Everything living that goes onto a job is in here — trees, shrubs, perennials, grasses, groundcovers, ferns, vines, annuals and roses. This is the top of the plant catalog and the other categories sit underneath it.
Plant selection out here is a narrower problem than it is in most of the country, and narrower is useful. Soil across the valley floor runs alkaline, commonly pH 7.5 to 8.2, which locks up iron and takes a long list of otherwise excellent plants off the table — they go yellow between green veins, decline for years, and nobody can feed them out of it. Water is allocated and it is seasonal. The frost dates are not generous at either end, and a warm week in April regularly costs somebody their fruit crop. Deer work the edges of most properties, and the wind does the rest.
What survives all of that is a smaller list than the catalogs suggest, and it is the list in here. A plant on this page is one we have put in the ground on properties in Delta and Montrose counties and watched through winters.
Two ways to use it. Browse by category below if you know roughly what you are after — a tree, a hedge, something for a bank. Or work from plant characteristics if you are starting from the problem instead: dry shade, a slope, alkaline ground, deer pressure, a spot that never drains.
