Summer 2012: A Brutal Fire Season
· Escape Garden Design, Aspen, Colorado
Summer is the loud season, all bloom and bees and moving water, before the first cool nights start the turn.
The perennial beds peak in July, and steady deadheading pushes a second flush of color into the cooler nights of late August. The native grasses come into their own as the season ages.
Water is the constant concern. The features run on a closed loop, recirculating the same water, and the planting is grouped so the irrigation only runs where it is needed. In a dry climate, a beautiful garden and a frugal one are usually the same garden.
It is also fire season, never far from anyone's mind in this valley, so we keep the ground near the house lean and green and stay aware of how dry the hills get.
Drought returned hard, and 2012 became one of the worst fire seasons the state had seen, with the Waldo Canyon and High Park fires burning on the news all summer. Fire-wise design and tough, low-water plants were on everyone's mind.
A seasonal tip worth passing along. Living in the mountains means living with fire, and the landscape right around a house is one of the few parts of that equation you control. The first five feet matter most: keep them lean, use stone and gravel and well-watered low plants, and avoid woody mulch and shrubs against the siding. Out to thirty feet, space trees and shrubs so fire cannot ladder from the ground into the canopy or jump plant to plant.
Water early in the morning, before the midday sun and wind carry half of it off, and let the monsoon do the rest when it shows up.
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.