At least we’ve got the sun going for us.
Otherwise, gardening in Colorado can be fraught with challenge. The soil, often, is dense clay. Winds whip, winter temperatures can dip well below zero, spring freezes torment budding plants, the sky along the Front Range is alternately parsimonious and violent with its offerings.
It’s not the kind of place where any old plant will thrive with little care.
It is the kind of place that demands the attention of its gardeners.
Good thing people like Mikl Brawner and Eve Reshetnik-Brawner, the husband-wife owners of Harlequin’s Gardens in Boulder, are around to help.
“We’re trying to find the plants and methods in the difficult conditions of Colorado that are adapted and attuned to these conditions,” says Mikl.
Difficult growing conditions define a normal year along the Front Range, but the past year has been oppressive. The snow fell, and fell, and fell, and refused to retreat. Temperatures plummeted over and over. Branches broke, shrubs flattened, and Xeriscape plants were tested as never before – more than two months of snow, ice, and drip, drip, drip from a long, slow melt.
Harlequin’s is 2 acres of highly exposed flatland, sitting between a patch of prairie and the mouth of a canyon. After each blizzard last winter, the wind roaring out of the canyon blew the snow blanketing the 20-acre field onto the Brawners’ land.
The snow entombed a greenhouse that sat in a small depression. Mikl and helpers had to dig tunnels from the surface to reach the greenhouse, which was filled with plants (all of which survived). Another structure suffered a partial collapse.
So much snow shrouded the area that rabbits, unable to reach the plants they normally eat, swarmed the Brawners’ property, gnawing on anything edible they could find poking out of the frozen husk.
And then there were the plants themselves, spending those cold months dark and sheathed in ice.
How, the Brawners wondered, would everything fare?
Some of the succulents, like agaves, suffered. Plenty of branches snapped. But for the most part, Harlequin’s Gardens emerged from the brutal winter healthy.
“Sometimes I panicked, I looked and everything was covered in ice. But the plants are tough,” says Mikl. “These are not plants that have been babied. We expect our plants to be tough enough for Colorado, to be able to buy them in April, put them in the ground, and they get snowed on. It snows every year in April.”
And the bulk of his drought-tolerant plants withstood the wet winter.
Scads of local garden centers have scant connection to the Front Range. Plants are grown in Florida and California, trucked here, and sold in Boulder, Arvada, Denver, Golden or Castle Rock. They are plunged into soil categorically different from that of, say, Dade County, Fla. Their leaves rattle in dry air, their branches bend in cold breezes, their roots struggle to snake through hard clay. They don’t always exactly thrive.
The Brawners are almost evangelical in their attachment to the gospel of local and natural. Things planted here should feel at home. Could the Brawners’ shrubs and trees and flowers flash bumper stickers, they would say “Native.”
Pesticides or industrial fertilizers never mist their plants or land. They use “beneficial insects,” like ladybugs, to deal with pests. Instead of artificially pumping up plants with loads of fertilizer, they make sure the soil is suited for the plants.
“In 25 years of research, I’ve found that strong and healthy plants are the keys to not using chemicals,” says Mikl. “Picking plants that like Colorado and not pushing them.”
And their patch of gardens and greenhouses – all of it dug and built by Mikl – have gathered around themselves a “community,” says avid Boulder County gardener Susan Spaulding, who also is a manager at Denver Botanic Gardens.
“I’ve always considered Harlequin’s Gardens a living example of steady effort and vision pays off,” she says. “We lived around the corner from there (about 20 years ago) and it was just a funky little dirt patch. But Mikl’s effort has been consistent and persistent. You know, you think something like that could never be successful. How could you have a nursery on a funky little piece of land like that?”
Mikl is a big, ruddy guy, weathered from years under the sun, with a small gold earring. He usually wears a hat – a beret, say, or a floppy gardener’s cap. He was raised in Iowa and is trained as an arborist, a tree specialist. He bought the Harlequin’s Gardens land in the early 1980s and has dedicated himself to it since. He opened Harlequin’s Gardens in 1992.
Ask Mikl a question about a plant or a gardening technique and by the time you walk away, you’ll know much more than you expected.
Eve grew up in New York City, moved to Boulder County in 1978 and never left. She became involved with Harlequin’s Gardens in 1998, when she and Mikl became romantically involved.
Her world always has revolved around nature, even in New York, where she would research all of the plants she’d encounter in the city. She’s an artist. Her subject? Plants.
Roses are one of Eve’s specialties, and she has toiled to husband a wealth of Colorado-
adapted roses, hardy specimens that are grown on their own roots. Many are from “found roses” – roses that have survived for years in cemeteries and other plots, despite abject neglect. Roses that withstand all that Colorado throws at them, without help from caring gardeners, are perfect for propagation, says Eve.
Visit Harlequin’s Gardens on a summer Saturday, and you’ll find Eve, a slight woman with dark hair and a New York accent, drifting from person to person, answering questions. You’ll also encounter employees – two full-time people and about 10 part-timers.
You’ll wander through the “display gardens” threading the land, each of which shows what different native or well-adapted plants look like. The structure where customers pay for stuff contains a reference library and couches – people are invited to hang out and read.
Most winter months, the energy bill for the entire plant-production operation is zero – the nursery depends on solar and thermal energy for most of its heat. During a bad month, it might rise to $50. Water? They use it, but not much. Some gardens receive the hose treatment only five times a year.
It’s a unique place, a motley assortment of hand-made greenhouses, a maze of display gardens, and a smattering of areas where plants are for sale. It’s clearly not the result of a mandate from some distant corporation – it’s more like a window into the personalities and passions of Eve and Mikl.
Good thing.
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
How to get there
Harlequin’s Gardens, at 4795 N. 26th St., can be a little tricky to find. Check the map on their website (harlequins) if the area is unfamiliar to you, or call for directions, 303-939-9403.
