Spring 2012: A Season in the Garden
· Escape Garden Design, Aspen, Colorado
Spring is the season of false starts, warm days chased by hard frosts, until one morning it is simply real.
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. We are lucky to work in a place where the best feature is often outside the property line, and a good design pulls those distant peaks and ridgelines into the composition. The Japanese call it shakkei, borrowed scenery, framing a far view so it becomes part of the near garden. We do it by lining up a gap in the planting, a path, or a gate with a mountain beyond, so the eye travels from your feet to the horizon.
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.