Spring 2017: 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.
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.
Cleanup is the work of the season, though it is less about tidying and more about reading what the winter did: what came through, what did not. We cut back last year's growth and freshen the compost.
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.
We also spent time this season on the everyday craft of the garden. Shibui is a Japanese idea that is hard to translate and easy to feel: a quiet, understated beauty that reveals itself slowly. It is the opposite of a garden that shouts, all loud color and novelty that wears thin by August. In our work it shows up as restraint, a limited palette, a few well-set stones, more green than flower, space left empty on purpose.
Go easy on the beds while they are wet with snowmelt, since working saturated soil compacts it for the season, and firm any plants the freeze and thaw has heaved.
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.
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.
More when the season changes. As ever, ask if you want a hand with your own piece of the valley.