What's Blooming: A New Garden!
By Andrew Scott, Horticulturist
We have a new garden being developed at the Gardens on Spring Creek! Since the expansion in 2018, there has been an unused plot nestled between the Prairie and Undaunted Gardens and the community garden beside the parking lot. For years, it’s merely been an empty mulched area where antsy volunteers could weed mallow and bindweed if they finished their original task early, but in collaboration with Colorado State University, the space is on its way to being a pretty and purposefully curated garden.
As you can imagine a lot of time and effort goes into bringing a new garden to life. The process began last October when CSU’s Professor Zach Johnson approached Michelle Provaznik, Garden’s Director, and Dillon Hancock, Operations and Horticulture Supervisor, about a potential opportunity for his students to get some hands-on, real-world experience with landscape design. A couple underutilized spaces were selected as redesign options, one being a crevice garden built beside the restroom platform on the west side of the Foothills Garden, the other being the “free for all” garden next to the community garden, according to Dillon.
Johnson, along with his colleagues Scott Curry and Chris Tragakes, brought students to the Gardens in November to tour both sites and get the wheels spinning for project designs for the coming spring semester. Each concept design was prepared by a team of students with mixed experience in the landscape design and contracting program; having freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors collaborating allowed less experienced students to learn from their peers but also offer fresh input that may have gone against common landscaping conventions.
Once the concepts were finished a month later, Dillon, Michael Coleman (our development officer), and Bryan Fischer (our curator and plant wizard) attended presentations and provided feedback so students could tweak their designs further in the spring. Once the designs were finalized, our team met to discuss and deliberate on each one to decide a finalist. We liked concepts from multiple designs, but the design of the “Sustainable Pollinator & Wildlife Garden” the most.
However, the theme had to be reworked given that these concepts are already represented onsite with our Sustainable Backyard and Butterfly & Hummingbird gardens. In April, I met with the team leads to discuss the strengths and critiques of their design, allowing them to tweak their hardscape layouts and tweak their plant list to increase the value of our collection (many of the plants in the plan were well represented on site already).
Suggestions were made to steer more towards either a private and tranquil garden hidden among elderberry hedges, or take inspiration from a mountain stream habitat, playing off the nearby naturalistic gardens that lead into our Wetlands Garden. Ground was broken shortly after and students focused on hardscaping over the course of two days, installing crusher fine paths and aligning boulders into a private foyer that will allow visitors to immerse themselves and be surrounded by plants on three sides.
The next steps in this process are convert the irrigation from its current spray configuration to a lower pressure system that can handle drip irrigation. Getting the weeds under control is also a priority, either through physical removal of the soil or installing plants as a cultural method of weed management, and there are talks of organizing a planting with the students this fall once the plant list is revised and tightened. Stay tuned!