Most times when we tour gardens, we arrive en masse and then we “oooh” and “aaah” and marvel at all the beautifully-grown plants and cleverly-designed components. We might say hello to the gardener, if he or she is there. Sometimes we even delve a little into the shared passion for nature that has one person judging what the other person has taken many years to achieve. But rarely do we learn much about the gardener’s other life. So it was with great interest that I read about Carol and Randall Shinn of Fort Collins, Colorado, whose beautiful garden I visited this month with the Garden Bloggers’ Fling. They met at the University of Colorado in Boulder, then enjoyed long careers in education, Carol in visual arts, and Randall in music composition. Their careers took them across the country, and finally to Tempe, Arizona for 28 years. When they moved to Colorado from the desert, it was because “water seemed more plentiful here than in any other city in the front range”. This was my bus window view as we pulled up in front of their home.
Carol’s artistic career has involved observing nature, photographing scenes that move her, transferring the images to fabric, then machine-stitching them to enhance the details and intensify the colours. This embroidery is as intricate and unusual an art form as her garden, which stitches together various manifestations of her interests as they evolved since moving here in 2006. Walking up the driveway, on one side is a traditional June planting of peonies, sages and bearded irises at their peak….
…. while the other side features gritty soil and a spectacular mix of colourful Colorado native penstemons, erigerons, white Astragalus angustifolius and tall yellow prince’s plume (Stanleya pinnata).
In front of the garage is a shrub we would see a lot of in the Denver area, native Apache plume (Fallugia paradoxa).
A sumptuous ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ peony flanks the walk to the front door…..
….. where a comfy wicker chair rests near the roses.
Bearded irises perform well in Carol’s garden, here with Rocky Mountain penstemon (P. strictus)…..
…. and peonies are the essence of June. Note the compact conifers, which lend winter interest to gardens where snow can appear even in late spring, as it did this year in the front range.
A dry stream bed meanders past a lupine and presumably diverts rain water in wet weather.
The most striking feature is the crevice garden, a haven for alpine collectables and a nod to the sandstone and basalt of the hulking Rocky Mountains nearby. I loved how it was artfully integrated into the more traditional plantings…..
…. and sections stitched together with thymes and other groundcovers.
Vertical crevice gardens are increasingly popular with alpine enthusiasts, patterned after the first iterations of this style as created by Czech rock gardeners like Zdenek Zvolánek, Ota Vlasak, Josef Halda and Vojtech Holubec, as Denver rock garden czar Panayoti Kelaidis relates in this blog. (As an aside, I have written about and photographed the massive crevice garden designed by Zvolánek for Montreal Botanical Garden’s Alpine Garden.) Some of Carol’s crevice gardens were designed by Kenton Seth.
Carol Shinn, left, explains the process to Garden Design owner Jim Peterson and his wife Valerie.
In men, it can lead to erectile dysfunction, as well as chronic tension, stress, general postural complaints and sports injuries. on line viagra see now Medical representative also take a lot cheap viagra without prescription of amount for the promotion of the medicine increases the rate of market retail price. And yes, there can be peace and tranquility in the cheap viagra online bedroom for you and your partner. Ajanta Pharma http://davidfraymusic.com/project/david-fray-the-german-symphony-orchestra-at-the-dso-berlin/ purchase levitra is successful in delivering its services to 12 countries because on internet.
Look at all those tiny treasures, each in its own space, protected against incursion of other plants by mighty rock walls.
The path to the back garden leads under an arched gate…..
…. behind which is wreathed a tangle of clematis.
Roses and irises continue the June show here, along with chives…..
….. and I do love bronze bearded irises.
In a far corner is the vegetable garden and….
…. beyond that, a series of no-nonsense compost bins.
And surprise, surprise! more rock garden in the back, this time horizontal crevices with the sweetest hens-and-chicks (Sempervivum).
There is water back here, too. This bird-friendly waterfall and pond makes a lovely splash near the house….
….. and mounted on the fence is this very cool Corten and concrete wall fountain.
The iconic bluestem joint fir (Ephedra equestina) looks happy in front of a colour-coordinated wall in a well-contained niche to prevent it from colonizing….
… while a striped amaryllis lights up the dappled shade under a conifer.
What a diverse, beautiful garden – all “embroidered” together with skill and love.
I’m taking a little break from my New Zealand blog marathon (just a few gardens left, and I’ll get to them later) to jaunt on down to the high plains of Colorado and take you on a spring stroll through Denver Botanic Gardens. I was there about 10 days ago en route to Utah and then Texas, and it was a tulip extravaganza. The garden made sure everyone driving along York street got a colourful eyeful……
….. and they were planted in sunset colours at the entrance.
Going in, we were impressed by the towering specimens of coral tower-of-jewels (Echium wildpretii), a show-stopper if there ever was one!
The honey bees were enjoying it too (all echiums are great pollinator plants).
We made a beeline (haha) for the Boettcher Memorial Tropical Conservatory. This is what it looks like from the far side of DBG’s outdoor UMB Bank Amphitheatre (aka best-ever-hill-rolling-for-little-kids-spot).
And this is what that roof looks like inside.
I climbed to the top to see the queen’s wreath (Petrea volubilis), which was happy in the heat and humidity.
Every time I go into a tropical glasshouse, I discover something new and fun – like this variegated clown fig (Ficus aspera ‘Parcelii’).
But it was a beautiful spring Saturday and I was eager to see the outdoor gardens, so we went past yet another little colony of Star Trek-like towers-of-jewel….
….. into Shady Lane, where people were enjoying all the different crabapples in bloom.
If they paid attention, they’d have gleaned lots of lessons in woodland underplanting, like this yellow Tulipa tarda with Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla)….
….. and red-flowered barrenwort (Epimedium x rubrum) with windflowers (Anemone blanda).
Walking on, we came to the brand-new (2016) Steppe Garden. What an undertaking this was, but a perfect choice for Denver, which sits in the high foothills of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains! In the Central Asian Steppe, below, I loved the combination of the Fritillaria pallidiflora, native to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, Iris bucharica and Tulipa greigii.
The bumble bee below was gathering lots of pollen from the fritillaria.
Isn’t this water feature fabulous?
And look, a sweet little Iberis taurica, from Turkey, peeking out from the stacked limestone of the fountain.
I can hardly wait to come back next June (yes, my annual Garden Bloggers’ Fling is happening in mid-June 2019 right here in Denver!) to see the North American Steppe with all its native penstemons.
Water runs throughout DBG in the form of canals, formal pools, waterfalls and freeform ponds. It reflects the blue of the sky and is the perfect place to exhibit large sculpture, like Frank Swanson’s ‘Reflections’. And yes, that little girl seeing her reflection did have parents nearby watching.
Springtime at a botanical garden, before the perennials emerge and shrubs and trees leaf out – but when the crowds begin to arrive – is dependent on the early show of tulips, daffodils, tulips and other spring bulbs. When I was in the Annuals Garden & Pavilion, visitors all had their cameras and phones out…..
……to record the brilliant display of tulips and other bulbs….
……. in the area that will later feature an annuals display.
On the margins, there were also spring-blooming perennials, like this sumptuous combination of blue Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla) with purple violas.
The Ann Montague Iris & Daylily Garden was getting ready to strut its stuff. How wonderful this garden would be in late spring and early summer!
DBG’s theme gardens are very specific, which is great if you have a particular craving to see, for example, a good selection of plants in the Dwarf Conifer Garden, below.
While other botanical gardens might feature flowering bulbs in spring, DBG has flowering cacti! Not sure of the identity of the sweet thing below, with Bell’s Twinpod (Physaria bellii) in the Desert Wash Garden.
Apart from the plants of the steppe, Denver Botanic Gardens is renowned for its meandering Rock Alpine Garden. Those purplish pools are….
…. lovely blue wooly speedwell (Veronica pectinata).
Spring adonis (A. vernalis) was lighting up the gravel, too!
A little background here: I visited DBG for the first time in 2006, and through an interesting set of circumstances my husband and I were toured around by DBG’s current Senior Curator and Director of Outreach Panayoti Kelaidis (since that bio, he’s co-authored a book titled Steppes: The Plants and Ecology of the World’s Semi-Arid Regions, Timber Press, 2015). For 90 minutes, Panayoti whisked us from one garden to another, waxing poetic on each theme and heaping praise on the talented staff who worked there. Subsequently we met each other as plant geeks on Facebook; then in January he was the American Horticultural Society host on the New Zealand garden tour on which my husband and I visited all the fabulous gardens I’ve been blogging about for the past few months. This is Panayoti and me heading into a small boat to explore the reaches of Fiordland’s spectacular Doubtful Sound.
Back to the Alpine Rock Garden…. The wonderful Crevice Garden, below, is the work of Mike Kintgen.
You aren’t tied to a specific time or location, as you canadian pharmacy cialis would be with a local course. get cialis overnight The risks of male impotence increase with the age or may last for a very long time, until an individual goes for medical treatment. If we see that visit over here buy generic cialis the price of it, we see it is so cheap. Oats- It can help you being a good lover in the bed. online pharmacy viagraLook at the rich colour of this winter heath (Erica carnea ‘Vivellii’).
I loved this pretty combination of Bergenia ciliata and Scilla forbesii.
The plants below are growing in “limestone cliffs” habitat.
I found this gorgeous Paeonia mascula at the edges of the Alpine Rock Garden.
And there are one or two troughs in this area as well, with tiny treasures for the most avid alpine fans.
In the shade of the Cactus & Succulent House, I found a few fritillaries, including Fritillaria acmopetala.
At the very edge of the rock gardens was a stand of western river birch (Betula occidentalis), a tree I didn’t know at all and was happy to discover.
The Gates Montane Garden contains plants that you might see in Colorado’s mountain habitats, especially in the Bear Creek Canyon where the late Charles C. Gates (to whom the garden is dedicated) once resided, like the mountain alders (Alnus incana ssp. tenuifolia) below.
And here I found wax currant (Ribes cereum) with its dainty, white flowers.
As if knowing that a montane garden is the perfect place for a Colorado native, this cottontail rabbit was busy munching grasses.
Just beyond was a perfect view of the eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis) casting a reflection on the pond in the Shofu-En Japanese Garden.
There is nothing like looking through a redbud.
Walking around the pond, I came to a spot that looked out on the exquisitely-pruned pines in the Japanese garden.
Next up was a garden that would be a treat to visit in summer, the Laura Smith Porter Plains Garden, honouring the woman who in the 1800s came as a child in a covered wagon to Denver City. There were some interesting succulents, but prairie flowers were still weeks away. That frieze is very interesting. It’s called The Story of a Pikes Peaker and was carved in 1925 by Robert Garrison for the Midland Savings Bank. Romanesque in style, it is decidedly western in theme and, though it might be considered insensitive some 90 years later with its one-sided version of the battles between “Pikes Peak or Bust” pioneers and native Americans, it is certainly impressive and lends a stately frontier air to this little piece of the grassy plains.
Back in the central part of the garden, there was more water and a waterfall. Do you see that little American toad?
It was doing a frog-kick.
And I couldn’t help but video the chorus of toads in this pool (I think it’s the Monet Pool.) Listen…..
Circling around the pool, we came to Le Potager. Though the rhubarb was looking fine and the lettuce under its protective mesh (mmm…. bunnies…) was ready for salads, most of the planting here was still to be done.
The Sacred Earth Garden was just waking up, but it features plants traditionally used by the more than twenty Native American tribes of the Colorado Plateau, which includes parts of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.
I found Texas madrone (Arbutus xalapensis) with its pretty white flowers in the Dryland Mesa Garden here……
Flanking the pool on the side of the conservatory, I discovered the Plant Select Demonstration Garden, featuring plants especially chosen, grown and marketed as ideal for low-water areas with extremes of winter and summer temperatures. The program, now 21 years old, was launched with the help of Panayoti Kelaidis. You can hear him talking about plants like the ice plant below Delosperma ‘P001S’, aka Fire Spinner, in this video.
This little Plant Select native Clematis hirsutissima var. scottii or Scott’s Sugarbowls caught my eye.
Doing a wide swing and heading back into the garden, we walked over to the Science Pyramid, below, but time was running out.
We gazed up the length of the El Pomar Waterway. In a month or so, those containers will be filled with succulents and ornamental grasses will swish along the canal.
At The Ellipse in Honor of Nancy Schotters, the gardeners had done a splendid job of matching up tulips in the shape and colours of the Dale Chihuly sculpture in the centre of the pool.
We passed by the Schlessmann Plaza…..
…. and the water wall at the York Street end of the El Pomar Waterway.
The O’Fallon Perennial Walk was just waking up, the perennials poking out of the ground, …….
….. but my memories of it in June from my 2006 visit, below, will help you understand how gorgeous this will be later.
Since we had started our day in Toronto at 4:30 in the morning, I was too tired to head across York Street to visit the Children’s Garden and opted to return to the hotel before dinner (and a next-morning flight to Utah). But that omission (and all those gardens that feature summer plants) will be remedied in June 2019, when I return to Denver Botanic Gardens with my Garden Blogger friends!
After travelling on the 10th day of our American Horticultural Society “Gardens, Wine & Wilderness Tour” from Lake Manapouri and Doubtful Sound to Dunedin in Otago on the east coast of the South Island, a 3-1/2 hour journey of 291 kilometres (182 miles)……
…. we arrived in the city late in the afternoon. Our route took us past the Dunedin Railway Station. Built in the Edwardian Baroque style in 1906, it provided train service for a city that had been founded 58 years earlier by the Free Church of Scotland. In fact Dunedin is the old Gaelic name for Edinburgh, and it was the Scots who were the first colonists, though the Māori had already occupied the land for some 700 years. It was a big whaling port in its early days, then the Otago Gold Rush of the 1860s led to its rapid expansion.
Where we had slept in a stateroom aboard a boat on Doubtful Sound in Fiordland the night before, tonight we would be sleeping in a rather lovely room at the Distinction Dunedin Hotel. What made it extra-special was the fact that the room was equipped with a clothes washer and dryer. If you’ve travelled for any length of time on a bus tour, you’ll know how welcome that would be.
Feeling a little tired after the drive, we ordered up a light room-service dinner of cheese plate & salad, and cracked a bottle of Marlborough Chardonnay.
The next morning, we headed out to Dunedin Botanic Garden….
…..where we were met in the parking lot for an orientation by Alan Matchett (left), Garden Team Leader/Curator and Collection Curator, Dylan Norfield.
Opened in 1863, it is New Zealand’s first botanic garden. It occupies 30.4 hectares (75 acres) on a property that slopes from native Lovelock Bush, the New Zealand Native Plant Collection, Geographic Collection and Rhododendron Dell at the top down a hillside through the Southern African Garden and Mediterranean Terrace and Rock Garden – all considered the Upper Garden – to the Lower Garden where you find Herbaceous Borders, a Knot Garden, Glasshouses, the Clive Lister Garden, the Rose Garden, Theme Borders and a Water Garden. The main gates open to an intersection of three of Dunedin’s main streets.
We set off behind Alan and Dylan for a tour that was sadly much too short to see all the features of this wonderful garden.
The Native Plant Collection is vast, and includes traditional borders…..
There were cultivars and hybrids of natives here, like silver-leafed Brachyglottis ‘Otari Cloud’….
….. and the lovely variegated Pittosporum tenuifolium ‘Irene Patterson’. Unlike the UK and the mild west coast, pittosporums are not much seen in northeast North America. I wish I’d had time to search out many more.
In the shadier sections, the New Zealand rock lily or renga renga (Arthropodium cirratum) was in flower…….
…… and bush flax (Astelia fragrans) was already in fruit.
We toured a fascinating Alpine Scree. On an island so dominated by the rugged Southern Alps (it is estimated that one-third of New Zealand’s flora exists in the alpine zone), it’s interesting to see plants adapted to the gravelly slopes of mountains…..
…..like giant Spaniard (Aciphylla scott-thomsonii), below. Though often called Spaniard grass or speargrass, the spiky Aciphyllas are actually umbellifers, members of Apiaceae that flower in November. The flowers in my closeup below have withered and blackened.
Here’s a vigorous clump of Marlborough rock daisy (Pachystegia insignis).
In the Geographic Collections, we noted South American plants like evergreen Luma apiculata from the Central Andes between Chile and Argentina…
….and Lomandra longifolia from Australia.
We made a brief stop at the Rhododendron Dell, which forms a large part of the 4-hectare (10-acre) Woodland Garden. Naturally, as we visited in summer, nothing was in flower, but I can only imagine what these massive ‘Halopeanum’ rhodos would have looked like in November.
Descending, we made our way through the large Southern African Garden.
There were beautiful king proteas here (P. cynaroides).
….. and masses of the dwarf Agapanthus ‘Streamline’.
How spectacular is this eye-popping planting of Crassula coccinea, native to the fynbos of the Western Cape?
With time running out, I raced through the Mediterranean Garden, with its formal pool…..
….. and balustrade overlook, with the hills of Dunedin in the distance. But I knew I’d be coming back here today after another tour stop to spend lots of time retracing my steps to really explore the place!
In the Lower Garden, there was a Knot Garden patterned on the one in the Shakespeare Garden at Stratford-on-Avon.
And in classic public garden style, there was a stunning herbaceous border that I viewed from one end……
….. to the other.
Look at these lovely combinations: alstroemerias and bright pink phlox with Salvia guaranitica ‘Black and Blue’….. Certain people do not have period for checking out stores. levitra online LifeSkills4Kids has order cialis http://raindogscine.com/?attachment_id=65 used weighted therapy for many years. This can be because of many reasons such as: – Physical cause order viagra sample 1. You probably may get hit by other health care speyou can try this out purchase viagrats.
….. and salmon achillea with old-fashioned Shasta daisies…..
….. and unusual (for me) Lobelia tupa with Phlox paniculata……
…… and soft pink achillea with chocolate cosmos (C. atrosanguineus). Isn’t this fabulous?
There were loads of bumble bees foraging on the alstroemerias……
….. and on the lovely blue bog sage (Salvia uliginosa).
And just to add a little design intelligence to all that floriferous brilliance, the garden also features a number of “colour borders”, including yellow…..
….. and red….
….. and violet, featuring Lythrum virgatum, Monarda fistulosa and Agastache foeniculum.
I was impressed by the massive size of this English oak (Quercus ruber) – aka the ‘Royal Oak’ – which was planted in 1863 to commemorate the marriage of the Prince of Wales and the Danish Princess Alexandra. The children in the playground seemed unmoved that they were frolicking atop the roots of a piece of Dunedin’s colonial history.
For sheer elegance, I loved the Clive Lister Garden – and also the story behind it, below. What a wonderful way to enrich a public space, especially one that has meant much to you during your life.
Look at this view of grasses and many native plants from one side of the bridge in the Clive Lister Garden……
….. and the other side, featuring hostas, Japanese maples and other shade plants.
The garden is full of textural plants…..
….. and those with attractive, coloured foliage.
Flowering seems less important than good foliage in the Clive Lister Garden, but there were some lovely surprises, like this ligularia-montbretia combination.
This is the shimmering Astelia chathamica ‘Silver Spear’, which we’re starting to see in N. American gardens.
Alas, our time at the fabulous Dunedin Botanic Garden had drawn to an end without me seeing the glasshouses, water garden, theme gardens, rose gardens or fully exploring the native and geographic collections in the Upper Garden we’d walked through so quickly. So I trotted out to the bus reluctantly and vowed to come back by taxi later in the day.
***************
When I returned, clouds were gathering in the sky so I hurried to the Winter Garden Glasshouse. At its opening in 1908, it was said to be the first public conservatory in Australasia. It has three wings; the west wing contains a good cactus collection.
Tropicals find a warm, humid home in the central Tropical House.
And the east wing contains the sub-tropical collection, with plants like the lovely Vireya rhododendron, below.
It started to sprinkle as I left and eyed the Rose Garden – very nice, I’m sure, but I wanted to get back to the Upper Garden.
I decided to buy an ice cream in the visitor’s centre to see if the shower might abate, but it continued. So I headed quickly over Lindsay Creek to the Rock Garden…..
….. eyeing these spectacular red-hot pokers (Kniphofia sp.) as I walked. The climate here in Dunedin seems perfect for these South African natives.
The rock garden is stunning, and one could spend a half day just here examining all its lovelies, like…….
….. strange-looking Raoulia apicinigra, one of the “mat daisy” clan, …..
….. and Dierama pendulum, fairy bells. But the rain had now intensified and having given my umbrella and raincoat to my husband to take back to the hotel (“Nah, I won’t need it.”), I found a plastic bag to partially cover my hat and tucked my phone under my shirt to keep it dry. My cameras were now back in the camera bag as the heavens opened and the rain poured down.
One last shot, of a butterfly lily (Gladiolus papilio) that was as soaked as I was, and out I ran, down the steps and past the now deserted herbaceous borders to a bus shelter outside the gates, where I waited in the monsoon for 20 minutes to flag down a passing cab.
As sad as I was not to have had more time to spend at Dunedin Botanic Garden, I was so very grateful that I’d had the opportunity to see it at all.
