Spalding Garden
The Spalding Garden is maintained by volunteers of the Milton Garden Club and is located in a residential neighborhood on Fletcher Steele Way. Tours available throughout the year. Check Milton Garden Club Events Facebook page.
Landscape architect Fletcher Steele designed the gardens for this 12-acre property in Milton, Massachusetts which belonged to Philip and Katherine Spalding, beginning circa 1924. His abstract design included 9-foot high patterned brick walls (with built-in benches) and walkways that delineated garden rooms, and the lack of geometric scheme suggested secret gardens. The design was laid out with views across the bowling green to the Great Blue Hill. Distinct features included a bowling green planted with a double allee of English elms underplanted with broadleaf evergreen shrubs and perennial borders. An oval perennial garden on the other side of the Georgian Revival house was planted for continuous flowering in spring, summer and fall. There was a dogwood path, a bosquet planted with flowering trees and shrubs, a columbine walk, and framing rows of double boxwood. Landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman also worked on the Spalding Garden, circa 1927 to 1938.
Flowering plants in the perennial garden included iris, bleeding heart, peonies, pinks, and forget-me-nots for spring into early summer; phlox, yellow daylilies, meadow rue and lobelia for summer; and asters, chrysanthemums and anemones for fall.
Katherine Spalding was the third president of the Milton Garden Club. The Milton Garden Club acquired one-half acre of the property in 2004 in order to protect that part of Steele's design. Houses have been built on the rest of the property. The half-acre includes walls, walkways, boxwood borders, and a stone fountain, and is being restored, with Lucinda Brockway of Past Designs. The Milton Garden Club has historic photographs and will conduct tours by appointment.
Persons associated with the garden include Philip and Katherine Spalding (former owners, 1917-1950); Fletcher Steele (landscape architect, circa 1924-1928); Ellen Biddle Shipman (landscape architect, circa 1927-1938); Milton Garden Club (current owner, 2004-present).
Spalding Garden 100th Anniversary
On June 18th, 2024, the MGC Garden History & Design Committee hosted a Summer Garden Party to celebrate the centennial of the garden. Spalding Garden was designed by Harvard trained landscape architect Fletcher Steele in 1924. Garden Club members and friends of the Spalding Garden gathered in the early evening to enjoy the splendor of the garden in full bloom.
