A Meadow From My Own Block
CHAPTER 6
I've started carrying little mason jars on my walks around Leadville. Neighbors probably think I'm odd (they're not wrong), because I'll be mid-stroll and suddenly crouched at the edge of someone's fence line, gently shaking seed heads into glass.
I'm collecting my garden. By hand. From my own neighborhood.
The Gold House sits on two lots, which means the land is as much my project as the plaster and floors, and honestly it's the part of this whole renovation that has my heart the most. Indoor-outdoor as ONE design has always been the thing I love above everything else. A house shouldn't stop at its walls. Especially not this house, at 10,200 feet, where the outside is the whole reason any of us live here.
So here's the plan, and it took me a while to be able to say it simply. The meadow isn't a section of the yard. It fills every pocket that isn't already spoken for, running between the beds and the paths and the places to sit, holding all of it together. Not a landscaped lawn, not something ordered from a catalog, but a meadow grown from seeds that already know how to live at this altitude because they're already living here.
Icelandic poppies in white, yellow, and orange. The native Leadville red poppies (if you've seen them glowing against an old miner's fence in July, you understand). And columbine, Colorado's state flower, in a variety of shades, because, how could I not? Among others… my jars keep filling up.
There's something that gets me every time I'm out gathering: these seeds are LOCAL in the deepest sense. This won't be a garden that could exist anywhere. It will be a meadow that could only exist here, on this street, in this town. Sourcing a landscape from your own block is the most curated thing I've ever done, and it cost me nothing but walks I was already taking.
Clearing took me most of June and July. Years of untreated, overgrown grasses and debris, and me, pulling and hauling load after load. Endurance work in the most literal way. Every trail race starts with the unglamorous base miles, and every meadow starts with clearing what choked the ground before it.
There's a lot in the ground now that wasn't there in June. That's a whole other story and I'm going to tell it properly, piece by piece, starting this fall.
Design-wise, the vision is structure meeting wildness. Structured garden beds, clean and intentional (the modern designer in me gets her moment out here), integrated right into the surrounding meadow, so the tended and the untamed hold each other. Order and wildness in the same frame. Which, come to think of it, is basically Leadville. And basically me.
This land will take years, and I'm weirdly at peace with that. You can rush a paint job. You cannot rush a meadow.
And there's one more thing I want. There are yellow roses all over this town, throwing hundreds of blooms against old fences like nobody planted them, thriving at 10,200 feet where half of what you put in the ground simply refuses. I don't think they're native. I think somebody carried them up here a long time ago and they just stayed, which honestly makes me love them more. I want them on this property.
For now I'll keep walking, keep crouching at fence lines, keep filling jars. Stewardship of a house turned into stewardship of a little piece of Leadville itself, and I didn't see that coming… but I'm so grateful it did.
