6 westword.com WESTWORD JULY 2-8, 2026 | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | help us now? You’re the ones who took the water away.’” “Well, you don’t need water,” Marsicek told her. Improbably, Denver Water is all about selling less of the stuff. “It’s an interesting business model to try and get people to use less of your product,” Salazar says. With roughly half of what Denver Water delivers going to irrigation, and half of its own supply drawn from the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin, the utility now works to talk Coloradans out of thirsty lawns. It coined the word “Xeriscape” in the 1980s, and in 2022 joined other Colorado River cities and utilities to cut “nonfunctional turf,” the decorative grass on medians and offi ce parks that nobody walks on, by 30%. Stratton runs the Landscape Transformation Assistance Program that does it, helping cities, parks and institutions rip out ornamental grass and reseed with native, low-water plantings – something the utility calls a “ColoradoScape.” Because nature wrested away Riverside’s own grass years ago, there was no lawn left to rip out. There was no irrigation to wean off. What there was, instead, was history – and ironically, the right kind of ruin. That was the takeaway for an ecological study of Riverside commissioned by Denver Water and authored by Matrix Design Group, a Colorado engineering and environmental consultancy, led by Joshua Eldridge. He’s a restoration ecologist who has spent more than 20 years coaxing life back into landscapes most people don’t want to think about – from Superfund sites to spent mines, oil-and-gas pads, and other brownfi elds. Compared to places that could kill you, a place where the dead rest is a relatively plush assignment. “Good work leads to more work,” he says, explaining how a man who reclaims industrial ruin winds up among the headstones. Eldridge and the Matrix team assessed the grounds in the spring of 2025. For a place too often shrugged off as terribly forlorn, there was a lot of life. The ground cover was made up mostly of the usual non-native opportun- ists that move in when nothing holds them back: redstem fi laree, fi eld bindweed, kochia, lambsquarters and Russian thistle (the iconic Western tumbleweed, which, like most things out West, isn’t from out West). Scattered through the weeds were native plants that outlasted 20 years without irriga- tion, such as sand dropseed, buffalograss, blue grama, slender wheatgrass – the short grasses that stood here long before the cem- etery did and thrived long before Kentucky bluegrass crept its way into Colorado. To revitalize Riverside, the job was not to truck in a new landscape but to coax back the one hiding in the ground. In all its years without irrigation, Riverside was not without care. The old approach? “Mow and go. We would pay for three mowings a year,” Briggs says, so that folks could fi nd the headstones. “We’d watch if we had a wet spring. Then we’d try to mow for Memorial Day. Then we’d watch it throughout the summer and mow it when it got bigger. And then at the end of the year, if it needed another mow, we’d mow it.” Eldridge will tell you that’s about the worst thing you can do. When you whip a mower across a site, you can destroy what you ought to save and spread the seeds of the stuff you’re trying to root out. The fix was counterin- tuitive: Do less. Matrix set up an experiment in a head- stone-free test plot between Riverside’s administration building and the rail line. The project carved the plot into a patchwork and treated them each a little differently, tilling some deep, scratching some shallow, leaving some alone, feeding some with nutrients, leaving others at the bare fer- tility the ground already had. The question was not which single thing would work best, but what mix would. Nature is complicated. In the fall, seeds for the same blend of native grasses went down across the entire plot: the short-grass prairie that had been here all along, accompanied, here and there, by wildfl owers to see if they could take. The idea was that winter would crack the seed husks and a spring melt would wake them. Winter? “We didn’t really get a winter,” Stratton admits, but no mat- ter. Denver’s wet May made the experiment work, with surprising results. The test plots that were worked hardest, those that were dug deep and fertilized heavily, came up thick with a dense crowd of the very weeds Matrix was hoping to root out, woken by the tilling and fed by the fertilizer. The plots barely touched came up thinner, and right. As Briggs says, “The area that’s doing the best is where we did the least.” Good news for the person who signs the front of the checks: Less labor, less soil to prep, less money. “Low maintenance,” Eldridge is care- ful to say, “is not no maintenance.” But the takeaway was unmistakable: Riverside’s hal- lowed soil rewarded being left mostly alone. That, of course, upends everything a cemetery is supposed to teach you about lawn care. Since Riverside’s founding in 1876, manicured greenscapes in Colorado have been an argument with the land, won or lost each week. With the test plots, what Matrix proposed was to live and let live.In January, Matrix graded the whole cemetery, dividing it into 43 blocks and scoring each on the weeds and what still grew there. The result was a map shaded like a stoplight, and it was overwhelmingly red: Roughly 85% of the ground scored “poor.” Just under 10 acres came back as the middling yellow. The “excellent” ground? About a third of an acre, with nothing scoring as “good.” Luckily, the map is not a coroner’s report. It’s a work plan to carry what’s learned from the test plots through the rest of the grounds. Denver Water paid for the analysis, but car- rying it out – a few acres a year, as the budget allows – falls to Fairmount, with Matrix advising and, in time, training the cemetery’s own crews to keep it going. Eldridge fi gures it will be fi ve to 10 years before the whole of Riverside is on that trajectory. “By, let’s call it 2035,” he says, “Riverside looks much different than it does today.” But different, how? “It doesn’t have to be bright green,” Stratton says. “It can still be beautiful and golden, with pops of color, and still look very alive.” A rendering on a fl yer promoting a July 25 event at Riverside when the cemetery, Denver Water and Matrix De- sign Group will “share our vision for…bringing new life to its landscape for generations to come” hints at that future. You can almost see low, tawny grass moving in the wind as prairie aster, blanket fl ower and prairie clover rise above the headstones where the mower once tried to keep the weeds in check.It’s not only plants, either, since a working prairie is busy in a way that a lawn can’t be. Kentucky bluegrass is often mowed into stillness, but a native stand hums: Pollinators work the fl owers, and insects navigate the grass as birds swoop in to eat both. Monitoring an- other restored site, Eldridge saw a butterfl y settle on some beardtongues until a bird snatched it. “This is why we do it,” he says. Eldridge’s vision is not a Riverside devoid of the industry that gave rise to Fairmount Cemetery – Suncor’s refi nery towers sit in the sightline, after all – but he fi gures that if you build the habitat, the life comes looking for it. The hope is for a cemetery with more traffi c than just mourners: people who come for the wildfl owers, people who come for the birds, and people who live in an area with pitifully little green to its name and just want somewhere pleasant to walk. There are, of course, vastly more effi cient ways to deal with the dead than a 77-acre park. Cremation is cheaper than burial, and scatter- ing ashes is usually free. There is no practical reason to set aside all this land, and the stone and the labor, for the benefi t of “residents” who cannot see any of it. That’s the tell: A grave is not a storage unit. It is dug so that a name stays above ground and the living have somewhere to go to reconnect with the departed. That only works if people keep showing up. The dead don’t sustain a cemetery; the living do. Riverside be- came forlorn not only because the grass died but because the grievers died, and their griev- ers died, and fewer and fewer folks wanted to be buried in a place that suggested that death might not lead to Eden with a sprinkler system. For Riverside, beauty is a matter of solvency as much as sentiment. “Let’s fi x this first,” Briggs says of the grounds, “and then people will want to come.” For Stratton, who first walked Riverside after vis- iting Fairmount and felt, in her words, like “maybe I’m not supposed to be here,” the goal is experiential. “I want them to want to walk the whole cemetery,” she says. As they do, perhaps they’ll be inspired to buy plots again until Riverside pays for it- self. The wildfl owers are an ecological project and a sales strategy: Here, the upside of the business calculus is a form of eternal life.“We need to save their stories,” Briggs says of the people already at Riverside, “and share their stories so that they’re not forgotten.” Whose stories? The State of Colorado’s fi rst governor, John Routt, rests at Riverside, a stone’s throw away from Col. Champion Vaughan, the Denver Tribune editor in chief who “kept a 10-gallon container of whiskey under his desk and would arrive at work at the peak of his dignity, which as the day progressed changed in proportion to the de- crease of whiskey in the container,” accord- ing to historian Annette L. Student. Vaughan called himself “colonel” on the strength of Civil War service no one has ever been able to verify. Cemeteries are the great equalizer. Briggs oversees Riverside’s lush, celeb- rity-fi lled sister, too, and lately she’s been looking at Fairmount differently. “One day this is going to look like Riverside if we don’t do something about it,” she says. Like life itself, water is promised to no one forever. The bill Riverside paid decades ago is going to be handed to the rest of the West – and so the cemetery that died fi rst turns out to be the one furthest ahead. “We’re not restoring Riv- erside,” she insists. “We’re transforming it.” “I think this part of the world is going to go back to what it probably looked like 100 years ago, 200 years ago, and that’s appropri- ate,” Salazar says. Sprinklers deny the wilderness. Cemeter- ies deny death. And yet, drop all the denials and the ground is still there, the rain still falls, and the prairie grass still comes back on its own. At 10 a.m. on Saturday, July 25, Fairmount Cemetery Company, Denver Water, and Matrix Design Group will present a free program on the transformation at Riverside Cemetery, 5201 Brighton Blvd. The test is designed to make the most of native plants. SKYLER MCKINLEY News continued from page 4
