Spring 2016: The Year Rain Barrels Became Legal
· Escape Garden Design, Aspen, Colorado
By the time the snow pulls back off the south-facing beds, the garden is impatient, and so are we.
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.
Colorado finally legalized residential rain barrels this spring, ending a strange chapter of western water law. It is a small amount of water, but a good habit and a daily reminder of how little rain actually falls here.
A seasonal tip worth passing along. For years it was technically illegal to catch the rain off your own roof in Colorado, a quirk of western water law that surprised every transplant. That changed in 2016, when the state legalized residential rain barrels, up to two barrels and 110 gallons per household. It is a small amount in the scheme of a landscape, but it is perfect for hand-watering containers and new plantings.
Hold tender plants and annuals until the frost danger truly passes in June, and keep frost cloth within reach until then.
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.