Fall 2006: A Season in the Garden
· Escape Garden Design, Aspen, Colorado
The turn comes quickly up here: the aspens go gold, the groundcovers go red and bronze, and the valley braces for winter.
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. When the snow gets deep in the high country, deer and elk move down into the valley and your garden starts to look like a buffet. The only certain defense is a real fence, and for elk it needs to be tall, since they clear surprisingly high. Short of fencing, lean hard on plants they avoid, and protect the few favorites with cages or repellents that you rotate so the animals do not get used to one scent.
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.
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.
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 will see you next season.