Spring 2020: A Strange Spring, and a Wave of New Gardeners
· 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.
With everyone suddenly home, more people took up gardening this spring than we had ever seen. It was a strange, quiet, anxious season, and the garden turned out to be exactly where a lot of people needed to be.
A seasonal tip worth passing along. Choosing who builds your landscape is a big decision, and a few questions tell you most of what you need to know. Ask whether they design, build, and maintain, or only one of those, and how the handoffs work if they do not do it all. Ask to see mature projects, not just freshly installed ones, because a garden a few years on tells the real story.
Hold tender plants and annuals until the frost danger truly passes in June, and keep frost cloth within reach until then.
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 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.
More when the season changes. As ever, ask if you want a hand with your own piece of the valley.