I should’ve posted this essay to my website two weeks ago when it was first written, but circumstances have dictated otherwise. Work for the Town of Silverton Parks-n-Recreation department is keeping me incredibly busy, in addition to other spring-related projects. “Better late than never,” as the old saying puts it.                                                                Word Count; 1479

Learning to Grow

Palm Trees in Siberia

One of my sisters often refers to living and thriving in this valley of ours as, “Living in South Siberia.” This is an incredibly harsh, cold, windy, and dry environment. Growing most types of trees and bushes here is often analogous to climbing Mt. Everest with a trusty pair of rusted roller skates attached to your feet.

Summers are short, so we need to take full advantage of this brief, and all to narrow window of opportunity for growing plants up here. I often override this brevity obstacle by having a veritable jungle of house plants inside my place. The mountain environment around here is too beautiful to spend all your time indoors, so spending as much time as possible outside enjoying this place is vital for maintaining a proper level of sanity.

Henceforth in this essay, I shall refer to successfully growing plants in Silverton as, “Palm Trees in Siberia”. This, for purposes of conciseness and a strong desire on my part to not have my readers getting too drowsy while reading this.

Since myself and a few other friends of mine in Silverton have been doing this plant growing thing in our backyard for a while now, all of us have learned a few “Tricks of the Trade” as it were. The Silverton plant growing version of course.

First and foremost, whatever you plant needs to be watered A LOT. We’re talking two or three times over a 10-day period, for the first two or three years the tree or bush is in the ground. Not just once a week when you’re trying to avoid an extreme bout of boredom. This, so the plant has a fighting chance to establish an extensive root system in order to survive our long winters. This place is a high-altitude desert.

I really don’t like planting something from a commercial tree nursery at lower elevations that you’ve just spent a lot of money purchasing. As I put it, the bigger the tree or bush, the greater the chance it won’t male it. All this, just to have the plant die the following summer. This is sort of like taking your hard-earned cash and flushing it down a toilet. Plus, 9 times out of 10, whatever it is you plant, inevitably it goes through some sort of shock a few days after it gets put in the ground. No matter how careful you are. Face it, Durango and Montrose are veritable beach resorts for growing plants compared to this place.

Here’s how we achieve, “Palm Trees in Siberia” with this one. Whatever it is you plant needs to have a hole dug for the plant WAY BELOW ground level. This protects the plant from the wind and unfortunately, it’s a lot of extra work. Exclusively because there’s a good reason why we call this part of the world, “The Rocky Mountains”. Sorry to also tell you this, but the only way to get around the conundrum is often to get down on your hands and knees and dig those rocks out of the ground with a clawed spade. Yuck, but what else are you going to do short of hiring someone with a trencher to dig the hole. This costs money, and once again I’ll say this, the bigger the plant that gets put in the ground, the greater the probability that it’ll probably die the following season.

So how do we get around this? GROW YOUR OWN. Unfortunately, this also takes a lot of patience and considerable amounts of time. Plus, the plant you put in the ground is often the size of a kitchen window seedling. Since most of us don’t have a lot of this time thing, let’s use some other tricks.

TRANSPLANTING is another nice option. Little known fact, the area in and around the cemetery is a natural tree nursery. In order to save the Town of Silverton money, we’ve dug up and transplanted lots of conifer and deciduous trees at the cemetery. Another. “Palm Tree in Siberia” set of tips for all our would-be tree planting aficionados out there; use a piece of string, and tie it to the side of the conifer tree facing magnetic north. Then when you transplant the baby tree, plant it in the exact same way it was growing when you dug it out of the ground. Who knows whether or not this works since I don’t have a PhD in Dendrology, but it can’t hurt. Also, when you dig up the tree, get as much of the root system as possible (Duh…). Then, you should water the baby tree with as much of that H2O stuff as you’d usually consume during one of your brain-dead, mid-summer, desert hikes. Sure glad I never did that in the past. Yeah, right?

Finally, go to one of the low-altitude tree nurseries around here and get some of those freebie black pots that originally had other plants growing in them. Cut the bottom of the pot off in the Fall, then jam it in the ground over the tree so the plant will make it through our harsh winter. Primarily because the sun up here is so intense on those cobalt blue-sky days that we have. Our sun reflects off the snow and bakes the tree seedling needles. These pot covers give the baby tree a bit of shade to help it too, but that’s just a side act of kindness.

One additional benefit of this transplanting tree strategy, and this one involves deciduous trees. Last Fall after all the Aspens had dropped their leaves and gone into dormancy for the winter, we dug up 16, 5’-7’ tall trees off the hillside in the cemetery. Transplanted all of them in a circle around the kid’s playground next to the Memorial Park Tennis Court. One of the complaints those of us in the Park’s Department have gotten from parents is that the playground because it has no trees, results in blast-furnace type conditions for the munchkins. We’ve already watered the trees eight times including putting a bit of rooting solution in the water since the snow melted, At this point, all those Aspens look like they’re going to bud out. We’ll know for sure in another month or so. Keep your fingers crossed they’ll bud out and live.

I have it on good authority that this strategy works. The family of my cousin’s husband transplanted a set of Aspen trees on their property in Breckenridge. The altitude there is 9,600’, which happens to be 300’ higher than Silverton. All those trees lived in case you’re wondering. Maybe you aren’t?

I love the common lilac bush (Syringa vulgaris). It’s a tough bush that can handle the cold, dry conditions of this place. I’ve seen bushes buried in huge piles of snow that’ve been plowed into place, and even some bushes that have been plowed over and leveled. With new watering the bushes actually come back to life and thrived. Are these zombie bushes, possibly? More than likely it’s because they like to be pruned. We currently have 64 lilac bushes planted down in the south part of town next to the Visitor’s Center. This figure is not an exaggeration.

Except for maybe having to replace one or two bushes that have died, almost every one of the lilacs have survived over the last 10 years. Butterflies love lilac bushes so someday we’ll have a bunch of them down at the south end of town. That’ll probably take another 10 to 15 years, and I’ll be older than Methuselah by then, but someday this will happen, Count on it.

There are parts of England where palm trees do indeed grow and thrive. Some of those places happen to be at the same latitude as south Siberia. Now the warmth of the Gulf Stream happens to have a lot to do with this, but the situation is basically like growing palm trees in Siberia. We’re looking at this from a figurative perspective.

If you go to the San Juan County Museum and look at the old pictures of this valley back during the height of the mining era, this place was totally denuded of vegetation. We may never be able to grow fruits & vegetables here in Silverton unless we have a big-ass green house, and lots of extra land that hasn’t already been turned into a summer residences. It also takes lots of this stuff sometimes referred to as Dead Presidents.

I love trees and bushes and we’re getting more and more of them growing here all the time. You’ll probably have to have me knocked off if you really want to put a stop to all this greenery propagation I’m obsessed with carrying out.

David G. Swanson is a resident tree planter who lives in Silverton…