Until I read Robert Pyle’s “The Thunder Tree,” I was unaware of how much the history of Denver’s eastern suburbs is inexorably entwined with the High Line Canal.
In this fascinating account of the first “big” water project in Colorado (Oregon State University Press, 2011), Pyle relates a year of his childhood spent exploring the High Line Canal in the 1950s, when children actually played outdoors rather than sitting in front of a screen.
But even then, the High Line Canal was a mixed blessing. The same irrigation ditch that brought agriculture to the Eastern Plains sowed the first seeds of suburban sprawl. Pyle’s community of Hoffman Heights, considered “way out beyond Aurora” in 1953, has long since been swallowed up by housing developments that still march steadily eastward, gobbling up miles of prairie in their path.
When I moved to Smoky Hill in 1987, it was one of the southernmost high-density, single-family housing developments in the Denver metro area. My house, built in 1980, had an unobstructed view of Pikes Peak, 70 miles to the south.
All that changed when a new development was built behind us the year we purchased our home. Our “mountain view” property, as described by a real estate flier, now faces a row of large new houses.
For a time, we consoled ourselves with pastures and dirt roads still within walking distance. But in the intervening two decades, every bit of open space nearby has been consumed by more and larger housing tracts.
Why should this interest gardeners? Because all of us along the Front Range share a reality we don’t like to think too much about. The verdure of our communities is completely artificial, relying as we do on imported water.
Since most of this area’s population consists of newcomers, many of us have no idea what this land looked like before it was developed. So seductive is the idea that water is plentiful here that an environmentally inclined landscape architect from New Mexico, who had spent his childhood in Denver, told me that Denver’s climate is more like that of Kansas City than Santa Fe.
This despite the fact that Kansas City receives nearly twice the precipitation we do. On the other hand, Santa Fe’s is nearly identical to our own semi-arid average of 15 inches per year.
Perception is obviously swayed by what surrounds us — in our case, green lawn and shade trees.
Which brings us to another reality check. Water is a finite resource, and many of our suburban communities are running out. Municipal wells are drying up. Water piped in from greater and greater distances is becoming prohibitively expensive.
Gardeners rely on water. If we don’t learn to better husband this critical commodity, gardeners, like the cattle that once grazed a block from my home, are going to become things of the past.
Robert Pyle is speaking about “The Thunder Tree” at the Denver Botanic Gardens at 7 tonight, co-sponsored by the Denver Audubon Society and the Rocky Mountain Land Library. For more information, call or e-mail Panayoti Kelaidis, 720-865-3604 or kelaidisp@botanicgardens.org.
