Denver Botanic Garden's green roof
This is the week for the Green Roof for the West Symposium! On Thursday, June 17, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Denver Botanic Gardens opens its doors to a regional conference with international speakers. The Gardens and its co-hosts (the U.S. Green Building Council – Colorado Chapter, Colorado State University and UC-Denver College of Architecture and Planning) have been looking and working towards a reprise of last year’s sucess. This year promises to be as forward-thinking and informative as the first ever symposium, also held at the Gardens. The registration price is $125 for the entire day, and current students with valid ID pay only $30. Includes continental breakfast, box lunch and beverages.
The symposium will feature a full day of in-depth sessions, presented by leading green roof experts and designers from across the U.S. and around the world.
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Hummingbird perching in the Lilac Garden
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Hummingbird perching in the Lilac Garden
Check out this hummingbird, spotted almost directly overhead in the Lilac Garden at Denver Botanic Gardens. Normally, I’m more interested in the horticultural and botanic than I am in the animals I might happen to see in Denver. But this bird was twittering away, paused to sit for just a moment on the branch, then leapt from its perch into the air and swooped and dived several times before dashing across the Gardens. I was lucky to enough to share the experience with both adults and children. (Doesn’t it seem like the Gardens is be a great place for children and families in the summer? Look here or read Lisa’s blog.) It was neat enough to see a hummingbird, to watch it perching with an audience as entranced as we were was divine!
I’m eating lunch right now. (That’s part of the reason there is no picture: you don’t need to see me chewing.) And this sandwich is my payoff for being attentive to my gardening. It might seem to be just a leftover from dinner last night, but I know it includes the first harvest of homegrown spinach for the year. Its fun to grow plants for their beauty, or the composition of the garden overall, but there’s a special satisfaction that comes with the first harvest of something edible.
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David Salman of High Country Gardens
David Salman has plenty to keep him busy. There are plants to tend, businesses to run, articles and blogs to write (and if you read his blog, there’s a rescued puppy named Jarrah who’s always ready to play), and certainly an appreciative audience anywhere there are gardeners in the west. We are so fortunate to have him join us in Denver for “Inspired by Mountains and Plains: Redefining the Well-Adapted Regional Garden” Friday, May 21 at 7:00 p.m.
Its a story familiar to anyone whose left lush gardens behind to move into the west: rocky mountain gardening is profoundly different. While many mail order nurseries can send you a plant across the country, their experiences and catalogue descriptions aren’t usually calibrated for a mile high and western dry. David Salman started High Country Gardens to be the mail order division of Santa Fe Greenhouses, his retail nursery company in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He tapped in to a desire for plants appropriate to western climates. And it seems he’s quite good at it.
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I can tell gardening season is here, not just by the brilliant sunshine, the gardeners eager to get started, the students jumping into classes that they’ll use next week, the plant sale and the shoppers, or the colleague rashly vowing to start his peppers outdoors this weekend in spite of frost warnings at his altitude. Rocky Mountain Gardening has some element of risk and unpredictability after all (last nights low in Denver was close enough to freezing to inspire a protective measures for all the plant sale plants). No, its the sequence of plants blooming, and the patterns of temperatures, and the reactions people make that confirms it all to me. Spring sprang already, and now’s the time to get into gardens, landscapes and yards.
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Tea
The serenity of my evening tea was abruptly shattered by a mildly shocking recognition. For those of us who reach a certain age–not the same age for all of us, but you’ll recognize the quandary if you have reached it–its no longer a question of “Does art imitate life, or vice versa?” its “Am I imitating my parents or did I become them?” After dinner, after my mother read stories to us, after my father finished the dishes, that was when the tea was served.
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Colorado’s own mining towns have stories of boom and bust, gold rushes, fortunes made and lost. But tomorrow night I’m looking East, not West. Mike Bone is preparing to tell the stories of his travel to the Golden Mountains of Central Asia as a plant explorer. And it will be a fascinating travelogue of places most of us will not see, but also, a glimpse into a tradition overlooked by most botanists and gardeners.
There is a book on my shelf, here above my head next to Tulipomania and The Orchid Thief, called In Pursuit of Plants by Philip Short that details the lives of plant collectors and explorers. These people, usually men, not necessarily botanists, scoured the world bringing specimens, alive or preserved, back to wealthy sponsors, or to scientists, or for their own obsessive collections. What struck me most about the eighteenth-century plant explorers was how many of them died before they saw or felt much success. Also, it seems many were often suffering in poverty, from strange diseases or in abject misery born of some privation. Have I mentioned how glad I am that Mike Bone and the other travelers made it back?
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David Montgomery, geomorphologist and author
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Dr. Montgomery
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Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization by David Montgomery cover shot.
When gardeners dish the dirt, they may speak of soil, either their own or the soil they wished they had. It really is the bed in which you make your garden lie. So 2008 MacArthur ‘Genius’ award recipient David Montgomery, author of Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, is the perfect speaker to help peer into our soil’s soul and see what sustainable means to the planet’s soil.
Speaking at March 4th’s Down and Dirty: the Scoop on Soil, Dr. David Montgomery will share his thoughts on the human relationship with soil. Today’s gardeners interested in growing food, enjoying beauty and living sustainably have many of the same challenges that humans have faced throughout history. Plant nutrition, soil erosion, healthy harvests, sustainable production all have underground dimensions: any garden’s foundation is literally the soil.
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