Fall 1998: A Season in the Garden
· Escape Garden Design, Aspen, Colorado
Fall is the short, brilliant one, two weeks of aspen gold and then a hard night that ends it.
This is when we put the gardens to bed: cutting back what needs it, leaving seed heads and grasses for the birds and for winter interest, blowing out the irrigation, and shutting down the water features before a freeze can crack a line.
The first hard freeze usually lands in mid September and ends the growing season almost overnight, so the last harvest and the last tender color come in on a deadline.
It is also the best planting season of the year. The soil is still warm, the air is cool, and trees and divided perennials get a quiet head start before the ground locks up. A tree planted in fall is ahead of one planted next spring.
On the practical side this season, a note from the field. Everyone who moves here wants aspens, and we understand why. Two weeks of gold in late September is hard to argue with. What people do not always know is that aspen grow as clones, sending up suckers from a shared root system, so they look best planted as a grove rather than a lone specimen. They are short lived and they stress easily. A single tree in a hot lawn island, cut off from its clone, is a candidate for borers and canker.
Watch the early-September forecasts and have frost cloth ready to buy a few more weeks, then get a deep watering in before the ground freezes.
Everything in this valley runs on the same short calendar, and the gardens that thrive are the ones designed around it rather than against it.
Our soil is mostly alkaline clay, the air is thin and dry, and the sun is strong, so the plants that last are the ones that have made peace with all three.
We take on only a handful of gardens each year, which is the only way to give a place like this the attention it asks for.
More than anything, a garden up here rewards patience: it takes a season or two longer to settle than people expect, then looks like it was always there.
We design, build, and maintain our own gardens, so we live with the results for years and learn from them.
The land around us is the best teacher there is, and the gardens we like best borrow from the hillsides more than from any catalog.
That is the season from where we stand. We will check back when the next one turns.