Foothills Garden

Garden Designer: Sherry Fuller, Bryan Fischer

The Foothills Garden serves as a naturalistic, native plant garden that showcases native plants found in the foothills biome seen from 5,000’ to almost 9,000’ in the Fort Collins area and at varying elevations up and down the Rockies. This garden emphasizes keystone, underused, and notable trees, shrubs, perennials, and grasses from this biome. Steep slopes capped with sandstone evoke our own foothills and create unique planting opportunities in this garden not seen in more traditional gardens 

Our local foothills represent the intersection of the grass-dominated Great Plains to our east and the Rocky Mountains to our west. True to its inspiration, our Foothills Garden includes dry slopes dominated by both blue grama and mountain mahogany, and showcases a range of plant communities, including foothills parkland, meadows, shrub steppe, and other icons of this biome, like a native plum thicket, and rock crevice specialist plants.  

Featuring:

• Approximately 1 acre in size

• 250+ species and cultivars of native plants from the foothills regions including Colorado and other Rocky Mountain states

• The west end contains easier-to-source cultivars of native plants as a demonstration for home gardeners

• The east end contains especially xeric plants, like those from the Colorado Plateau, that thrive without irrigation in the Fort Collins area once established