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| All Photos by Nancy Shepard |
Every year in my excitement to get new plants, I am always drawn to what looks good right now in the stores and plant sales which usually means choosing spring-summer flowering specimens.
As I start preparing for planting this year, I’m giving special attention to plant phenology or plant blooming time. I was looking through my 2019 garden photos taken in late August and saw how sad and wiped out my garden looked by that time. But I also stumbled on pictures of a mini-vacation we had taken to Steamboat Springs late last fall. We had visited their Yampa River Park botanic gardens and what a wonderful place to get late-blooming ideas. Built in 1995, the park is at 6,880 feet with an average of 158 inches of snowfall each year. The park contains over 50 small gardens donated and tended by organizations and individuals and uses no tax dollars.
Many of the park’s plants are native to Colorado. With inviting walkways through multiple ponds and sculptures, the plants are well-labeled with common, botanic, and family names. A garden with that much snowfall, temperatures sometimes falling to minus 40F, and barely 60 days without frost, this was the treasure trove where I could find some really tough specimens. Even if their bloom time had passed, several of these had very attractive fall foliage.
Here are some more of my key delights:
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Dark Towers Hybrid Beardtongue
Penstemon ‘Dark Towers’ Scrophulariaceae
(While done flowering, its fall foliage is still distinctive)
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Mock Bearberry Manzanita
Arctostaphylos x coloradoensis Ericaceae
(This is a Plant Select specimen)
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| Green Leaf Manzanita
Arctostaphylos patula hybrid Ericaceae
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Silver Edged Horehound
Marrubium rotundifolium (This is also a Plant Select specimen) |
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| Garden Phlox Phlox paniculata 'Fairy's Petticoat' Polemoniaceae |
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September Charm Windflower
Anemone hybrid ‘September Charm’ Ranunculaceae |