Fall 2014: A Season in the Garden
· Escape Garden Design, Aspen, Colorado
Autumn arrives fast in the high country, and if you blink you miss the best of it, so we try not to blink.
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. The emerald ash borer reached Colorado in 2013, and it has been working its way through the state's ash trees ever since. If you have ash, it is worth knowing that an untreated tree in an infested area is on borrowed time, and planning a replacement now beats scrambling later. Good replacements for our conditions include hackberry, Kentucky coffeetree, bur oak, and native hawthorn and serviceberry for smaller spaces.
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 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 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.
More when the season changes. As ever, ask if you want a hand with your own piece of the valley.