Posted January 27, 2012 by Matt Cole, Director of Education
A Tangelo blooms in the Denver Botanic Gardens Orangery in winter.
Winter is busy, and not just for Colorado skiers. Gardeners are planning, dreaming and preparing; growers are tending indoor blooms; and propagators are starting plants to be ready for warm weather: busy! Evergreens are balancing photosynthesis and drought, orchids are delivering on the promise of color and beauty, and seeds are trying to intuit the fine line between germinating too soon and too late: busy! For some gardeners, winter means that their busy, short days can’t hold time to appreciate each bloom and everything that is happening.
You can’t always look ahead either. It was pure chance that I saw this white Tangelo blossom on a snowy day. (The Orangery at the Gardens looks lovely with the orchid showcase throughout.)
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Posted May 25, 2010 by Matt Cole, Director of Education
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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Posted May 17, 2010 by Matt Cole, Director of Education
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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Posted May 8, 2010 by Matt Cole, Director of Education
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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Posted May 9, 2008 by Matt Cole, Director of Education
Flowers don’t wave to gardeners. They grow, they bloom, they wave gently in the breeze, but they don’t wave to gardeners, even if gardeners wave first. They reserve their flirtatious side for pollinators. They only wave to catch the roving eye of insects.
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Posted in: At the Gardens, Education, Rocky Mountain Gardening, What's Blooming - Comments(1)