Denver Botanic Gardens cover 24 acres alongside York Street in the Cheesman Park neighborhood of Denver, the land a former burial ground that’s now filled with trees, plants, flowers and other ground coverings from all over the world. This is where a Denver International Airport employee said he finds rest three or four times each summer.

People who fly in the window aisle on United Airlines to Concourse B at DIA and look out at the tarmac below might see Jonathan Millett, helping unload luggage from a nearby Boeing 787. Whether it is minus 16 or 110 above outside, raining or snowing, he’s certain to keep luggage in sync with their owners in making a tight connection, something he’s done for 16 years.

Millett likes his job, but today, he is seated on a shaded bench at the Gardens, relaxing. This is his spot to unwind.

The park offers 170 benches and 10 chairs on which visitors can rest, reflect and renew. The Boettcher Memorial Tropical Conservatory opened in 1966, yet it is the peace of the outdoors that Millett and others sought out.

The peace begins at the Gardens’ entrance. A Sensory Garden, run by a horticultural therapist, is the first stop but just one stop in the journey that the Gardens offer to relieve the stress and busyness of Denver urban life.

Millett was born in Littleton, attended Arapahoe High School in Centennial, enrolled in what is now Metropolitan State University, and now lives in an apartment in Aurora. He mowed his lawn growing up, but he’s free of that now. He enjoys the beauty of the Botanic Gardens, without having to do the yardwork. The garden is peaceful.

“Maybe that’s why I like it so much,” Millett said.

The Sensory Garden is run by Angie Andrade, Associate Director of Horticulture and Therapeutic Horticulture Program for the Gardens. She grew up in Castle Rock, growing and eating tomatoes and snap peas that she started inside and transplanted after Mother’s Day.

As a child, Andrade joined a field trip to the Gardens. “It was magical, otherworldly, with big trees and secret areas,” she said. “It takes you out of your head.”

Andrade’s Sensory Garden is magical for visitors. A group of Boy Scouts can’t believe that a yellow flower in the sensory garden smells like buttered popcorn. The peppermint geranium smells like peppermint. And then there’s lemon balm and cinnamon basil.

Andrade has worked at the Gardens for 20 years. “Gardening is a relationship,” she said. “You have to check everybody out every day. It’s not a schedule; it’s observing.”

She observes visitors’ reactions as well, watching for a change of behavior, and she often sees it, because the visitors are outside, in nature. They have arrived stressed, and now they show signs of delight.

Elsewhere in the Gardens, a Westminster High School graduate now in his 22nd year with the Gardens is delighted to tell a visitor how his work deepens his appreciation of life in Colorado.

Mike Bone is the Associate Director of Horticulture and Curator of the Gardens’ Steppes Collections. Steppe is a word in both German and French, derived from a Russian word, for a flat, grassy, arid plain, typically in the rain shadow of mountains.

Denver is at the western edge of the Great American Steppe, what most people think of as the Great Plains.

As a kid, Bone visited his grandfather’s farm in the panhandle of Texas, where he learned to love the outdoors. His dad, a schoolteacher, took him on frequent summer trips in Colorado: to the southern Rockies, Guanella Pass in Clear Creek County, Fairplay, South Park and the Arkansas River drainage, where he learned to camp, fish and hunt.

As an adult, Bone worked at Miller Landscaping, at 70th and York, where he learned about controlled environments and mechanical spaces. Then, at a wholesale nursery, Nursery Green Acres in Golden, he discovered what plants grow and survive in the Front Range environment. Both businesses have since closed.

In his 22 years at the Botanic Gardens, Bone has traveled to climates around the world similar to Denver’s: arid regions of central Asia, South America and Southern Africa. He spent three weeks in 2018 gathering seeds from Lesotho, a land-locked African nation featuring a steppe, the Drakensberg escarpment. The seeds Bone brought back from Lesotho grew in Denver. That realization tugged at Bone’s soul.

“I feel a genetic pull to the steppe, an ancient, human genetic pull,” he said. “Humans migrate through steppes. The Silk Road ran along a steppe.” And Bone isn’t the only one who sees it, senses it.

“Visitors ask us all the time, out of natural curiosity, what is that plant,” Bone said. “I’ve had people come up and say, ‘I think I know what that plant is, it’s a summer hyacinth. I saw it on a hillside in South Africa.’” Steppe brings humanity together, Bone said.

Denver Botanic Gardens partners with Colorado State University on Plant Select, a non-profit organization that offers plants that can thrive in Colorado’s steppe environment. The selection is in part informed by Bone’s work.

Bone travels with another Gardens staffer, Kevin Philip Williams, Manager of Horticulture. Williams oversees many gardens, like the Dwarf Conifer Collection. There are more than 50 themed gardens at Denver Botanic Gardens, which is why the name is plural.

 
Visitors are encouraged to use their five senses at the Gardens,
whether it is discovering texture, inhaling the smells or simply resting along the paths.


Williams is excited by the Gardens’ efforts to create environments that closely match what plants, flowers and trees would experience in the wild, as opposed to a traditional garden. He’s helping establish a dwarf conifer environment in a section of the park that matches a Colorado montane. Surrounding the conifers are what you would expect to see where they grow, between 7,000 to 10,000 feet elevation, with dry understory and rocky terrain.

Next to the conifers is a willow glade that will eventually include all 40 known species of willow in Colorado, from the South Platte to Cottonwood Pass. Williams travels with Bone, the steppes collector, gathering willow cuttings on federal lands, with the agencies’ permission.

“Willows are important host plants for everything from flies to moose,” Williams said.

With the diverse gardens on 24 acres, some with rare species, how does Williams protect more vulnerable plants?

“We curate, we edit,” Williams said. “I prefer that the species have self-autonomy. I want to partner with plants to make decisions in their own way. I let species flow. But if Columbines are overwhelming rare plants, I’ll use our territorial hand.”

Williams said his Botanic Gardens work, going on 10 years now, is inspiring him to curate the front and back yards of his Sherrelwood home in Westminster.

The front yard is what he calls a cool ranch thicket, like a meadow – a mix of sumac, mahogany, thick shrubbery, grasses, perennials and annuals. The shrubs will grow in the next five to seven years, and others will be interstitials.

The backyard will be Iggy’s Herb Meadow, named for his Jack Russell terrier and the plants Williams is establishing. “We’re hoping he runs through sage and scented plants, and comes back smelling nice,” he said.

Williams will have the option of Iggy smelling like peppermint, or popcorn.