On the east bank of the South Platte, between Elitch Gardens and the Speer Boulevard bridge, lies what may be the loneliest park in Denver:
Centennial Gardens.
A visit to the grounds of Versailles inspired former Mayor Wellington Webb and wife Wilma to envision a formal French garden on a 5-acre site that used to be a car crushing plant. The city spent $3.3 million building it in 2001 — the end of Denver’s last economic boom when Webb, a la Louis XIV, was transforming the city’s landscape.
Six years after its metal gates opened, Centennial goes largely unvisited and the success of Webb’s vision is in question.
“It hasn’t become one of the signature parks in our system,” says parks spokeswoman Jill McGranahan. “We want to see people in our gardens. Maybe a change is worth exploring.”
“Hidden asset. Secret jewel. Those are all nice terms. But I’d like to see it be a little less hidden and a little less sacred,” adds Jeff Shoemaker of the Greenway Foundation, a nonprofit working along the Platte.
Centennial is owned by the city and maintained by the Denver Botanic Gardens. Its goal is ambitious: a formal French design grown exclusively with native, drought- tolerant plants that are watered once a week.
By hand, horticulturist Maria Bumgarner has pruned mountain mahogany bushes into neat hedges she cuts at orthogonal angles. By hand, she has shaped Wichita blue junipers into formal cones resembling Hershey’s Kisses. By hand, she has planted 40,000 bulbs. And by hand, she fights bindweeds that blow in from the Platte.
The symmetry and stiffness appeal to her sense of order and neatness, though she admits it’s a matter of taste.
“Man over nature. That’s what formal gardens are about,” she says.
Bumgarner has worked to place more benches — albeit uncomfortably backless, concrete ones — close to the gardens’ five fountains. And she has planted more trees to someday offer much-needed shade.
Other problems aren’t so easy to fix.
Like city budget cuts that slashed the garden’s funding from $155,000 last year to $102,000 this year, and limited manpower from three full-timers to one.
And an even more fundamental challenge — slow visitation. In four sunny and warm hours Tuesday afternoon, only two people came for a stroll.
“Is this the botanical gardens?” asked Karen Maslanka, a tourist from Three Rivers, Mich.
“We were hoping for something, you know, more botanical,” added friend Kim Weiland.
It won’t help the obscurity problem that in August, when at least 35,000 Democrats are expected at the nearby Pepsi Center, the city will close the gardens for security reasons.
Denver is working on a master plan to improve parks along the stretch of the Platte that includes Centennial. The city also is working to make its parks more busy and active. No decisions have been made about the park’s future, but both plans may not bode well for a formal garden with few visitors.
Bumgarner, a 30-year-old redhead, has toiled for four years in the space she calls Denver’s “red-headed stepchild.” She fears that the garden’s days may be numbered and, like any gardener, wants the fruits of her labor to reach maturity. In Centennial’s case, that could take 14 more years.
“I feel like crying when I talk about this, but the city has made it clear that we might not be around next year,” she says. “This may be my last chance to help this garden grow.”
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or sgreene@denverpost.com.
