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October 19, 2024
Once I informed gardening mates I’d be in Denver in late September, many urged me to go to SummerHome Backyard. It was already on my checklist. SummerHome has had glowing media consideration since its creation in 2020, and I’d examine it in Visionary and Shrouded in Mild. Privately owned but open to the general public, this city xeriscape within the Washington Park neighborhood presents common visiting hours. However even higher, proprietor Lisa Negri, the retired proprietor of an environmental engineering firm, generously made time to satisfy me within the backyard and inform me all about it.
Me with SummerHome proprietor Lisa Negri
The genesis of the .14-acre backyard was frustration. Lisa had watched as 100-year-old bungalows in her city neighborhood have been changed with boxy 2- or 3-story homes that blocked mild and loomed over their neighbors. In 2019, when a run-down bungalow subsequent door grew to become out there after its proprietor died, she shortly purchased it off-market to maintain it out of the fingers of builders. Then she tore it down.
She thought-about making it into an open garden the place she might let her canines run round. However she didn’t like the thought of sustaining an enormous garden in Denver’s arid local weather, the place annual precipitation averages simply 14 inches. Lisa was volunteering at Denver Botanic Gardens, the place she met horticulturist and backyard designer Kevin Philip Williams, they usually began speaking about what the area might be.
Quickly Kevin was designing a waterwise backyard suited to Colorado’s steppe local weather. (A steppe is a semi-arid grassland with chilly winters and warm-to-hot summers.) In 2020, when Denver Botanic Gardens shut down for the pandemic, Lisa harnessed a military of backyard volunteers desirous to get their fingers again within the grime, they usually planted 4,000 crops at SummerHome.
The backyard ensuing from Lisa and Kevin’s collaboration — which continues to today — is attractive in late September, golden with rabbitbrush and goldenrod, swaying with ‘Undaunted Ruby’ muhly and large bluestem grasses, and alight with colourful agastache, salvia, and standing cypress. However maybe probably the most lovely a part of the backyard is the intention behind it: Lisa’s want to make it a pocket park for public use reasonably than maintaining all of it to herself.
Immediately, neighbors pop in to stroll the backyard paths with their canines or probe for hummingbirds and butterflies with their youngsters. Lisa finds individuals enjoyable in chairs and benches she’s positioned all through the backyard. Whereas I used to be there, a canine proprietor stopped by along with his pup, who lapped a drink from a fountain.
Lisa unlocks the gate every morning, a sign that the backyard is open to guests. At evening she closes it up once more. The backyard stays open to the general public from spring bulb season by means of autumn’s ripeness. After the primary onerous freeze, Lisa closes it for winter.
A QR code on the fence hyperlinks to SummerHome’s web site, which features a plant checklist. Lisa hopes the backyard will encourage others to plant native and tailored waterwise crops, showcasing the sweetness and wildlife habitat they provide with out want of frequent watering.
Lisa informed me she waters new crops to get them established however in any other case irrigates the complete backyard a couple of times a yr. In an exceptionally scorching and dry yr like this one, she has watered 4 instances. There is no such thing as a irrigation system. Watering is finished by hand or by soaker hoses. She has a gardener who comes as soon as per week to examine on issues. And volunteer helpers from the neighborhood signal as much as work within the backyard in the future every month. The neighborhood funding within the backyard is inspiring, and Lisa says she couldn’t do it with out them.
Willy, one among Lisa’s canines, enjoys the view from a boulder bench.
Two fountains run on a timer within the morning and night, turning off in the course of the warmth of noon to preserve water.
The water attracts birds and different wildlife and provides to the backyard’s peaceable ambiance.
Gravel paths meander by means of grasses and flowering perennials that stood shoulder excessive once I visited in late September.
Kinetic sculptures by Lyman Whitaker catch the wind and pull the gaze inward from surrounding buildings.
Standing cypress and muhly grass
‘Undaunted Ruby’ muhly and snow-on-the-mountain euphorbia
Sandstone-esque hypertufa troughs made by Colorado gardener Domenique Turnbull are planted with succulents that Lisa rescued from imminent tear-down properties in her neighborhood…
…every one a salute to a now-vanished dwelling and backyard.
A customized ceramic totem by Rita Vali echoes the colours of close by crops.
Close to a patch of rabbitbrush, a bee rental presents nesting websites for solitary bees and wasps, important pollinators. A neighborhood teen painted the tarot card design on the field.
Holes drilled in blocks of wooden give solitary bees and wasps, which nest in hole stems and wooden cavities, locations to put their eggs. The larvae hatch inside, feed on the pollen and nectar the mom collected for them, and finally emerge as adults.
Kevin’s design for the backyard, Lisa informed me, was impressed by graffiti — particularly by an image he’d taken in Slovenia of layers of colourful graffiti on a utility field. Utilizing the colours as a spatial information, he clustered plant species in distinct communities and oversowed all of it with seed mixes to create a backyard collage better than the sum of its elements.
Lisa says most of her neighbors have been supportive of the private-public venture. However early on, one neighbor complained to the town, which responded with a cease-and-desist order requiring Lisa to cease permitting public entry to the backyard. For 8 months, SummerHome’s gate remained shut. However Lisa didn’t quit on her imaginative and prescient.
With the assistance of Kevin and different horticulturists, she put collectively a 96-page rezoning request that detailed how the backyard gives habitat for wildlife and important inexperienced area in an city setting and presents different advantages. It took a number of re-submissions, however finally the town authorised a rezoning of the property, and SummerHome was allowed to reopen.
A boulder bench, one among a number of positioned all through the backyard, presents a spot to relaxation or a perch to view the backyard from above.
Lisa informed me that roughly 20% of her crops are native to the Entrance Vary of Colorado, the place she lives. The remaining are from steppe areas around the globe with climates much like Denver’s. She eschews uncommon crops in favor of species available at nurseries in order that anybody impressed by the backyard can exit and discover those self same crops for his or her yard.
Grasses and a wind sculpture add motion to the backyard. That’s Lisa’s home subsequent door.
Dense plantings enclose the backyard and discourage weeds.
Salvia
Agastache
Damaged bricks in a copper birdbath give bees and different pollinators a secure place to land for a drink.
Yucca
Milkweed
A bee properties in on rabbitbrush flowers.
Agastache and liatris seedheads
Snow-on-the-mountain euphorbia is fairly with its mint-and-white coloring amid rose, silver, and tawny grasses.
One other view
The mushy palette of autumn
Imagine it or not, that is solely half of my images of SummerHome Backyard. I haven’t even proven you the again half, which features a lovely crevice backyard. Keep tuned for Half 2!
And get this, Austin: Lisa has agreed to return talk about SummerHome as a part of my Backyard Spark collection on April tenth. Extra information to return.
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Digging Deeper
Come study gardening and design at Backyard Spark! I set up in-person talks by inspiring designers, panorama architects, authors, and gardeners a number of instances a yr in Austin. These are limited-attendance occasions that promote out shortly, so be part of the Backyard Spark electronic mail checklist to be notified upfront; merely click on this hyperlink and ask to be added.
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