Plants and Gardens
View of La Plata Mountains from Escalante Pueblo

ANASAZI HERITAGE CENTER DEMONSTRATION GARDENS Master Gardeners at work

When you visit the Anasazi Heritage Center, take a few minutes to enjoy the gardens and grounds. The museum grounds occupy about 100 acres that were first landscaped in 1988, and are now anchored with mature trees and shrubs. The gardens are designed to blend with the landscape and offer vistas of the Four Corners and Sleeping Ute Mountain. Informal outdoor seating areas, a picnic area, and paved walkways allow visitors to enjoy the careful stonework, natural meadows, planted flower beds, and wild original forest cover.

The Anasazi Heritage Center grounds are 7,100 feet above sea level, straddling the Pinyon/Juniper and the Pine/Oak ecological zones. These zones overlap here with an interesting blend of native trees, shrubs, grasses, and flowers.

With Plant Select® plants and other hardy perennials integrated into the plaza's planting beds and general landscape, native and adapted plant varieties can be compared almost side-by-side.

Many of our plants have thrived in the high elevation, dry climate, and heavy alkaline soil of the Four Corners region for hundreds of years. Our gardens may help you understand the importance of plants to the Ancestral Puebloan people.

NATIVE PLANTS

The BLM Anasazi Heritage Center boasts a collection of native grasses, flowers, cacti, shrubs, and trees that are undisturbed in their original settings. Many of these plants are visible along the Escalante Trail that winds for a half-mile through natures's own xeriscape garden.

Starting from the parking lot, the trail ends at the Escalante Pueblo with views for miles in all directions. In spring, the blooms of Mountain Mahogany, Serviceberry, Fendlerbush, and Squaw Apple are beautiful.

Fendler (fendlera rupicola), a native shrubRed Feathers (Echium amoenum) from Plant Select
 Fendler (fendlera rupicola), a native shrubRed Feathers (Echium amoenum), from Plant Select
Red Gaillardia (Gaillardia spp.), nativeMexican Hats (Ratibida columnifera), native

Red Gaillardia (Gaillardia spp.), native

Mexican Hats (Ratibida columnifera), native

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anasazi Heritage Center


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The BLM Anasazi Heritage Center Plant Guide is an in-depth directory of plants and flowers on museum grounds, prepared and updated by our volunteers. A copy of this 40-page document is available at the museum.

Plant Select Logo, link to Plant Select

Plant
Select®

The BLM Anasazi Heritage Center has been a Plant Select® Demonstration Garden since 2010, allowing visitors to view Plant Select® plants in real garden situations.

Plant Select® is a cooperative program administered by Denver Botanic Gardens and Colorado State University in concert with horticulturists and nurseries throughout the Rocky Mountain region. Its purpose is to seek, identify, and distribute the very best plants for landscapes and gardens from the intermountain region to the high plains. This program is conducted in cooperation with Colorado State University Montezuma County Extension and the Colorado Master Gardener Program. It is primarily a volunteer effort.

See the Plant Select Video which explains this collaborative project.