Year Opened: 2018
Garden Designer: Sherry Fuller, with help from Bryan Fischer

The Foothills Garden serves as a naturalistic, native plant garden that showcases the beauty, form and function of native trees, shrubs, grasses and perennials. It showcases and promotes the use of regionally appropriate, underused and novel native varieties, inspiring visitors to add these plants to their home gardens.  The garden’s topography and rockwork evoke our regional foothills with steep slopes and rock-capped hogbacks.

Our local foothills represent the intersection of the grass-dominated Great Plains to our east and the Rocky Mountains to our west. True to its inspiration, our Foothills Garden includes dry slopes dominated by mountain mahogany, riparian areas including a native plum thicket, rock crevices, sagebrush steppe, and west slope communities like dry mesas.

Featuring:

• Approximately 1 acre
• 300+ species and cultivars of native plants from the foothills regions including Colorado and other Rocky Mountain states
• Most plants are very drought tolerant and need no soil amendment or fertilizer
• The west end contains cultivars of native plants, which are often easier to source, while the east end will eventually be non-irrigated to showcase plants that thrive with no additional water