Dear Readers,

Bill Cullina and his jolly crew at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens are busting their buttons with pride. They have every right to be proud.

TripAdvisor, the travel review website, recently ranked Boothbay’s Coastal Maine Botanical Garden as the top public garden in the U.S.

Not bad for a garden that is only six years old.

“It is a big deal,” said Cullina, the gardens executive director. “It is not like making a top 10 list produced by some travel writer or magazine. This was an honor from our customers. It was done by our actual visitors, and that makes it a bigger deal,” he said.

Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens was rated ahead of some of the nation’s top gardens, including the famed Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley.

“A treasure,” said one reviewer who rated the Botanical Gardens on the site. “An exceptional place to visit,” said another.

TripAdvisor is a widely regarded guide to vacation places. They ask customers to rate the places they visit on their vacations, including hotels and restaurants and other attractions.

Unlike travel writers, who are sometimes wined and dined by attractions in hopes of getting a good review, the TripAdvisor reviewers pay to get in, buy their own meals and pay retail to sleep in the sheets.

If they like a place, they say so. If they think it stinks, they say that too.

Cullina, who said he checks TripAdvisor when he takes his own family on vacation, said the service is on the up and up. He said it is tough to put in the “fix” with TripAdvisor by getting lots of folks to vote for you in a sort of electronic effort to stuff the ballot box, and pump up your ratings.

For the record, 247 of 261 customers rated the Botanical Gardens as excellent, 12 said they were very good, one average and one poor, according to TripAdvisor.

Will the rating mean anything? Will it boost attendance? Cullina is not sure. “We had about 90,000 visitors last year opposed to about 84,500 the year before.”

We at the Boothbay Register and Wiscasset Newspaper think it is nice too. We all feel a sense of accomplishment when one of our local attractions is recognized by a national authority. We also like the fact that 90,000 folks, many from away, came to our community just to visit the gardens. In a town that depends on tourists and the dollars they spend, CMBG has become a major attraction.

So here is a pat on the back for the folks at CMBG. Well done, Bill and company. We know you are proud of your work at the Botanical Gardens. We want you to know we are proud of you, too.