Can Colorado do more with less water?
Where Colorado will find the water it needs to thrive is a more urgent question than ever amid historic drought, undeniable climate change and unprecedented interstate conflicts over limited river supplies.
The Colorado Sun is embarking on a solutions journalism series asking who in the state is doing their share to save precious water. Our solutions-oriented reporting will assess whether specific water conservation projects can free up water at a large scale, or whether local conservation is always overwhelmed by uncontrollable natural conditions or immovable market realities.
The Colorado Sun series, “Can Colorado do more with less water?,” will create a body of work showcasing what may or may not be possible in creating water solutions across the state. From Akron to Aspen, we’re looking for signs of success or failure that will help lead us to water security.
As an overseer of cemeteries, Kendra Briggs knows all about expectations: Pastoral landscapes, lush and green and nicely manicured, dotted with shade trees and all of it nourished by the life-giving spray of irrigation. To many customers, it remains the standard for a final resting place.
In Colorado, those traditional demands increasingly collide with climate reality. Briggs, the president and CEO of the nonprofit Fairmount Cemetery Company, deals daily with the difficulties of scarce precipitation and challenging access to water. Even Fairmount’s centerpiece Denver location, the pastoral, historic grounds near the corner of South Quebec Street and East Alameda Avenue, battles brownout amid equally historic drought.
But Briggs also looks after another far more problematic property. Riverside Cemetery, once a shaded, verdant garden of the hereafter, has devolved — through a series of unfortunate events — into a weed-strewn moonscape.
Loss of water rights and a Dutch elm infestation eventually transformed a once-flourishing cemetery into a place where it seems only history lives. It marks the resting place for many Colorado pioneers and civic leaders among an estimated 65,000 graves, some unmarked, across 77 acres along the South Platte River just north of downtown.
Briggs has read the online reviews, and they are brutal.
This place looks horrible. Never thought dirt could look so bad. They took away the water so many years ago it’s just pitiful.
Not maintained at all. Too bad! Lots of history here.
The cemetery was desolate. My heart sank with disappointment that something so historic would be left to this neglectful end.
As she read the reviews she thought: What do you expect in a high plains desert with no water in the middle of a drought? With limited options, she likened maintenance of Riverside to “kicking the can down the road.” Mowing weeds. Grading roads. Resetting fallen monuments.
But then hope appeared. Amid a landscape literally gone to seed lurked unexpected opportunity.
If people can get over the idea that a cemetery should be like a putting green, then it’ll be more attractive to people.
— Kendra Briggs, CEO of Fairmount Cemetery Company
Denver Water, Colorado’s largest public water utility, approached Briggs with an invitation to apply for a new grant to reimagine Riverside, using only whatever moisture falls from the sky. Then it introduced her to Matrix Design Group, a planning, engineering and environmental consulting firm.
Together, they began to conceive a plan designed — as it’s implemented over several years — to transform the landscape to a tapestry of native grasses and even flowers to attract pollinators to improve aesthetics, help the environment and reduce maintenance costs.
It started last fall on test plots staked out across a patch of unused land next to the cemetery’s deteriorating main office. There, experts from Matrix experimented with native seed mixes, tillage depths and fertilizers to calibrate the optimal formula for sowing a sustainable future.
If the effort proves successful, the ramifications could extend well beyond Riverside’s borders. The transformation could not only green its low-income urban pocket of Elyria-Swansea but also offer a template for other burial properties — and provide information to educate and encourage visitors, as well.
Although conservation-minded burial options have emerged in properties already suited to native plants that thrive in an arid climate, and natural or green burial has gained popularity, traditional cemeteries still face potential challenges in coping with water scarcity.
Drought-tolerant landscaping and more efficient irrigation and plant selection have been widely embraced by some, but the Riverside experiment represents an extreme makeover. And Briggs already is looking even further ahead. She asked Matrix to create a plan for Fairmount as well, banking on the public eventually accepting a gradual pivot toward a new normal.
It’s difficult to gauge the precise water savings the no-irrigation approach would make at Riverside. In the cemetery’s early days, there was no accounting for what it pulled from the South Platte to nourish the landscape. But Denver Water can offer some general calculations.
Healthy bluegrass needs 18 gallons of water per square foot per season. Riverside was never entirely bluegrass, so to account for a mixed landscape, figure 12 gallons per square foot.
The cemetery’s 77 acres would require about 125 acre-feet at that rate. Charged at an annual rate of $21,750 per acre-foot, the cemetery would use about $2.7 million of water each season to nurture more traditional grounds.
More money than Riverside can afford. More water than the utility wants to expend.
In addition to those savings, a dryland approach might even allow Riverside to regain the cachet it held in the late 19th century, when figures like businesswoman Augusta Tabor, Sand Creek Massacre whistleblower Silas Soule, Black philanthropist Clara Brown, three Medal of Honor recipients and four territorial governors (Evans, Hunt, Elbert and Routt) were interred. Currently, the cemetery performs about 10 burials a year. It has room for about 500 more.
“We still have property for sale,” Briggs says, “but nobody wants it.”
That could change. The first order of business is transformation, a term that’s important because of what it’s not: restoration.
“We’re not gonna plant bluegrass out there,” Briggs says. “And that’s the perception that I think the community needs to understand. If people can get over the idea that a cemetery should be like a putting green, then it’ll be more attractive to people.”
The property goes dry
At the outset, Riverside was as much Denver’s first city park as it was a cemetery. Harvey C. Lowrie, a landscape and civil engineer, designed the grounds influenced by Mount Auburn Cemetery just outside of Boston, built in 1831 as the nation’s first landscaped garden cemetery.
The idea was to create a park-like setting in contrast to traditional old churchyards, explains Ray Thal, a longtime volunteer at Riverside who has researched its history extensively. Established in 1876, shortly before Colorado won statehood, the cemetery featured meandering gravel lanes winding through manicured lawns as well as abundant shade trees and flowering plants — including a central rose garden — that attracted prominent Colorado families.
In 1890, when Denver City Cemetery was redesigned to create what’s now Cheesman Park, nearly 800 documented sets of remains, including many Civil War-era military graves, were exhumed in an infamously botched operation and moved to Riverside. Ultimately, the cemetery accommodated a diverse burial population estimated around 65,000. Access to a streetcar line delivered visitors interested solely in enjoying a pastoral setting with a view of the mountains.
“You could go out there and wander around, whether you knew anybody that was buried there or not, just to enjoy the plantings,” says Thal, who still leads tours of the historic property.
Although Riverside Cemetery Association founded the property in 1876, financial issues led to its transfer to Fairmount in 1900. Back then, Riverside took water for irrigation from the nearby river and diverted it to a pond, where a pump house then sent it coursing through an above-ground irrigation system managed by dozens of workers.
“So forever they were just pulling water from the South Platte, and there was no accounting for it or anything,” Briggs says. “Then in the ’80s, the state restricted the use of that water because it technically wasn’t really a water right.”
Legal wrangling led to a 1981 Colorado Supreme Court case that ended the cemetery’s unfettered use of South Platte water. At that point, Denver Water agreed to sell Riverside water at a discount, but that ended with the drought in 2003. Faced with paying market rates, Riverside went dry.
Some suggested that Riverside take advantage of the recycled wastewater treatment facility on York Street, just north of the cemetery, but even those costs — starting around $1 million for a new irrigation system, Briggs estimates — proved prohibitive for a property that annually operates at a significant deficit.
The building that houses the office and chapel experienced its own struggles. The septic tank quit working, which closed the restrooms. A balky heating system and lack of air conditioning further debilitated the structure. It’s now been closed for a few years, with portable toilets standing sentry nearby.
It was the lack of restrooms, Briggs says, that really started the journey toward a reimagined Riverside. As she mulled how to deal with the crumbling structure, she got a call from Denver Water.
Bea Stratton, who manages the utility’s Landscape Transformation Assistance Program — LTAP, for short — recounts that the offer to help Riverside transform its grounds stemmed from an earlier conversation, following a 2024 story on the cemetery’s trials in the alt-weekly Westword. Then-editor Patty Calhoun and Denver Water CEO Alan Salazar talked over drinks about how the utility might help.
“It was kind of divine timing,” Stratton says.
The grant program offered a path forward. But Briggs was skeptical. Stratton understood.
“The relationship between Riverside and Denver Water has been long and not always easy,” Stratton says.
But as Riverside approached its 150th anniversary, and Briggs wrestled with updating its main building, the idea of addressing the rest of the cemetery made sense. Especially as Denver Water was launching the LTAP aimed at removing highly irrigated turf grass and replacing it with low-water landscaping.
Stratton notes that the program isn’t a “full-out war on Kentucky bluegrass.” The targets are not active spaces like parks and sports fields. Think big medians and large HOA open spaces sucking water from inefficient 30-year-old irrigation systems. Or commercial space with massive swaths of irrigated turf that offers little beyond a pleasing aesthetic.
At Riverside, obviously, there was no longer any irrigated turf to replace. But the cemetery checked other boxes that aligned with Denver Water’s goals.
The aim of replacing already-irrigated turf grass meant, almost by definition, that most funding for those transitions would land in affluent areas of the city. Denver Water wanted to devote some of its program funding to improving communities just like Riverside’s low-income Elyria-Swansea — urban spaces largely devoid of green spaces. And Riverside, tucked into that industrial pocket hard by the Suncor refinery, with a rendering plant nearby and bordered to the east by light and heavy rail lines, offered something like a blank canvas.
It also presented the opportunity to mend the utility’s relationship with the cemetery. Over time, it held promise as a welcoming place to feed the public’s fascination with the history buried there, as well as a natural oasis for people, pollinators and wildlife.
Briggs took Denver Water up on its invitation to apply for the grant.
Even before Riverside applied for LTAP funding, Denver Water paid for design work and brought in Matrix Design Group. The utility covered the cost of overall planning. When Briggs decided on a course of action, the idea of a test plot began to take shape, and the LTAP money — 50 cents per square foot for under an acre, totaling close to $13,000 — paid for the project to begin in earnest last fall.
The transformation will roll out in phases over several years. And while Denver Water can’t guarantee funding for the life of the program, Stratton says it wants to “stay engaged and help move the project forward.” The results, as they unfold, could also inform other unirrigated research plots at Botanic Gardens Chatfield.
But first, Riverside had a puzzle to solve.
Plotting a strategy
Joshua Eldridge steps over the rope separating two of the nine test plots at Riverside, where the future of the cemetery’s landscape plays out on competing parcels. Here Eldridge, the director of environmental services at Matrix, and his colleagues set up patches last fall to determine the combination of seeds and soil treatment that points the best way forward.
They reflect three basic tillage approaches, ranging from leaving the ground untouched, to tilling it 2 inches deep to doing a “deep rip” of 6 inches. Each plot has been treated with one of three different types, and quantities, of fertilizer. Finally, two different seed mixes have been applied — one that’s just a combination of grasses, and another that includes both grasses and flowering plants, to attract pollinators.
Eldridge brings 20 years of experience in restoring wildland and urban landscapes, and considers “a rewilding of our cities” part of his personal mission. He notes that cemeteries and golf courses represent two underutilized resources that make up large amounts of private land within the urban core.
Matrix also worked with Aurora’s CommonGround Golf Course to diversify and sustain native plants, pollinators and wildlife. At Riverside, where maintaining sightlines to the memorials and headstones is a priority, mapping the grounds to determine which areas receive the lowest levels of activity — visitors have dwindled at some of the older plots — can inform which areas taller, flowering plants, with all the attendant buzz, might be more practical.
So while the growth height of native species in many areas will align with what visitors might expect from turf grass, Eldridge noted that it’s not going to be a uniform landscape, and the seed mix will produce a palette beyond traditional browns and greens, especially amid seasonal change.
We are literally watching grass grow, and so people have to keep that patience mindset.
— Joshua Eldridge, director of environmental services at Matrix Design Group
“So it’s going to be more interesting, in my opinion, over time,” he says. “But it will take time. We are literally watching grass grow, and so people have to keep that patience mindset.”
Crouching down to inspect one of the test plots more closely, he focuses on something called sand dropseed, a grass that thrives in dry, sandy soil. It was already present at Riverside and clearly sustainable through natural distribution of its seeds. No tillage necessary.
The test plots revealed fairly quickly that the no-disturbance option outperformed the others. However, that result came with the caveat that the no-till section already had established vegetation that was now managed differently.
“So if you already have good stuff there, let’s try and keep it there,” Eldridge says. “(Sand dropseed) is adapted to the conditions here. So why would we want to change that up? This is already meeting a lot of the ecological goals.”
One of those goals: creating a “low-grow mix” of native grasses that doesn’t require as much maintenance — varieties like buffalo grass and blue grama — and remain short except when they go to flower, reducing the need to mow. But while the sand dropseed definitely stands taller than what Eldridge would ideally recommend, it’s here. It’s adapted to the conditions. It’s staying.
“There are other native species that would be appropriate out here,” Eldridge says, “but we don’t want to have really tall species because there’s still maintenance that has to happen, and we don’t want mowers to come in and hit some of these headstones or memorials. And so we’ve really targeted the species selection to the soils, what we know will work out here (with) the maintenance and aesthetic objectives of the site.”
Eldridge points to the lower-growing blue grama, which even in mid-August retains spikes of green within its brown tufts. But these subtle brushstrokes of color are largely surrounded and outnumbered by a different shade of green that poses a multifaceted challenge to any transformation.
Weeds.
Weeding the right way
There are noxious weeds, an official designation for a type of harmful plant that’s regulated by the government. And then there’s the troublemaker Eldridge pulls from the test plot.
“Kochia is just ob-noxious; it’s really hard to get rid of,” he says, taking strands of the tall, spiky plant into his hand. “And these are actually the flowers of kochia, and so this is what you think of as the historic tumbleweed. In old Western movies, this would break off and it would tumble across the ground, and it would spread these seeds as it would roll.”
He turns his attention to another plant, the Russian thistle, also a precursor of the classic tumbleweed that, on its windblown journey, spreads tens of thousands of seeds from a single plant.
“They’re both annuals,” Eldridge continues. “They’ve adapted well to dry conditions, and they will just take over. So, it’s about control. It’s about timely control. If you’re not consistent in your treatment, they can be a real challenge.”
Over time — an oft-repeated phrase applied to the transformation — the weeds can be crowded out as more native grasses take root to compete with them. The plan: Keep the native grasses that are already working in the cemetery and control the weeds wherever possible.
Eldridge’s colleague at Matrix, Maddie Bean, adds another name to the hit list: redstem fillery. Part of the geranium family, it is designated a noxious weed by the state agriculture department — meaning it’s required to be either eradicated, contained or suppressed.
“It is super low growing, but it has these really pointy, long seed heads that come out of the ground,” says Bean, an environmental specialist with Matrix. “So also, a lot of the weeds out there we’re seeing are very prickly to touch, and in our seed mix, we have a lot of lower growing grasses and flowers that we’ll be installing.”
Controlling the weeds doesn’t necessarily mean applying chemicals. Some types, like noxious perennials or thistles, will be handled with selective herbicides that kill a particular type of weed without harming the native grass. But eradication also can mean cutting some types down while the seeds aren’t yet viable, interrupting the annual cycle and creating time and space for the native grasses to gain a foothold.
Cemeteries have traditionally mowed three times a summer — Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day — but the transformation demands a more thoughtful approach. Mowing at the wrong time simply does the weed’s job of seed dispersal. So this fall, workers will attack the weeds with a more targeted strategy.
“Let’s use weed whackers and just hit the areas that you need to,” Eldridge explains, “and then you let those natives come in and do their job.”
But even in a best-case scenario, where the landscape at Riverside comes to reflect a grassland prairie system mirroring the Colorado plains, it’s doubtful that the project will achieve total coverage. There could still be patches of bare ground, just as you’d find in nature.
“Maintaining 100% cover is a really hard challenge,” Eldridge says, “and it’s only achieved in park spaces through a heavy influence of fertilizers and water. And we’re trying to back off of both of those things out here.”
Putting strategy into practice
The landscape assessment for the whole cemetery has generated a timeline for future action: The fall of 2026 will see another round of weed control, followed by seeding of native species across 3 to 5 acres during the dormant season, typically in November and December. All of that will be followed by additional weed control next year while Matrix does another round of data collection on its test plots.
Finally, in the fall of 2027, the cemetery plans to have a more robust revegetation schedule and strategy for the entire cemetery.
Pollinator corridors — islands of purple prairie clover, Western yarrow and hairy false goldenaster — could be strategically planted throughout the cemetery to attract a diversity of pollinators and ensure multiple species of flowers throughout the growing season. Placing them near older blocks that don’t attract as many visitors would ensure the flowers don’t get trampled. And no one gets stung by a bee.
Additionally, Block 36, the active and available portion of the cemetery, will be included as a high priority because it still attracts visitors.
“We want to make sure that people coming to visit their family members are proud that their family members reside there,” Bean says. “And that’s the whole point of doing this, right?”
To that end, Riverside also has planted two trees — though CEO Briggs says she “would love to plant 200.” One is a Russian hawthorn and the other is a Texas red oak. Both require only enough watering to get them established the first couple of years.
It’s a start.
Overall, Eldridge hopes to see “strong movement” toward a native, sustainable landscape in three to five years, though results may be piecemeal. Additional dry summers like this year could prolong the process, as could notoriously noxious plants like tree-of-heaven. In terms of managing expectations, 10 years is reasonable — which means there’s another aspect of the transformation to consider: education.
Matrix has created educational signs for Riverside that will show and tell visitors to restored areas what the landscape will look like once it’s fully established with the species specific to each area. A QR code will take visitors to more detailed descriptions of the project — even year-to-year comparisons — and explain why, with no irrigation, the land requires time and patience.
“This is not an instant, flip-the-switch situation,” Eldridge says.
Eventually, he hopes to transform the parched cemetery grounds into a landscape better capable of handling Colorado’s climatic variables, whether that’s wide differences in moisture or temperature. Higher functioning, lower maintenance.
“Riverside can absolutely be a test case for nonirrigated landscapes across the metro,” he says. “We’re seeing less water available, not only from the skies but from our taps. Anything that we can do to better understand our landscapes and apply thoughtful, scientific-based approaches is going to be really beneficial to landowners across the metropolitan area.”