Spring 2024: A Season in the Garden
· Escape Garden Design, Aspen, Colorado
The valley spends weeks deciding whether to let go of winter, and mud season is the price of admission to spring.
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. More trees die from bad planting than from anything that comes after, and almost all of it is avoidable. Dig the hole wide and no deeper than the root ball, so the trunk flare sits right at grade, never buried. Tease apart circling roots, set the tree, backfill with the native soil you dug out, and skip the rich amendments that keep roots from venturing into the surrounding ground.
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.