Denver Botanical Gardens

That’s Denver Botanic Gardens, as in Many Gardens

by Kathy Haq

Any visitor to Denver Botanic Gardens’ York Street location has some choices to make. The 24-acre campus contains more than 50 gardens, ranging from the regionally focused to those identified as “internationally inspired,” “ornamental,” “shady,” and “water gardens.”

In the Cheesman Park neighborhood on Denver’s east side, the York Street gardens sit atop land that once housed the city’s first cemetery, Mount Prospect Hill. Most of the bodies were removed in the 1890s, and today, instead of graves and headstones, the space is alive with plants, science and art exhibitions, educational programming, and ongoing research.

The gardens encompass several other sites as well: Chatfield Farms, a 700-acre native plant refuge and working farm located near Littleton; the Plains Conservation Center in Aurora, offering educational programming on the prairie ecosystem and cultural history of Colorado; and Mount Goliath, near Idaho, managed in cooperation with the U.S. Forest Service and featuring the highest-altitude cultivated garden in the country. With more than 1.3 million visitors in 2018, the Denver Botanic Gardens are considered among the nation’s most visited.

All told, there are seven living collections, including alpine plants, aquatic plants, cacti and succulents, Colorado natives, steppe plants, and tropical plants. Each group is extensively researched, with individual plant life cycles documented from beginning to end. The so-called “Amenity Collection” showcases plants of the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains region, interwoven with traditional garden favorites like lilacs, daylilies, peonies, roses, and bulbs, with the stated goal of demonstrating “ways to combine local plant palettes for different situations and needs, using a wide spectrum of trees, shrubs, perennials, and annuals.”

At approximately 5,400 feet, in a semi-arid climate in USDA cold-hardiness zone 5, the York Street gardens offer a dazzling perspective on a range of plants that could potentially thrive in Santa Fe. One could spend many days getting to know these gardens. A quick perusal during an organized tour in early October 2019 left this first-time visitor impressed by the diversity of species, the variety of water features, and the number of plants still in bloom that late in the season. Perhaps most surprising: the architecture, hardscape, and foliage combine to create a real sense of intimacy in each of the garden settings. Benches where visitors can sit and simply “be” are scattered throughout.

If you’re planning a visit, it’s worth checking out Denver Botanic Gardens’ comprehensive website, especially the Explore Our Gardens pages and the Gardens Navigator, where you can search for plants, explore gardens and their features, discover flowers in bloom, take a virtual tour, and locate memorial and dedicated items. Finally, there is a Gardening Resources site staffed by the Colorado Master Gardeners at the Denver Botanic Gardens, some of whom were planting spring bulbs during my visit.

Photo by Kathy Haq