A nice place to visit

Kent is on a roll. The town was chosen by Yankee Magazine as New England’s top foliage town, in a competition released in the magazine’s September/October issue. That is no small accomplishment, especially when taking into account the colorful vistas available in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Green Mountains of Vermont, all worthy contenders.

But Kent’s location on beautiful Route 7 and its proximity to the New York metropolitan area certainly give the town an advantage in attracting leaf-peepers, who are really just nature lovers wanting to enjoy the last of the warm weather in the country. What better place than Kent? The town has Macedonia Brook State Park, Kent Falls, Bulls Bridge and a vibrant, welcoming downtown with high-quality and varied shops and eateries.

The Kent Land Trust has also received accreditation from the national Land Trust Alliance, the result of a four-year process of review by the organization. This makes Kent one of only two of the 102 land trusts in Connecticut to be so recognized. The standards are stringent, demanding that land trusts have excellent financial and land management policies and that they adhere to those policies.

Could these two things be related? Absolutely. It’s no accident that a town with a strong, active and viable land trust, responsible for preserving open space, is a fantastic place to visit for a nature-related activity such as celebrating the change of the seasons from summer to autumn.

All who live in the Tri-state area know that there are many wonderful places in the region to see the changing of the leaves and visit those places sometime around the second week of October. But kudos to the people of Kent, well-deserved, for envisioning the best their town can be and making it happen. There’s always more work to do for any town, because after all, no place is perfect. But if Kent can keep its strong Yankee values in mind while continuing to plan out its future, this quintessential New England town can only become more and more successful, as a place to visit and a place to live.