Al Rollinger 9/2/1941 – 2/25/2025
Edward Alan Rollinger (“Al”) passed away in Denver on February 25, 2025.
When young, Al moved with his family from Minnesota to Denver. He graduated from South High School and Colorado State University, earning a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture.
Over the course of a 50-year career as a Landscape Designer in Denver, Al’s influence was felt across the whole industry in the region, among his colleagues and clients, fellow designers, landscape contractors, and the members of the plant nursery community. He had a ready abundance of knowledge of plants, from their Latin names to their behavior and best uses. With Larry Watson, Al regularly hosted a landscape course at Denver Botanic Gardens that was a sellout for years. Al taught a similar class at the University of Colorado, Denver campus, which was also extremely popular. He chose the placement of many of the trees on this campus, which exemplify Al’s penchant to design “miniature forests” and not just bland symmetrical plantings. He very much enjoyed teaching aspiring landscape designers and home gardeners to create interesting projects with four-season interest, using a diversity of plant material, and the capability to withstand decades of growth and evolution.
Notably, in 1968, Al set out to survey the location and condition of the most interesting trees in Denver. After driving up and down every street in the city, a list was compiled of over 1,100 trees of 45 species. In 2016, with the help of the Denver Botanic Gardens, the Denver Office of the City Forester, Colorado State Forest Service, Colorado Tree Coalition, and the Colorado State University Denver Extension, a project was launched to resurvey the original trees. That unique comparative scientific record has been preserved and published as the Rollinger Tree Collection, 50-Year Survey.
Al’s over 1,000 hand-drawn design plans illustrated a keen understanding of the nexus between space, time, and species: the seasonal progression of time (“design for winter first”); the elegant placement in space that emulates natural forms yet considers years’ growth in the future (“don’t place everything in a symmetrical pattern, that’s not how nature would have done it”); and a choice of species that favors native plants, respects the experience of contractors’ in the field, and utilizes past lessons paired with the will to experiment. Through his designs and teachings, Al instilled a greater respect for the way plants live, and how that understanding allows us a successful companionship with them.
He was many things: a jazz drummer, an accomplished photographer, a baker of fine cookies, a model railroad builder, a voracious reader of history and fiction, an original Broncos fan, a mentor to designers, a cherished long-time friend to many, a loving grandfather, a beloved father. Al was also often irreverent, reactionary, generous, and forgiving.
Al had an unstoppable sense of humor, a razor wit, and an often indomitable will. He would spec a project and it would become reality. He moved mountains of soil and left a living legacy across the Front Range.
We will miss him. And pass along his often repeated advice, to simply: “Try it. See if it works.”
Please plant a tree in his honor, and remember to care for it.
A summer memorial gathering will be announced at a future date.
Jason Rollinger
