It all began in 1992 with a heroic rescue, saving beauty from certain death. A rose rescue.
“They were remodeling the library, the one on East Second Avenue,” said Karen Anesi, a longtime member of the Garden Club of Durango. “And I got a call from Doris Ferguson that they had pulled out these really pretty roses and were throwing them away.”
Ferguson was upset because the heirloom roses were transplants from the garden of her mother, Marie Mason, a charter member of the Garden Club in 1940.
Anesi, who knew Mason's reputation as a gardener, was president of the club at the time. She grabbed a couple of 5-gallon buckets and went to save the roses. She then went to visit former City Manager Bob Ledger to see if a city garden could take them. It helped her cause that Ledger had rented a room from Mason while attending Fort Lewis College in the 1960s. But Ledger still had to ask the $64,000 question:
“Who's going to take care of them?” he asked.
Anesi, without missing a beat, said the club would. So Ledger told her to plant them at what is now Santa Rita Park.
“It was a different time in the early 1990s,” she said. “Now it would have to go through all sorts of review, looking into things like liability and budget considerations. But we just dug a hole and put them in the ground. They survived, as battered as they were.”
It was the beginning of a public-private partnership that has led to a garden space that delights residents and tourists alike. The Santa Rita garden is one of several in Durango created to beautify, educate, feed or research plants for our arid climate, all maintained with the generosity of area green thumbs.
'How does your garden grow?'
The Santa Rita garden features bridges, flagstone walkways, an expansive perennial garden along with an expanded rose garden, a pergola, benches and some xeriscaping as well. More than 50 perennial bushes that attract both butterflies and hummingbirds also attract people, particularly children.
“Basically, every president of the club has worked to advance it,” Anesi said. “It's the crown jewel of any of the projects Garden Club has done over the years.”
Since 2005, the club has added more than 30 varieties of roses, so their garden now includes hybrid teas, floribunda, shrub roses, climbing roses and miniatures.
Marsha Schuetz has chaired the garden project for the last five years.
“Roses bloom only twice a year,” she said. “It's now a more interesting garden for a lot of months. We have a lot of daffodils in the spring. Mothers bring their babies down to the park and set them down among the daffodils to take photos.”
The gardeners are now adding a variety of iris courtesy of the late Bill Ramaley, who left his impressive collection to the club.
“Members are 'mothering' some iris rhizomes, too,” Schuetz said, “to sell at our annual plant sale.”
The plant sale has funded many of the improvements over the years, and the club also has gotten help from everyone from the Boy Scouts to the Glacier Club, which donated the rock featuring a salute to Blue Star mothers, whose children have served or are serving in the military.
Members of the club are asked to give an hour-and-a-half twice during the summer to work in the garden. For Penelope Fisher, who found herself in charge of the rose section without knowing much about them or how they grow here, it's a blessing because she can't have a garden in a townhome.
Helen Winfrey donates more than 300 hours every summer spread over three gardens: the garden at Santa Rita, the Four Corners Rose Society's rose garden in front of the Durango School District 9-R Administration Building on east 12th Street and the gardens at the Animas Museum.
“That one was set up long ago by Shirley Spangsberg's group,” Winfrey said about the museum's grounds. “When I started, it was full of plants now considered noxious weeds or invasive ornamentals, which thrive here, so it's been a lot of work getting those out and transitioning while trying to keep the original character.”
The museum's garden, which does not have a sprinkler system, is xeriscaped, able to survive in our arid climate. This year, gardeners added two new attractions, “To Dye For,” which features plants homesteaders would have used to dye their sheeps' wool, and a Siberian iris bed.
Eat your veggies
Gardening has been on the upswing during the last decade as people have begun growing some of their own food. No one is a greater advocate for the movement than Darrin Parmenter, horticulturist for the La Plata County Extension Office. The students in his master-gardener program provide numerous hours of labor and expertise to several gardens around town as part of earning the designation.
One of those gardens is at Manna Soup Kitchen, which supplies about 60 pounds of produce every week, garden manager Jason Cloudt said. That will increase in coming years, as they have added an orchard and bee hives and even mushroom logs. On the horizon is a greenhouse and a mini-worm farm to compost kitchen scraps.
“Since we grow food for the general population, we try to grow stuff like carrots and beets that people are aware of,” he said. “We want them to eat their vegetables, not be scared of them.”
The garden provides produce not only to the soup kitchen. Produce goes to Manna clients to take home, as well. It's also used for educational purposes, to teach students in the new culinary-arts program how to tell when a fruit or vegetable is ripe and how to use fresh herbs.
The gardens at the Powerhouse Science Center – courtesy of Durango High Country Gardeners, the Durango Daybreak Rotary Club and numerous community members – don't just make the center more appealing. They're another way the center can teach the kids who visit. The new garden in the “backyard” features fruits, vegetables and other native foliage. The center uses the garden for summer camps such as “Soil, Slugs and Science” and “Kitchen Laboratory.”
“It's not just produce we're growing,” said Hannah Land, Powerhouse educator and garden planner. “There's science all around. Gardens provide endless opportunities for discovery: Lessons on sensory exploration and the stories of pollinators to plant biology and the study of ecosystem ecology – and of course, there's a firsthand look at where our food comes from.”
Durango Botanical Society's demonstration garden behind Durango Public Library is another source for information and inspiration.
“Our efforts are purely horticultural,” the society's Executive Director Cindy Smart said. “We base all of our efforts on beautification, education, testing and research, volunteer development and, of course, community beautification of public spaces.”
Each public garden in Durango has a purpose, whether it's making the community more beautiful, feeding the needy, providing education or serving as a testing facility. But whatever purpose, the gardens are the result of hard work and dedication by a number of gardeners and garden lovers and a gift to us all.
abutler@durangoherald.com
