First-time visitors are always surprised to learn that the Mile High City is not actually in the mountains. Denver, with its notoriously cold winters, hot, dry summers and erratic precipitation, instead typifies the high plains and steppes, a huge area that stretches across much of the American interior West.
The mountains are so close that, on a clear day, you’d swear you can reach out and touch them. With such lofty peaks as Mount Evans, at more than 14,000 feet in elevation and only a couple of hours’ drive away from downtown Denver, the Rocky Mountains can’t help but have a huge impact on gardeners who live in their shadows.
Nevertheless, until recently, Front Range gardeners have tried to practice garden ideals imported from the East Coast, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest and England — despite the undeniable disparity in our growing conditions. Hence the widely held belief that gardening is uncommonly difficult in Colorado — and it is if you’re trying to garden as if you lived in Connecticut.
But fortunately, when it comes to ornamental gardening, an amazing transformation is taking place in Colorado. Savvy gardeners are starting to recognize that our strength lies in our differences. We’ve got to stop caviling about the unique set of circumstances that shape our region. The new garden model that is emerging instead embraces and celebrates Colorado’s potential while remaining grounded in the reality of where we live.
Although this is not the best place to grow a wide selection of trees, there are enough choices to create urban forests in every major city in the interior West. We may not be able to grow camellias (outside in the garden anyway) but the compensation is all of the cold-desert shrubs that are impossible in wetter, “easier” climates. In fact, for every plant that doesn’t like it here, there are dozens that do.
Tropical plants of all sorts adore Denver’s hot summers. Agapanthus, cannas, pineapple lilies, setcreasea, begonias, brugmansia and rain lilies, all come back year after year when stored dormant in a cool, dark place over the winter months.
With hundreds to choose from, summer annuals are easy to grow from seed or affordable to buy in flats in spring. Succulents that can’t take the cold — aeonium, aptinia, crassula, dracaena, echeveria, kalanchoe and the like — are content to spend winter indoors in a sunny window. Traditional houseplants can also join container plantings for the summer, reverting to houseplant status again in winter.
If you want to grow tropicals exclusively, Tampa Bay or San Diego would be better locations. But only in Denver do you find tropicals mixing it up with high plains wildflowers, montane shrubs, high mountain alpines, herbs from the Mediterranean, temperate perennials, trees and shrubs, cacti and succulents from both cold and warm deserts, as well as all of the old garden standards, including roses, bulbs, vegetables and many types of fruit.
It doesn’t get any better than this. So let’s stop telling ourselves that Colorado is a challenging place to garden.
Marcia Tatroe is a garden writer and lecturer. Her most recent book is “Cutting Edge Gardening in the Intermountain West,” ($29.95, Johnson Books). E-mail her at rltaurora@aol.com.
