Get Instant Color for Vibrant Spaces

Planting flower pots and boxes is one of the most effective and easy ways to dress up a terrace or balcony. A dull outdoor living space instantly becomes brighter and more interesting. Harsh corners can be softened and vacant areas can be filled. Your gardens become more dynamic and new elements of interest and beauty are displayed by adding vibrant living plant material to containers surrounding your gardens. Who better to help you achieve this than us?! After all, we are the most trusted and experienced team of garden experts in the Colorado Mountains.

Adding flower containers to your outdoor living spaces will help create the feeling that nature is creeping into straight-lined structures. Containers can also be filled with an “herb recipe” to give your home-cooked meals that fresh from the garden taste. To ensure that you get the most out of your container gardens, Land Designs will start growing your plants in a greenhouse in April and deliver them in June. You get overflowing pots while your neighbors flowers barely peek over the top. You can awe your guests and ease your mind by having living color surround your home not only in your gardens but also on your relaxing outdoor spaces.

Getting Your Garden Ready for Spring

The landscaper’s first task in the spring is to clean up, and prepare the landscape for optimum growth. While there may not be much going on above ground, there is an incredible amount happening underground. It’s important to complete spring clean up and maintenance early so you don’t have to work around new growth.

Gardens
We start by removing any leftover growth from the previous year and lay down a top dressing of composted cattle manure and cotton burrs. Typically fall cut back has left 4-6 inch stems and some low lying foliage. These materials can harbor disease pathogens so they need to be removed along with any remaining tree leaves or debris from the previous year. The compost provides a fresh source of nutrients to encourage new growth and can be tilled into the soil once it has served its purpose. This compost helps to break up difficult, Rocky Mountain soils. In addition, it provides an attractive texture and neat appearance as we wait for plants to come up and fill our gardens.

Shrubs and Trees
We prune any dead, damaged, or broken members, evaluate any support stakes, remove old mulch and replace it with fresh. Care must be taken when pruning as it is possible to unknowingly transmit disease by not disinfecting tools between cuts. It is also easy to stunt growth and flowering by accidentally removing buds on spring flowering shrubs.

Turf
If you have turf, it’s time to de-thatch. Dethatching severs rhizomes and stolons (underground stems) promoting new growth resulting in a more dense, lush lawn. Dethatching must be timed with irrigation start-up or else risk damaging your lawn. You should apply a pre-emergent herbicide with a little fertilizer mixed-in at the same time as de-thatching to help to minimize weed growth and give the turf a boost of energy. Our Plant Health Care Division applies a precise blend tuned specifically to our Rocky Mountain soil conditions.

While it is fine to repair damage from snow plows, pests, or otherwise in the spring, true overseeding, should be performed in the fall. If you overseed during spring at the same time that you are applying a pre-emergent herbicide, the herbicide will hinder the growth of the new seed. Pre-emergent herbicides are designed to prevent the germination of weed seeds. They cannot discriminate, however, between weed seeds and sewn grass seed. Applying grass seed in combination with a pre-emergent herbicide (or most any herbicide) is a recipe for disaster.

Most importantly, spring is a time to plan. It’s a time to look back at your garden and consider what you liked and disliked, what worked and what might do better elsewhere in the garden. Once everything is growing and full, it becomes harder to see beyond what’s in place. Spring clean up provides a beautiful, blank canvas upon which one can imagine endless possibilities.

Scale Strikes Vail

While not as well known as the mountain pine beetle, scale insects have been infecting trees at a greater rate in recent years and silently killing trees without much notice. The mountain pine beetle infestation results in the death of the tree the following year, while scale insects starve the plant they feed on over the course of several years leading to its slow “decline”.

A property owner’s first awareness of the problem (and one that results in the most phone calls to our office) is the observation that their tree appears “unhealthy and thin”. Entire branches have died-back and the tree is dropping an unusual amount of needles or leaves. A more thorough investigation exposes small, white specks against the green foliage.These are the sucking insects known as pine needle scale. There are several hundred species of scale active in the United States. In our region of Colorado most of our service calls are in response to pine needle scale, which attacks most evergreens but is typically found on spruce varieties. There is also a scale insect active in our area that is found living camouflaged on the trunks of aspen trees: aspen scale.

Its coloration, similar to that of the aspen trunk, makes it difficult to identify but its damage is similar to that of pine needle scale: a slow decline with no apparent reason. Other components of a landscape—shrubs and flowers, and even houseplants are prone to scale infestations. The result is always the same as the plant eventually succumbs to starvation and slowly fades away.

There are a variety of treatment options available ranging from pesticide sprays, soil injections, trunk sprays, and even direct trunk injections. There are synthetic pesticides, organic pesticides, and even some bionatural control options. All treatments have one thing in common: the scale insect must be treated in the proper stage of its life to result in effective control. This stage is known as the “crawler” stage and occurs right after hatching from their overwintering eggs. The “crawlers” briefly leave the protective, waxy, scale covering and are quite vulnerable to control efforts. They seek out a location on the previous year’s growth to inject their sucking mouthparts and ingest juices. They will remain there for the rest of their lives. Once the insect begins covering itself with the white, waxy, scale covering, however, they are protected against all but systemic pesticides.

What if you suspect scale insects are active in your landscape?
Call a professional. They have the knowledge and experience to offer environmentally sound control options.

Where have scale insects been seen locally?
Pine needle scale is approaching epidemic levels in the Town of Vail. There is an endless supply of spruce trees s in Vail, which assist the scale’s ability to proliferate. Spruces are being skeletonized by the insect and many property owners don’t realize there’s a problem until it’s too late.

Aspen scale has been seen in the Town of Vail and moving westwards towards Gypsum. With its natural grey coloring property owners have no reason to suspect an insect infestation.

Should I be concerned about scale?
Yes. Left untreated it doesn’t go away on its own and its activity always ends poorly for the tree.

Associated Landscape Contractors of Colorado (ALCC) Grand Award Winner

Perched high above the valley floor in the Cordillera Valley Club, the Juniper Lane residence rises from the arid hillside as if set in place from above. Design considerations included preservation of existing junipers with sparse under-story vegetation, respect for ravines directing water during rain events, and views focused within the site and beyond. This unique design/build landscape is characterized by careful limitations of disturbance, thoughtful circulation, definition of space, superb stone work, and a plant palette that blends arid garden spaces with the sparse native condition. Program elements include an entry sequence, natural water feature, site circulation, garden spaces, dry streambed, and barbeque terrace.

The driveway was sited to curve and ascend between existing clusters of trees; the arrival at the home is introduced by boulder retaining with arid plantings rising to meet with structural walls extended from the home. An open bridge between the driveway and front entry allows the existing ravine below to stay intact, offering a unique tree-top view passing by the most sculptural juniper on the site, while an on-grade path provides access to the tree’s gnarled roots and the water feature below. Just beyond the juniper, an interior bridge at the home’s entry foyer crosses over a native ravine that became the framework for the water feature. Prior to construction of the water feature, a mock-up was built to illustrate the close connection between soil, plants, water, and stone. Subtle, stepping weirs constructed of layered stone, with shallow intermediate pools and opportunistic planting were inspired by the washed out character of the site’s ravines. Stonework used to form the water feature was phased out to gently deconstruct back to natural conditions.

In the backyard, where the water feature originates from a dry stream bed constructed with a similar stacked appearance, site circulation and an intimate barbeque terrace are nestled between the hillside and the home to provide respite from highway noise below. Xeric plant material was deftly layered to start with dense plantings near the home transitioning to enhanced revegetation areas that blend into site specific revegetation at outlying areas; all of which was done with consideration of site microclimates.

The Juniper Lane Residence draws inspiration from its surroundings to evoke a strong sense of place. The design/build team met the project’s challenge, to integrate a complex program into the native hillside with a thorough design process and careful construction phasing.

High Country Character Interview with Glen Ellison from Vail Colorado

When you leave a conversation with the words fair, honest, hard-work, responsibility, quality, family, and friends resonating in your mind, you feel grateful to have that person as a part of your community. These values combined with Glen Ellison’s passion for creating wonderful outdoor spaces for people to enjoy, has grown Land Designs by Ellison into one of the largest landscape companies in the region. The Vail location created a niche: landscape design, build and maintenance in high-elevation resort towns throughout Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

When did you arrive in Vail?

Starting in 1972, every winter, spring break and summer vacation seven of us would pack into the family station wagon and drive 24-hours to Vail. I grew an attachment to Vail during those years and interned here the summer before graduating college. In 1980, after marrying my high school sweetheart, I made a permanent move to Vail and began my career.

How did you end up founding a landscape architecture business?

I’ve had a passion for the business since I was 14 and worked at a landscape/nursery operation in Mansfield, Ohio. That job eventually gave me hands on and practical experience to create client drawings. After putting myself through college at Ohio State, earning a Horticulture degree but lacking start-up capital, I managed deposits from three small jobs to buy the tools and product that I needed to get started. In those days I regularly worked 24-hour days out of my Toyota pick up truck, only coming home for a dinner break.

How has your business grown?

In the 1980s Vail was a winter town without extensive landscapes, so local landscape architecture matured with the development of Beaver Creek and their design guidelines. We worked on one of the first Beaver Creek lots that included architectural landscape design plans of the level not yet seen here. Architect Jim Mortar asked me to help develop the Tyrolean Inn’s landscape. That led to more architects including us in their projects and our initial growth. More recently, we have reorganized into seven business units, each with their own business plan. The Landscape Design unit has seen the greatest change with the addition of talented landscape architect David Berg, who has transformed the business by implementing progressive technology. We now provide CAD drawings for seamless integration with the architect’s drawings. I’m now learning from those whom I mentored, and am able to get back to where it all started—into the community to continue relationships with clients, architects, and contractors, many of whom have become friends over the years.

Is there a project of which you are most proud?

This work is so fascinating and challenging because each project is different, starting with a unique piece of land and completely new pallet to create upon.

Two (out of 20+ ) award-winning projects stand out for different reasons. One is the Gerald R Ford Amphitheater. We had the opportunity to create and build this landscape originally and then again with the renovation. This is a special place because of the alpine spirit we captured in the outdoor setting, and because it is a place where community and visitors come together to enjoy something very unique to the area—a stimulation of all the aesthetic senses. A green roof we created in Steamboat Springs also stands out. This was the first time that the ALCC (Associated Landscape Contractors of Colorado) ever awarded a perfect score to a project. They created the presidential award specifically because of this project. And, just this month we won another ALCC Grand award for a recent project in Cordillera.

A Cut Above Forestry Awards Scholarship to Summit County Highschool Student

Breckenridge, Colorado—Monday, April 5, the first annual A Cut Above Forestry High School Scholarship was awarded to local Summit High student, Torrance Lee. The scholarship was established to provide encouragement and financial support to a deserving student pursuing a degree in natural resources or related environmental discipline. Mr. Lee was selected as the recipient based on his future goals as identified through an essay submission and community and school recommendations. Rick and Martha Herwehe presented the scholarship to Mr. Lee at 2010 Scholarship Night, held at Summit High School.

“Torrance is a deserving student and we are so pleased to be able to assist him in his pursuit of a career in the natural resources and environmental disciplines,” said Rick Herwehe, Founder of A Cut Above Forestry. The scholarship was funded by money raised at the Dunk-A-Bug Tank and Beetle-fest and then those funds were matched by A Cut Above Forestry.

Founded in 1983, A Cut Above Forestry initially filled a void in professional tree care in Eagle and Summit Counties and has since become the leading arbor services firm in the central mountains of Colorado. A Cut Above Forestry has been a driving force behind the reforestation efforts and long-range reforestation goals in Summit County. A recent merger with Land Designs by Ellison located in Eagle County increased both the geographic area of service, and portfolio of services. Services offered include arbor services, reforestation, irrigation services, landscape architecture, maintenance and installation. For more information visit www.acutaboveforestry.com or call 970.453.9154.