Lauren Springer

I recently went to a talk given by Lauren Springer, the garden designer and author of The Undaunted Garden. That book, first published in the mid 1990s, introduced dry climate gardening in the west. Not lush western California estates, not Oregon vineyards, not southwestern cactus and gravel installations, but intermountain high altitude steppe gardens, which is what we have here in Santa Fe.

In that seminal book she wrote about her own Fort Collins, CO home garden, created in similar conditions to ours here: harsh climate, frigid winters, hail, wind, too much altitude and too little rain.

With all of that she (and her husband, Scott Ogden, now divorced) made beautiful spaces using not just native plants, but introduced plants and hybrids that can thrive in the high, dry cold. And she made composed, real gardens, not just scrub chaparral meadows.

She went on to write other books and become a designer, creating a couple of the gardens at the Denver Botanical Garden and at public gardens in Colorado. She's designing and installing the tribute garden at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden for David Salman, the well known plantsman and owner of High Country Gardens nursery, who died in 2022. 

They were great friends for thirty years. She's using many plants from David's own gardens, gifted to her and tended for a couple years, to create the tribute garden to him. They planted it up last summer. 

In addition to providing some of the plants, she has donated her design work and time. 

There's a Hot Box garden, which will have cactus plants he loved, and a steep Hillside garden above the Hot Box, which will have tons of perennials and shrubs, many that I have in my garden too. Here's a list of everything she's planting, wow.  

She doesn't draw a design in advance, she simply places the little seedling pots on the ground where she knows they'll look good growing together. Wish I had that ability.

The talk was really good -- she's a warm, enthusiastic speaker (funny too, she described David as someone who could grow roots on a broomstick). She made the small, closeknit group of western mountain plant developers come alive. 

They love what they do, they are all great friends and collaborators, and it's a small world of specialty plant growers and propagators who make it possible for me to grow what I do in my own humble garden in Santa Fe.

Ah, my own humble garden -- I have the plants she grows, I have conditions she has, I follow her concepts -- but I don't have the space. My tiny walled courtyard doesn't allow the massed combinations and organic flow of a plant community all planted together. So I get a formal, structured look, with plants placed just so in tidy ones and twos. 

But if I had started from scratch with a completely blank slate, as Lauren does in her designed gardens, I could have created something much more natural looking. I've seen it done in a small courtyard. A couple I saw on local Santa Fe real estate listings last year show me the Undaunted Garden look in a small walled space. 

These courtyards are still larger (wider) than mine, though. And they have views beyond. So not exactly my constraints, but still, they have the aesthetic of high steppes and prairie lands, but contained and composed.

Every gardener would love to start over with a blank slate. If I could, I would make my little space much more like the gardens Lauren Springer designs: natural, unfussy, less formal. 

But I'll settle for seeing and hearing about her work instead, and using some of her plant selections in much smaller quantities. And visiting the public gardens she designs.  That will do.