Spring 2000: A Season in the Garden
· Escape Garden Design, Aspen, Colorado
Spring up here is not a date on the calendar so much as a negotiation with the mountain.
The first bulbs push through the last of the snow, then the columbine and the early natives, and the whole valley turns green almost overnight once it commits.
The waterfalls come back online first. There is a morning every spring when we open the valves, clear the basins, and listen for the sound to even out, and it is one of the better days of the year.
Patience is the rule. The last hard frost can land in early to mid June up here, so the tender things wait while the cold-tolerant ones go in the ground.
A seasonal tip worth passing along. No plant is truly deer proof when a hard winter pushes the herd down into the valley, but some are reliably left alone. Aromatic and fuzzy-leaved plants top the list: catmint, Russian sage, lavender where it is hardy, yarrow, salvia, and the artemisias. Ornamental grasses, daffodils, alliums, and most of the penstemons also tend to go untouched.
Hold tender plants and annuals until the frost danger truly passes in June, and keep frost cloth within reach until then.
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.