EVERGREEN —
Everywhere that Larry Simmons lived, he always kept a garden.
Growing up in northern Illinois, Simmons, now 62, reaped the spoils of his mother’s spacious vegetable plot. Later, as a young family man living and working in the South, his own vegetable garden was so productive that bean plants towered over 10 feet tall.
But then Simmons and his wife, Betty, fell in love with a modest house on the side of a mountain in the Colorado foothills.
The challenges: shade. An altitude of 7,500 feet. Chilly nights, a short growing season, and abundant wildlife that seem to view a tended mountain garden as their own personal smorgasbord.
The silver lining: Simmons’ gardening dilemmas were shared by his neighbor for 30 years, .
The late Pierce was responsible for major landscaping contributions at the , where he worked for nearly two decades, and at in Littleton, which he helped create in 1994.
“He’d help me out whenever I’d come ask him a question,” Simmons recalls of their congenial gardening relationship. “He brought me a bunch of plants.”
The two especially shared a love of rock gardening. Pierce had a stint as president of the in addition to sitting on the board of directors of the for 33 years.
“Gardening meant everything to him,” says his wife of many years, Gina Pierce.
Then in September 2011, Andrew Pierce lost his battle with skin cancer at age 75. He left behind a grieving community of Colorado plant lovers who for years had looked to him for inspiration and advice, along with two tidy high-country gardens at the home he shared with Gina and their two (now adult) children.
This is the first summer that Andrew Pierce hasn’t tended the rock garden on the south side of his home on Independence Mountain. There, beneath the Pierces’ sun room, moss-laden stones scavenged from nearby roads are accented with cranesbill, chives, yellow-blooming ice plant and competing succulents.
Pierce, a native of Great Britain, also kept a neat little English garden peppered with bulbs and annuals at the rear of his fenced backyard.
Now, Simmons, an entrepreneurial handyman who’s long been retired from the commercial air-freight industry, looks after those gardens.
“I’ve got at least a day’s work up here,” Simmons says with a nod toward the Pierce house just uphill from his own. “I’m a master weeder.”
Simmons’ own style of gardening is thorough and passionate, but he’s hardly a perfectionist. Where Pierce liked to plant annuals for color, Simmons prefers low-maintenance perennials.
And don’t even bother asking him the names of the plants he selects.
“I don’t know the names of the plants,” Simmons says. “I just stick ’em in the ground and if they grow, fine. If they don’t, I replace ’em.”
Nonetheless, for Simmons, the routine gardener’s walk through beds and borders to survey what’s blooming, what’s fading, and what needs to be done now takes him around his own yard and then the one at the Pierce place, where a widow who has little interest in plants now lives alone and plans to travel for months at a time.
Is it much work?
“That depends on how rigorous you want to be,” Simmons says. “Once we get the watering system on a timer, it’s pretty much self-sustaining. It’s just a matter of when you want to get away … to relax and weed for a while.”
“It’s more therapeutic,” Simmons says of caring for his own gardens in addition to the Pierce property, “than it is labor or maintenance.”
Elana Ashanti Jefferson: 303-954-1957 or ejefferson@denverpost.com
