Round Robin: Colorado Gardening
Notes from regional herb gardeners
By Rob Proctor
June/July 1995
DENVER, Colorado—I don’t know what leisure is. There are times when I say to myself, "You’re going to sit down for an hour and do absolutely nothing." I bought a rocking chair for exactly that purpose. I pictured how pleasant it would be this summer, rocking the time away on the patio without a care in the world.
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It wasn’t meant to be. I can sit still for about ten minutes. Then I notice that the pots of scented geraniums by the back door look dry. I’ll get to them in a little while, maybe when I feed the goldfish. Well, I suppose I could just amble over and relax while I sprinkle a pinch of food on the water’s gleaming surface and watch the feeding frenzy. The fountain head in the pond looks as though it’s running too slowly; it’ll take just a few minutes to clean it. Then I will return to my rocker, but maybe first I should repot that aloe vera that I’ve been meaning to get around to, but before that I should check a new plant I set in over the weekend called Allium przewalskianum (said to look like an elegant version of common chives with violet flowers). And so it goes.
A gardener juggles dozens of chores and hundreds of things to remember. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I like the variety; I love the challenge. There are little projects, such as transplanting or repotting, and then there are big projects, like deciding one morning that the garden needs an area to showcase some of the sages native to Turkey that I’ve recently discovered. Colorado is a great place to grow many of them because of our brilliant sunshine and low humidity. Salvia cyanescens forms a rosette of silky gray leaves topped by 3-foot stems of electric blue flowers. S. pachystachya has pale yellow blossoms on a shrubby frame a foot tall and twice as wide. I’m also eager to see the chartreuse, foot-tall flower spikes of S. cryptantha; that color—like the flowers of lady’s-mantle—seems to bring out the best in neighboring plants.