Summer Travel – Betty Ford Alpine Garden

If  you are heading to Colorado this summer a stop at the Betty Ford Alpine Garden is a must.  This public botanical garden in the Vail valley is the highest elevation botanical garden in the United States.

Recognized as the foremost authority on high-altitude plants the gardens are used for educational purposes as well as conservation.  The Betty Ford Alpine Garden  provides an environment for rare, exotic and imperiled alpine wildflowers and plants.

The Botanic Garden is named after long time Vail resident Betty Ford.  Mrs. Ford is noted for saying that “our flowers in the summer are as glorious as our snow in the winter”.  If you take a visit to these amazing gardens you will certainly agree.

The botanic garden is located close to the center of Vail in the shadow of Colorado’s Gore Range.  There is an assortment of perennial beds, rock gardens and waterfalls that dramatically display an astonishing selection of the world’s most unique and beautiful high elevation plants.  Gardening at high altitude can certainly have its challenges, but these gardens let you see the possibilities associated with  high altitude gardening.

Please visit the garden’s website for full details.

The Avalanche Lily

We’ve been fascinated by this flower and the stories surrounding it’s name since we first saw them.  It was in March, in the midst of a brutal and unrelenting winter.  The day was sunny and milder than it had been in weeks , a cleft in a month of cathedral-gray skies and slicing winds. We launched ourselves out of the house  for a hike. 

As we emerged from a rocky outcrop, we found the entire hillside below  covered with a waving mass of white flowers growing so closely together than no earth showed through, resembling a shifting avalanche of snow . I had to know more about these amazing flowers:

Avalanche Lily: Erythronium montanum
Nodding lilies with 6 curved, upsweeping tepals. Each flower is usually on top of a leafless, unbranched stem. The leaves are typically leathery, arising from the base of the stalk. Unlike its close cousin, the Glacier Lily, the Avalanche Lily has white flowers with yellow centers. Also, the Avalanche Lily has non-mottled leaves, unlike another close cousin, the White Fawn Lily.

Tidbits:
This flower is closely related to both the Glacier Lily and the White Fawn Lily, and its name is oftentimes used interchangeably with both. . The Avalanche Lily is a distinct Northwest Cascades flower. Its corms were a frequent source of food for the indigenous Northwest tribes. It does not sprout up at the conclusion of an avalanche, marking the last breaths of those trapped beneath the snow (one of the stories I had heard) …it’s just a lovely harbinger of spring.