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Asp en Do wnto wn Ri ver H ome Be a part of Aspen’s richest river experience. Steps away from downtown Aspen, and set within feet of the Roaring Fork River, this home is a splendid, secluded riverfront gem. Host the perfect summertime fete on its mature grounds. Walk just minutes to the Silver Queen Gondola in winter. Offered at Five Million, Seven Hundred and Fifty Thousand
Water erupts from a fountain under a canopy of Douglas fir, filling the enclosed garden with a cacophony of sound and motion. The bathtub was a protoBotanical snapshots are prevalent throughout the garden. Here, a crisp succulent rosette opens to the sun.
Opportunities
Top of the Wo rl d / Ol d Sno wm ass Discover a hidden gem atop a spectacular mesa in Old Snowmass. Enjoy panoramic and expansive views of the Snowmass Mountain ski area. This private 5-acre compound features a log and stone main residence, a detached 1-bedroom apartment, a 4-car garage and a separate artist studio. $1,495,000
Ri dge of Red Mou nta in
Nearly three decades iN the makiNg, the deWolf gardeN does somethiNg that feW gardeNs caN: it carries oN the legacy of a free spirit. STORy By SaRah ChaSe Shaw
PhOTOgRaPhy By JaSOn Dewey
Impressive 5 bedroom, 5 bathroom family home. Vaulted ceilings with large south-facing windows. Master bedroom with floor-to-ceiling windows. Finishes include marble, granite, and oak flooring. Enjoy outdoor living with extensive landscaping, mature trees, multiple decks, hot tub and flat lawn area. Offered at Four Million, Eight Hundred and Fifty Thousand
Call TOM CARR 970 379-9935 Stop by and visit. We’re located in the North of Nell building, next to the Gondola. 555 East Durant, Ste 4A | Aspen, CO 81611 Tel: 970-925-5400 | tcarr@aspenreinfo.com Search Aspen/Snowmass area homes for sales online at www.AspenReInfo .com
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type for the dancing fountain on the Hyman Avenue Mall. Below, the textural frilliness of Ornamental Kale lies in stark contrast to the solid earthy quality of a hollowed planting vessel.
Great
a story line out of a children’s book or a magic-realist novel: a garden is imbued with enchanted qualities that convey a kind of restorative life force to those who pass through its gates. They, in turn, give life back to it. Plants that will not survive anywhere else in the region thrive there. A tree that exists nowhere else in the world grows there. There—which is here, in Aspen’s West End—an expanse of green bursts at the seams with innovation, allegory, and a wildness that mirrors a life driven by openness and curiosity. Here, the word “garden” falls woefully short as a descriptor.
The garden in question belongs to Maggie DeWolf, wife of the late Nick DeWolf, an Aspenite like town will never see again. Philanthropist, inventor, photographer, and co-founder of Teradyne, a Boston-based manufacturer of semiconductors, Nick was a fixture in Aspen, easily identified by his tall stature, smiling profile, and flowing mane of long hair. A fan of creativity and freedom of expression, and a regular at the annual Burning Man Festival, he lived for groundbreaking engineering and artistry. “His spirit was very Burning Man,” says daughter Nicole. “Unorthodox, a little racy, and full of ideas. . . . He was the master of envisioning the ridiculous.” The DeWolfs settled in Aspen in 1975, raising six children and cats and dogs too numerous to count in their home on the corner of Bleeker and Second Streets. Recognizing Maggie’s passion for gardening, and hoping for a corner where he could pursue his own experiments, Nick purchased the adjacent lot in the late 1970s from the neighbor affectionately known as “old man Gus,” who lived in a Quonset hut on the property until he died. Maggie’s garden expanded over the years and now surrounds the main residence.
More recently, it has risen to containers on top of the carriage house. An homage to Nick’s droll humor can be found in a corner of the garden, where a bathtub jettisons a constant stream of water into a series of rivulets that crisscross the enclosed space. This playful cacophony of sound and motion was the prototype for an Aspen icon: the much-loved dancing fountain on the Hyman Avenue Mall, which Nick designed with artist Travis Fulton and that has entertained thousands of children every summer since 1978. While Nick pushed the envelope of creativity and invention, his wife was testing the limits of gardening at 8,000 feet. “I just plant like mad and hope for the best,” says Maggie, whose background in biology and botany dates back to her days at Randolph Macon College. And plant like mad she does. There are literally hundreds of species of plants growing within the walls of this compound. Typical regional favorites like hollyhocks, geraniums, curly mint, and euphorbia explode in some areas, while species more anomalous in these parts have a home here as well. Pots of spiky Wollemi pine, to name but one example, snuggle just outside continued on p. 90
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ever-changing environment.
Clay pots, ceramic and wrought iron plant stands, benches, and garden ornaments intermix with exotic and common plants to create a colorful and
Giant ball dahlias from Holland add color annually.
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A jam-packed Victorian-style greenhouse opens into the main living area of the house.
Messy vitality exists in all corners of the garden where old and new mingle with one-of-a-kind horticultural specimens. Eyes of all sorts keep constant
watch over the garden—even bunny eyes. The garden on the corner of Bleeker and Second Streets sticks in the minds of all who see it, with its year-round botanical display of color and texture.
Some of the garden’s most exotic and tender species spend the winter in this hothouse, protected from the frigid conditions of Aspen’s climate.
inch of this small but packed space. Gardeners spend up to four days a week from March until November working every square
Tightly manicured miniature fruit trees bear cherries, plums, and apples. Edibles such as garlic, currants, watercress, and herbs thrive in their shadows. Colorado sandstone surrounds a
Turkish mosaic in the center of the garden. Many plants in the garden are early spring bloomers in Aspen but also have beautiful fall color.
continued from p. 86 the greenhouse. These lime-green tropical trees were discovered in Australia less than twenty years ago, and they’ve been available on the open market only since 2006. Wollemi pines are rare in the world, but because their mortality rates rise sharply when the temperature drops below twenty degrees Fahrenheit, they’re unheard of in the Rocky Mountains. But not here. “People think our climate is too harsh, so they aren’t willing to experiment,” Maggie says. “There isn’t a lot of oxygen here, and that’s always a problem, but we like to try everything. We’ve even managed to grow coffee plants and artichokes here!” The “we” Maggie refers to is herself and the team at Treeline Landscape, whose owners Susie and Walt Burger have tended to Maggie’s garden year-round for more than twenty years. There’s a tremendous amount of work to be done: at least one gardener is on-site three or four days a week from April to November. Maggie is adamant about getting the water features going early in the spring because they muffle the
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noise of nearby Main Street, and she’s always anxious for her spring bulbs to get a head start. As soon as the last of the snow melts, dredging, weeding, and cleaning the myriad of water channels that snake through the garden are priorities. And what does this energetic crew do all summer long? Plenty, according to six-year garden veteran Rita Martinez. They weed and trim, deadhead and dig, and plant and plant and plant. The garden, Martinez says, will even accommodate whatever mood its gardeners are in. “On those slow and nit-picky days when you’re just content to get down to the finest detail and be in your own head, you can stay in one place,” says Martinez. “By the time you leave, it’s like a little bonsai garden.” And then there are those days when the gardeners congregate together: “It’s just chatterbox central from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m.” Maggie interacts constantly with her crew, acting as both friend and mentor. Mostly, she lets them plant wherever they see fit, but occasionally she’ll chime in with definite instructions. A virtual botanical encyclo-
PIONEER CANYONand RANCH “You tend You
nurture, and You Contemporary estate situated on over 40 private acres tell it how gorgeous Bordered by 350+/acres of open space Beautifully landscaped grounds with fabulous outdoor it is in the morning, entertaining areas and You love it.” • Covered outdoor patio with fireplace, pizza oven, • • •
hot tub & fire pit
MAUREEN STAPLETON 970.948.9331 Maureen.Stapleton @sothebysrealty.com AspenSnowmassSIR.com
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• • • • • •
pedia, she spends chunks of her day perusing gardening websites and plant catalogs or poring through the Royal Horticultural Society’s monthly magazine. She’s particularly proud of her soil. And she should be: it Views from Aspen to Snowmass Mountain came directly from Hallam Lake when it was dredged in 1987. 13,167 square feet That earth nurtures a true one-of-a-kind specimen bedrooms, full baths, half baths on 7 the north side of7the house, one 2 that Maggie has wished more than once that she could move. “About 3 car garage fifteen years ago a man planted it. Then he rang the Horseandproperty doorbell said, ‘I planted a tree for you,’ and he left,” she says. Years later, this uninvited weeping ceMinutes from Aspen and the liftsa desolate, of Snowmass dar—developed in a lab in Boulder—strikes Lorax-like pose in the shadow of a seventy-five-foot, century-old spruce. $17,950,000 Furnished Elsewhere on the property, adjacent to a sunny strip of experimental Buffalo grass, the elusive Mayapple produces a gelatinous and mildly toxic pink fruit in late summer. Rhododendrons and wisteria, staples of
Ground covers and moss hide a variety of exotic curios. It takes many return visits to discover
all of the garden’s hidden secrets. Faces peer from unexpected places. And like the garden itself, the work area is in a constant state of flux.
acidic Eastern gardens, flourish in the microclimate created by the garden walls—with the help of an occasional shot or two of vinegar. In recent years, Maggie has tested Asian plant varieties, because as she says, “they don’t need very much oxygen.” Amid the exotic species, many of which, like the weeping cedar, have been engineered in labs around the world, tightly manicured miniature fruit trees bear cherries, plums, and apples. In their shadow, edibles—garlic, currants, watercress, and herbs—thrive. This year, says Walt, there’s talk of expanding the food crops in barrels and self-watering containers on the roof of the carriage house. But it’s not all flora. Much of the garden’s whimsy comes from its inanimate fauna. Impish garden elves hide under mossy logs; oversized ceramic frogs and miniature turtles languish in shallow pools of water; slyly observant lions crouch sentinel at the gate. Multiple sets of eyes—attached to moss-covered granite heads laid sideways in the recirculating streams or propped upright in sandstone niches along the rock wall—keep constant watch over the garden. It can feel a touch sinister to some but always in a harmless, Dr. Seuss-y sort of way. Indeed, the DeWolf garden doesn’t appeal to everyone. It’s not spare, modern, and sexy, and there’s 94 | aspen sojourner | summer 2012
nary a right angle or a straight line in sight. The plantings are dense, even messy, and, like its owners, all a bit nonconforming and eclectic. Travis Fulton calls it “a delicious mess.” For Rita Martinez, it’s about reciprocity. “You tend and you nurture, and you tell it how gorgeous it is in the morning, and you love it,” she says. “And then you get this garden, and it’s just magnificent. And you’ve been able to contribute to that end result.”
“i Just Plant liKe mad and hoPe For the Best.” Locals recognize this garden by its impressive spring and fall-blooming crocus display. Visitors are often found gazing in delight at the unusual array of color and texture. Still others know it simply because it looks like nothing else in the neighborhood. Maggie enjoys the various reactions. “I just plant like mad and hope for the best,” she says, “because this garden is for everyone.”