's bare. This Friday and Saturday, November 6 and 7, Sandwich's Department of Public Works plans to start filling it with daffodil bulbs. The Sandwich Enterprise reported that the plan calls for 10,000 bulbs.

The path itself is about four miles long and has been in use since last fall, well before its formal ribbon-cutting on May 29. This planting is the first project on Service Road meant purely to make the path a better place to be. And because daffodils come back for years, the volunteers who turn up this week are deciding what this stretch of Sandwich will look like each April for a long time.

A corridor that changed hands this year

Tree Warden James A. Sacco is supervising the planting. He told the Sandwich Enterprise why the town picked this spot:

"Service Road was selected because it just became under town management this year, and has a vast, wide-open planting area that is visible to motorists, bikers and pedestrians. Also, it is a safe working location, with the wide layout and planting area behind the bike path away from the road."

His key phrase is "under town management this year." It took a long string of agencies and partners to build the trail. Construction began in 2023, according to a Sandwich Enterprise report on the Bikeways and Pedestrian Committee. At the May ceremony, the Bikeway & Pedestrian Committee chairman Sean Polay, MassDOT's bicycle and pedestrian coordinator Peter Sutton, and Colleen Medeiros of the Cape Cod Commission all spoke about the funding and planning behind it.

DPW Director Paul Tilton, who has worked on the path "from the very beginning," told the crowd how it started. Around 15 years ago, former Cape Cod Commission staffer Lev Malikov sketched an 88-mile cross-Cape trail on a napkin. The idea got its real push from an unexpected partnership with National Grid, which was already doing work along Service Road.

So the path was the product of a long regional effort. Its upkeep is now the town's job, and the town's first project after taking it over is a spring flower bed.

What goes in the ground on Friday and Saturday

The plan is specific. Here's what the Sandwich Enterprise laid out:

• Placement: a one-foot grid about 10 feet up the slopes from the bike path, on the side away from the road.
• Tools: auger-head drills plus hand tools, with several people working together on each section.
• Crew size: about 40 volunteers in all.
• Varieties: three mixed packs of daffodils in whites, oranges, and yellows, with some blooms expected to look "almost pink."
• Purpose: mostly to make the town look better. Sacco also expects the bulbs to help hold the slopes against erosion and to feed pollinators early in the spring.

The two dates were picked on purpose. Friday gives weekday volunteers a chance to help. Saturday gives families one. In an email to Sandwich Chamber of Commerce Director Heidi H. Trottier, Sacco wrote, "We thought including Saturday the 7th would be good to include some school-age volunteers as well."

Sacco also said the idea had been discussed for several years before it finally got scheduled. The town choosing daffodils isn't random either. Sacco pointed to the flower's long planting history in Sandwich and its toughness as an early-spring bloom. In April 2014, the town held a free Daffodil Festival at Oakcrest Cove Field as part of its 375th anniversary, with cut daffodils for sale, family activities, soil testing, and an ask-a-master-gardener table, according to the Cape Cod Times.

How to join the planting crew

You don't have to live in Sandwich to help. Here's how to get on the list:

1. Call the Sandwich Department of Public Works and say you'd like to volunteer for the Service Road daffodil planting.
2. Check the Sandwich Chamber of Commerce Facebook page, where the DPW said more details would be posted.
3. Pick a day. Friday the 6th is the weekday session. Saturday the 7th is the one meant for families and school-age helpers.
4. Expect real digging on a slope. The crews will use augers and hand tools, which makes it a good fit for groups that can split the drilling and planting.

If you'd rather not dig, the town's Service Road Trail page and its trail map show the whole route. The easiest place to start is the 36-space lot at 1 Round Hill Road, at the trail's midpoint. From there you can head east toward Chase Road or west toward Route 130. The town's opening announcement, as printed in the Sandwich Enterprise, says the path provides connections to Sandwich Hollows Golf Course and the Maple Swamp Conservation trails.

The same model already worked at a flagpole

This kind of partnership between the town and volunteers has already worked in Sandwich this fall, at a much smaller site. In early October, the Sandwich Garden Club turned the bed around the front flagpole at the Center for Active Living into a pollinator garden. The Sandwich Enterprise covered the project, which was led by Garden Club treasurer Candice C. Murphy.

The pieces fit together much like the Service Road effort:

• The DPW's Parks Department cleared out the old plants, weeds, and grass.
• Scenic Roots Garden Center co-owner Donna Kutil Ross gave a 20% discount and helped find the plants for the design.
• The Visitor Services Board provided grant funding, as it had for the club's earlier makeover of the Oakcrest Cove garden about three years ago.
• Garden Club co-president Linda Fox donated pavers for a walkway to the flagpole.
• Volunteers from the Garden Club and the Sandwich Tree and Landscape Advisory Committee put in 178 plants in about three hours.

The plants include coreopsis, coneflower, Russian sage, bearberry, goldenrod, milkweed, and chokeberry, set in three repeating sections. There's also amsonia, which turns blue in spring, green in summer, and gold in fall. The club plans to add plant signs and will help care for the bed while it gets established. Guy J. Boucher, Director of Operations for Community Services, explained why the arrangement works: "We have a great Parks Department in the DPW and staff who work really hard, but to do something at that level is sometimes hard and can be hard for our town staff to maintain."

Sacco worked on both projects. Murphy presented the flagpole plan to him along with town staff before it moved forward. Service Road is the same idea on a four-mile scale. Town staff prepare the site and run the logistics, and volunteers supply the hands.

Why spring on Service Road comes first

The daffodils are planned to bloom on a path that, for now, ends at Robin Road near Route 130. The next phase would carry it to the Cape Cod Canal through the center of Sandwich. In its ribbon-cutting coverage, the Sandwich Enterprise reports that this extension is still in its "pre-25%" design phase, with the town applying for MassTrails grants to pay for engineering. Planners have said resident feedback will keep shaping where the route goes.

Until that connection is built, riders going from the canal to Sandwich Village follow a signed on-road route along Route 6A, Jarves Street, and Main Street, sharing the road with traffic that can reach 45 miles per hour. That means the Service Road stretch is the protected part of Sandwich's trail system for now, and probably for some time. It's also part of Vision 88, the Cape Cod Commission's plan for an off-road path network from Woods Hole to Provincetown. In an email to the Cape Cod Times, Polay put it this way: "the end of this path is certainly not the end of the road."

The trail's name has been up for discussion too. At a July meeting of the Bikeways and Pedestrians Committee, members agreed the name should change and Polay suggested "Glass Town Bikeway." Town Engineer Sam Jensen noted that if the path becomes part of the Cape Cod Rail Trail, the state would likely rename it.

When to look for the first blooms

Bulbs planted this week won't show anything until spring. For a sense of timing, Heritage Museums & Gardens on Grove Street says its daffodils start appearing in April and are "in their glory" in May. If the Service Road bulbs follow a similar schedule, next April will be the first spring the slope above the path shows color. That will also be about a year after the ribbon-cutting and the town's first full season in charge of the corridor. Sacco said he's looking forward to seeing how the work done now pays off in the spring.

Our team at Glenn Knapik follows projects like this one because they shape how a Sandwich street feels from one season to the next. If the trail's growth has you thinking about what your home near it might be worth, we're glad to prepare a free home valuation with the same local detail. See you on the path in April.