August at Birdhaven
Part One
A Preview
a n n o u n c i n g
The Colorado Rocky Mountain Sculpture Garden Summer Season
2016
i s
Now Underway
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Hello and Welcome
It is with a great sense of pleasure, pride, relief and satisfaction that I am once again poised to savor yet another, the 13th, Colorado Rocky Mountain Sculpture Garden, or “Birdhaven”, Summer Season. For I think I can at last quite safely say that, after a quite prolonged spell of chilly late Spring weather, the Summer of ’16 Season is now most certainly upon us. Hopefully this blissful state of affairs will linger, certainly it will through August, September, and however long into October I am able to keep ol’ Jack Frost at bay. But August – lovely August, is without doubt the most enchanting month of the year. Winter has it’s ‘spectacular’, Spring and Autumn have much going for them too. August however. August has enchantment down to a tee. A whole season in a bottle labeled, yep you guessed it: August at Birdhaven, Woody Creek CO. Coming soon.
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Origins
Around 13 years or so ago the area where now stands the Sculpture Garden served as a parking lot. 
The soil was packed solid and ridden with a particularly tenacious dry grass, itself supported by a mangled thatch of gnarled and knotted roots. The surface comprised of a deep layer of tight-packed, course gravel. Thanks however to the miraculous powers divined by of our mighty Woody Creek River water such memories now seem very dim indeed. During the coming weeks I will be once again posting my blogs on a real-time basis, assembled and dispatched under the banner ‘August at Birdhaven’. 
And so in order to prepare the scene, and celebrate the occasion, I thought I would use this opportunity to take a quick glance backwards in time. The photos arranged below were primarily taken last summer, around the month of August. Bare in mind, here at 7,300 feet above sea-level, the first seven months of the year can at practically anytime, and quite without warning, turn a bit chilly, and very much so when it comes our nights. Any July evening for instance may turn suddenly quite nippy, and no one leaves home without at least a sweater, but at four in the morning it can feel extremely cold indeed (as many an unprepared camper has and will discover, to their acute and prolonged discomfort).
Summer’s Peak
But, oh my, once that magical month… the merry month of August sweeps down upon us, finally, at last! we are all just so wonderfully, gloriously, finally warm! Well, I can’t say its ever that warm of an evening around these parts, truth be told, but it now becomes warm enough for massive zucchini fronds to adore the night sky unfettered by the cling of frost capes. Luxuriously warm enough for Kris and I to sit out on the porch of an evening without once mentioning the word “blanket”.
Best of all, it is now warm enough for the hundreds of thousands, millions and millions, of plants – big and brash, teeny and weeny, frost tender and otherwise – to grow, grow and GROW some more. 
For these are fully developed, mature plants, root systems and all, pent up and ready to go. So ready willing and able are they that, once they sense that the weather is no longer out to kill them, they practically unfurl and bloom right before your eyes. You have to see it to believe it. And if you follow this blog (hint) then follow it you most certainly will. For having not touched my camera since the great thaw of early March I am now good and ready, well-rested, and well up for the coming assignment. Don’t forget that you can always take a Colorado Rocky Mountain Sculpture Garden Tour from previous years by clicking on the appropriate tab at the top right-hand side of this page. May I also extend a warm welcome to visit my gift shop too, located for your shopping convenience at the very top of each page. And so, until ‘August at Birdhaven’ gets underway, in August, and in order to set the tone, I present the following gallery of Sculpture Garden photos gleamed from the glorious Summer of ’15 archival files, located deep within the martincooney.com photographic vaults, here at Birdhaven Gallery, Woody Creek CO.
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and now
the slideshow
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If you would like to visit Birdhaven by prior appointment, no dogs please, call my phone at 970 319 1070 for details. View the sculpture, watch the birds, and taste the garden. New for this year – I will be hosting regular Don’t Lunch, Come ‘n Munch noontime tours wherein we will nibble our way through the garden, from one end to another. So come hungry. Together we will munch a plethora of seasonal veggies including peas, edible flowers, whole leaves, teeny zucchinis, Giant Red mustard, pak choi, kale, kohlrabi, arugula… you see it, we’ll munch it!
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thanks for visiting martincooney.com
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λλ∂Γ†ïη
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