Native & xeriscape management.

A commercial xeriscape is one of the best investments a Front Range property owner can make. It's also the single easiest landscape to destroy with routine maintenance — and most of them are being destroyed right now, quietly, by crews doing exactly what they were told.

This is our wedge. It's why Frontier Property Care exists.

Why most commercial xeriscapes look bad

Walk a Denver-area office park with a xeric bed installed five years ago and you'll usually see one of three failures:

1. Everything sheared into balls. A crew with hedge trimmers turned rabbitbrush, fernbush, and sumac into green meatballs. Shearing removes the current season's flowering wood, forces dense twiggy outer growth, shades out the interior of the shrub, and produces a plant that is dead in the middle and blooms on nothing. The plant is still alive. It just isn't the plant anyone paid for.
2. Grasses cut back in fall, then mowed on the turf schedule. Native warm-season grasses like blue grama and little bluestem hold their structure through winter — CSU Extension notes that grasses "add a significant vertical presence to the winter landscape and are commonly left standing until spring." Cut them down in October and you've bought a bed of stubble for six months and thrown away the standing vegetation that, per CSU, provides overwintering sites for beneficial insects and birds.
3. The bed slowly reverts to weeds. Nobody scoped weed control for a rock bed, so nobody did it, so now the bed is a bindweed and cheatgrass nursery with a few surviving penstemon in it.

None of that is the plants' fault. It's a maintenance scope problem.

What xeric maintenance actually is

Xeriscape isn't "no maintenance." It's a different, lower, and much more timing-sensitive maintenance load. The labor hours drop. The precision required goes up.

Cutback, once a year, in late winter or early spring. CSU Extension's guidance on ornamental grasses is that most benefit from cutting back "usually just before new growth begins in the spring" — not fall. Native grasses and most native perennials get cut back before the plant pushes. CSU's native-perennial guidance is more direct still: "Leave vegetation standing after the first hard frost to provide over-wintering sites for beneficial insects and birds." Fall cutback throws that away, and it strips the property of its only winter interest.

One honest caveat, because it's a commercial property. CSU also says, plainly, that the dried foliage of ornamental grasses is combustible in winter and "is likely best removed in public and commercial sites." That is a real tension, and we're not going to pretend it isn't. Our position: leave the perennial stems, and treat mass grass plantings adjacent to buildings, parking, or smoking areas as a fire-load decision rather than an aesthetic one. Out in the middle of a detention basin, leave them standing. Tight against a building wall, clear them. That's a judgment call we'll make with you, not a rule we'll apply blindly.

Pruning that respects bloom wood. Shrubs that bloom on old wood — serviceberry, for example — set next year's flowers shortly after this year's bloom. Prune them in late winter and you're cutting off the flowers. Shrubs that bloom on new wood tolerate a late-winter cut. A crew that doesn't know the difference will prune both the same day and you'll lose a season of bloom on half the bed.

Selective, not indiscriminate. Xeric shrubs want to be pruned with hand pruners, one branch at a time, thinning to structure — not sheared to a shape. It's slower per plant. It's also the difference between a bed that looks better every year and one that looks worse every year.

Weed control, aggressively and early. This is the real recurring labor in a xeriscape. Gravel and rock mulch beds hold heat and are excellent seedbeds for exactly the weeds you don't want. The rule is simple: pull or treat before seed set. A weed pulled in May is one weed. A weed pulled in August is next year's thousand.

Almost no fertilizer. Native and adapted xeric plants evolved on lean Front Range soils. Fertilizing them produces soft, floppy, over-tall growth that lodges over in the first hard rain and is more attractive to pests. Most xeric beds need no supplemental fertility at all.

Irrigation that gets turned down. A xeriscape that's still on the turf-zone schedule three years after install is not saving you a dime, and the plants are usually suffering from it. Established xeric plantings need dramatically less water than turf — and often, seasonally, none. See Irrigation Management for how we handle that.

What it costs you when it's done badly

You bought the xeriscape to lower a water bill. If the beds get irrigated like turf, the water savings never arrive and you paid the install cost for nothing.

You bought it because it was supposed to look good with less input. If the shrubs get sheared into balls and the grasses get scalped in October, it looks worse than the turf it replaced — and now you're getting complaints about the "dead-looking" landscaping every winter.

And you bought it because natives are supposed to be tough. They are. But a plant that's been sheared for three straight seasons, overwatered, and overfertilized isn't tough anymore — it's a stressed plant with a shallow root system, and it will die in the first real drought year and need replacing.

Doing it right isn't more expensive. It's usually cheaper, because it's fewer hours. It just has to be the right hours, at the right time, by someone who can tell a penstemon from a weed.

What we do

We inventory the plant material — actually identify it, species by species — and build a cutback and pruning calendar around what's in your beds. We hand-prune. We don't shear xeric shrubs. We cut grasses back in late winter, not fall. We weed before seed set. And we get your xeric zones off the turf irrigation schedule, which is usually where the savings you were promised have been hiding.

Read more: When to Cut Back Colorado Native Plants and Native Plants That Work on Front Range Commercial Properties.