Winter 2006-2007: A Season in the Garden
· Escape Garden Design, Aspen, Colorado
Winter is when a mountain garden earns or loses its keep, because there are no flowers to hide behind.
Most of our work this season happens indoors at the drawing table, planning the gardens we will build once the ground opens. The cold months are the busiest at the drawing board, even if it does not look that way from the road.
The birds keep the place alive in winter, working the seed heads we left standing and sheltering in the spruce, which is reason enough to leave the fall cleanup undone.
Out in the garden, the evergreens carry the whole composition now, and a heavy wet snowfall is the one thing worth bundling up for, to brush the weight off upright branches before it splits them.
Aside from the weather, here is what was on our minds in the garden this season. We are lucky to work in a place where the best feature is often outside the property line, and a good design pulls those distant peaks and ridgelines into the composition. The Japanese call it shakkei, borrowed scenery, framing a far view so it becomes part of the near garden. We do it by lining up a gap in the planting, a path, or a gate with a mountain beyond, so the eye travels from your feet to the horizon.
Watch for the heavy, wet storms that snap branches, keep paths safe, and otherwise let the snow lie on the beds where it does the most good.
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 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.
That is the season from where we stand. We will check back when the next one turns.