When actor Michael Douglas’s Bermudian mother, Diana Dill Darrid, married President Nixon’s former Treasury chief of staff Donald Webster at Christmastime in 2002, the bride and groom asked guests to donate toward the preservation of Penhurst Agricultural Park (Middle Rd., west of Store Hill, open sunrise to sunset daily, admission free) in lieu of wedding gifts. They held a publicized ceremony to plant cedar saplings on Christmas Eve inside the 14-acre Penhurst Agricultural Park, which rambles from Middle Road down across the Railway Trail to North Shore, encompassing farm fields and dense woodland that few Bermudians have ventured to explore.

Visible from the Penhurst Agricultural Park entrance area are the communications tower and giant satellite dish on the next-door property of Cable & Wireless, on which the lion’s share of Bermuda’s telecommunications depends. The park gives easy access to the Railway Trail in Smith’s; south of the Trail, it descends to a grassy spread where a bench overlooks the North Shore. Bluebirds, cardinals, mourning doves, and finches can all be seen and heard here, amid the fiddlewoods, palmettos, and cedars.

Parks Department crews spent early 2005 culling invasive species, such as Mexican pepper bushes, from Penhurst Agricultural Park and planting replacement endemics.