St. Andrews, a very pretty coastal resort town in far western New Brunswick, is so close to the US that Maine can be seen even on a relatively foggy day.  Shown here is its icon, the Algonquin, a resort hotel first built in 1889 and rebuilt in 1914 high on a hill overlooking the town and the sea.  The Algonquin is certainly a beautiful place to visit, but if you stay, make sure you get a room with air conditioning; very late into the summer night, my top-floor room in the old wing remained unbearably hot - a common occurrence on warm days, according to the staff - which seems rather nutty given the expense of staying here.

Shops and boutiques along Water Street, the town’s commercial street, near sunset.  A few years ago when I traveled the coast of Maine, I ended the trip once I reached Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor, as many Americans do; driving hours further simply to see one lighthouse at the easternmost point of the United States didn’t seem worth the trouble.  Had I known then what lay just across the border with Canada, I would have changed my mind. 

Greenoch Presbyterian Church, complete with a green oak carving on its steeple, is named after the Scottish hometown of its chief funder.  Like Saint John, St. Andrews was created just after America won its war for independence by New England colonists who remained loyal to Britain and King George III.  Most of the streets intersecting Water Street are named after King George’s many children.  For decades, St. Andrews and Saint John were in economic competition with one another; by the mid-19th century, Saint John had won out.  Over the next generation, St. Andrews became St. Andrews-by-the-Sea; a place of commerce became a place of leisure, hence the building of resort hotels like the Algonquin at the top of this page.

Over half the buildings in St. Andrews are over a century old.  This is one of them: the Sheriff Andrews House, built around 1820.  Elisha Andrews had already been county sheriff for fifteen years when he had this house built, and he would continue to serve for twelve more.

The sheriff’s 19th-century equivalent of a laptop computer.  With a wife and seven children at the time this house was built, my guess is that he did not get a lot of work done at home.

Ladies at the house in period costume making a quilt.  This isn’t just a show for tourists; they make these quilts for people in the community.  I rather liked this one they were working on.

One of their completed quilts.

The Sheriff Andrews House has nine rooms, every one with a fireplace.  Still, St. Andrews can get quite cold in winter, so a bed warmer was likely welcome.

One block up from the sheriff’s house is the All Saints Church, an Anglican church built in 1867 that replaced the original built in 1788.

Inside, as with the previous churches I photographed this trip, it is again the ceiling that first draws attention.  The church’s literature points to its resemblance to an upturned boat; more interestingly, the ceiling is constructed of pews from the original church.  Hanging from the rafters on the front left is Canada’s flag as it appeared before the brilliant maple leaf version now in use.  On the back right, the flag of Wales - a red dragon on green and white stripes - hangs over the pew where Prince Charles and Princess Diana sat in 1983, two hundred years after the first British loyalists from the US arrived in St. Andrews.

The baptismal font of the church has unique floor tiles, shown here, with symbols depicting Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; I believe this is the one for Mark.  The tiles came from the original church; there, they surrounded the altar.

The altar here too is from the original church.  The stained glass window was given in memory of the church’s first rector by his relatives here in New Brunswick and the US.

At the top of the same street as the Sheriff Andrews House and the All Saints Church is the highlight of St. Andrews, Kingsbrae Garden.

Most of these photographs were taken in the Perennial Garden section of Kingsbrae Garden, which seemed to draw the most attention from visitors and was certainly the most photogenic.  Yes, that is a bee; the blue flower is actually quite small.

One reason why people congregated in this section was the massive number of hummingbirds here.  Every few seconds one would flit past my head with a low, quick, intense buzz, and by the time I would catch sight of it, it would make an impossibly sharp change of direction, usually toward a plant like this, where it would stop as abruptly as hitting a wall and hover dead still while having a taste.  One hummingbird is a show all by itself; watching dozens of them here was like watching an action movie, complete with surround sound.

I arrived at Kingsbrae Garden at a perfect time in terms of weather.  The sun was high but hidden behind a broad veil of thin high clouds for two hours, allowing me to catch the full range of color in very diffuse light.

What’s unusual about the garden is that it’s by far the youngest attraction in this very historic town; it hasn’t even had its tenth anniversary.  Yet already it is one of the best gardens in Canada, and should continue to improve with age.

The 27 acres of grounds that make up Kingsbrae Garden, a donation, were once part of an estate that had a history of producing excellent gardens - though nothing quite like this.  The home on that estate, from 1897, was restored into what is now Kingsbrae Arms, a very upscale resort.

The purpose of Kingsbrae Garden is to promote and encourage home gardening, and it pays tribute to a number of different traditional gardening styles.  Besides the perennial garden are rose, white, gravel, and Celtic knot gardens, plus an edible garden, a heath and heather garden, a bird and butterfly garden, and more.

2500 varieties of plant life can be found at Kingbrae Garden; it took me a couple of hours to photograph the few I’ve shown here.  When the sun came out in full, lunch at the café on the garden grounds provided a perfect end to this visit.

Back down on the St. Andrews coast near sunset, this is a restored wooden blockhouse, one of a dozen built to protect this British colonial town from Americans during the War of 1812.  Soldiers were quartered here, with their artillery right outside the door.  An attack never came, and the cannon, looking rather threatening from this position, was never fired.

The same cannon, with a very cooperative sunset behind it.

The same sunset about an hour later and just steps away from the previous shot.  This gives a hint of the bizarre tides on the Bay of Fundy, which I would encounter regularly over the coming days; at high tide, all the ground here stretching out hundreds of meters to the bay is under water.

A couple of parting shots near St. Andrews.  This is a farm along the road into town, with rolls of baled hay in the background, a common sight throughout this part of Canada.

Further north of St. Andrews are a number of covered bridges; New Brunswick has dozens of them, and I would see more in the coming days.  This one is called the Digdeguash River #3.  St. Andrews and the surrounding area has much to offer, and anyone driving up the Maine coast should continue right on across the Canadian border to this wonderful little place.