Fall 2022: A Season in the Garden
· Escape Garden Design, Aspen, Colorado
Fall is the gardener's reward and warning at once, beautiful and brief, with the first hard frost never far off.
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. Composting works at altitude, it just works slowly, since cold and dryness both put the brakes on decomposition. Keep the pile a bit bigger to hold heat, keep it as moist as a wrung-out sponge in our dry air, and turn it when you can. Expect it to nearly stall over winter and roar back to life in spring, which is normal and fine.
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.