New Hampshire? Isn't that a quaint rural county in England?

The Boston Globe ran a story a while back about the fact that New Hampshire is trying to "brand" itself, to boost tourism and encourage people to buy local products.

Apparently tourists and shoppers who don’t live in New Hampshire have very specific and positive images of neighboring Maine (yummy lobsters, etc.) and Vermont (cute cows, etc.) but they don’t really associate New Hampshire with . . . much of anything.

I was reminded of this earlier this week when my wife Liz and I visited the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay, Maine, about an hour from our home in Augusta, Maine. As its name implies, this gorgeous facility isn’t so much a garden as a collection of gardens, one of which is a meditation garden that features a lot of Maine granite.

As Liz took photos and I surveyed the scene, a group of about six people sauntered into the meditation garden, chatting amiably and making observations about how beautiful the place is.

“Wow,” one woman said. “Look at all that granite.”

“Yup,” a male companion replied in an authoritative tone of voice that belied his ignorance. “That’s why they call it the Granite State.”

Sorry, New Hampshire. If tourists are so clueless that they appropriate your nickname and apply it to the Pine Tree State (aka Maine), maybe your image problems are even worse than you thought.