“I love bringing the feeling of nature into the spaces people live in,” reveals Johnny Moore, designer at Tree of Life Landscapes, Mead. The beauty and joy of nature that speaks to Moore, is something he wants to capture when he designs.

“When we first talked with this Boulder- based client about her yard, she didn’t have a detailed vision for her landscape renovation,” says Moore. “What she did know is she wanted to remove most of the sod and create perennial gardens more suitable to the Colorado climate. My work as a designer is often to help clients realize a vision they can’t articulate.”

Four seasons of immersion and mystery

The perennial garden Moore designed in 2017 included removal of all sod on one side of the driveway and a portion on the other side. “Our vision was to create four seasons of interest. Color in the spring, summer and fall and in the winter a lot of texture and different hues of brown. There is a lot of richness and depth to the winter textures that can’t be seen in other seasons. Leaving the seed heads allows the birds some winter food. We are creating more than a garden. It’s an environment for not only us but the other inhabitants.” To Moore’s point, this property has earned National Wildlife Federation habitat certification.

The design includes a walking area throughout. The walking area serves three functions: it ties the areas in the design together, it provides immersion from within the garden among the plants to enjoy them up close, and thirdly and importantly, it provides ease of maintenance.

Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, when eighth in line to the Saudi Arabian throne, built a 60,000-square-foot house, in Aspen Colorado, in 1990 that needed a landscape on a par with his palatial retreat. It was an opportunity Landscape Workshop, Inc., then based in the Denver area, felt prepared to tackle. “It was a good fit for us,” says Tim McMichael, now the president. “It put us on the front end of development when Aspen was on the cusp of breaking out and we were lucky to be in the right place at the right time.”

Leading up to this opportunity, Landscape Workshop had been a fast-growing company founded in 1979 by landscape architect Jim Pitts, McMichael’s father. By 1986 Pitts had grown the firm from a team of three to one of largest landscape installation companies in Colorado. With experience from large projects such as Southwest Plaza shopping mall and The Pinery, Landscape Workshop was confident taking on a big job in the mountains. At the time, there were no companies in the high country that could match their experience. Landscape Workshop gained a What does it take to please a Saudi prince in Aspen? Jim Pitts, founder of Landscape Workshop, Inc., with his wife and their great grandchildren who may someday be part of the company team. Landscape Workshop knows how it’s done foothold in the Aspen market and soon operations moved to Carbondale.