After a six-year hiatus, the Belmont Garden Club’s Garden Tour returns this spring. Seven homeowners will open their garden gates on Sunday, June 1, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., offering guests the chance to view expertly tended flower and vegetable beds, cozy patio spaces and container plantings, naturalistic woodland paths and water features, and more.
Now in its third decade, the Garden Tour is one of the Club’s primary fundraisers, with proceeds benefiting various public projects, including street median daffodils, planted with the support of the Department of Public Works, and Belmont Center’s seasonal horse trough displays and native plant garden. Another significant beneficiary of this year’s fundraiser will be the public Woodland Garden adjacent to the town library building, which is under construction. The Woodland Garden is maintained by Club members and will require a redesign and revival once the new building is completed.
The tour is offered approximately every five years. In the inaugural tour, held in 1999, one of the featured gardens was that of Dee and Erich Ippen on School Street. She recalled it was a very hot day in late June, but their Sissinghurst-inspired white garden — planted with shade-loving plants beneath a giant pin oak, their back neighbor’s stately elm, and other trees — kept its cool, even under the gaze of dozens of visitors. Dee Ippen has now come full circle, as this year she is co-chair of the Garden Tour, along with Leslie Aitken and Louise Halstead. The main change to the tour over the years is that the date has moved up, both to take advantage of cooler spring weather and to catch people before school gets out and summer vacations start.
A lot of planning goes on behind the scenes, starting a year before the tour date, when candidate gardens are viewed at the same time of year that they will ultimately be showcased. In winter and early spring, Belmont Garden Club members help the homeowners write descriptions of their gardens’ histories and highlights for the keepsake program booklet and offer tips for how to best show off the gardens. In the weeks and days before the tour, members lend a hand sprucing up the gardens with some final weeding and pruning.
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Sue and Jim Kelleher’s garden on Hillcrest Road was featured in the last tour, in 2019. She reminisced, “Preparing my garden for the event was no small task — it required a lot of effort and attention to detail.” She was grateful for advice from Sara Townsend, one of the Club’s expert gardeners, on small tweaks that ensured everything looked its best. “On the day of the tour, it was exciting to see visitors admire and enjoy my garden. Sharing my space with fellow garden enthusiasts made all the preparation worthwhile!”
Other than experiencing the serene pleasure of wandering through several spectacular gardens, many guests will take home ideas for plants and designs to try at home. The gardens represent a range of aesthetic preferences, scale, and budget. Most likely, some guests will be inspired, as I was after the 2019 tour, to join the Garden Club themselves.
Tickets are $35 in advance and $40 on the day of the tour and can be purchased at Westcott Mercantile, Artefact Home|Garden, and Hillside Garden Ace Hardware. Bring your ticket to the Beech Street Center, or buy one there, from 10:30 a.m. onward (until 3:30 p.m.) on June 1, and pick up a program booklet that includes the addresses, a map, and garden descriptions.
Jenny has been gardening in Belmont since 2001 and became a member of the Belmont Garden Club in 2019. From 2010 to 2013, she was the volunteer editor for the Belmont Farmers’ Market newsletter, Roots & Sprouts.