Crevice Gardening ......in defence of rock.....

[Maggi Young]

I'd go a stage further than Anne and lay down a good layer/mound of sand before the rocks, as well as over the top to wash down.
If the underlying ground is well drained I think this could work well. 

[astragalus]

Good idea, Maggi.  Sand really helps with any freeze/thaw issues as well.  OK, Lesley - get to work!

[astragalus]

In the crevice gardens today, a blooming phlox despite repeated frosts amd a nice onosma in the newest crevice section.

[astragalus]

And here's the onosma, sorry.

[astragalus]

Not sure where this picture belongs.  It's part 1 of garden protection for the winter - marking the garden edges to keep the demolition guy (excuse me, I mean the snow plower), from removing the garden.  The last time he removed the majority of the phloxes and deposited them 100 yards away with all the tap roots neatly severed.  Part 2 will be placing chicken wire over a large part of the garden to keep the marauding antlered rats frustrated.  It's the end of the hunting season and they will soon find their way back here.

[Lesley Cox]

So your garden goes right down to the road Anne? A great treat for passers by but the snowman is a real danger. I hope the red markers work well. Maybe a slab of Christmas cake and a word to the wise as well?

So pleased these good ideas are coming BEFORE I need to take them on board, not afterwards. I'll have no excuses for poor results.

[ranunculus]

Actually Lesley, this is a long sweeping drive that dissects Anne and Joe's beautiful property, leaving and joining the main road at points hundreds of yards apart ... the snowplough to clear this drive is a winter essential.

[Lesley Cox]

Thanks Cliff. How lucky you are to have been there.

[Leiomerus]

The great thing about plants is that they can tolerate a remarkable range of conditions. Some friends made a very crude scree using broken bricks and anything else available (sounds a bit like one of the constructions that Farrer railed against), but then filling in with sand and woodashes etc. A lot of plants have established in it, but not anything really choice. There is a great Volume of the AGS Bulletin (no. 2, 1933) almost totally devoted to screes with some pictures of the Botanics at Edinburgh and Branklyn in Perthshire, which both had amazing plants growing in them. Alan Furness' garden (simplistically) is almost like Lesley's description of piling a whole variety of different sized stones and rocks all together but done with great panache and skill - and can there be a better alpine garden in the UK? And then Robin and Sue White have simply planted in 4 or 5 inches of gravel over the soil (see an entry I have made on the AGS website). Alpine gardening is so much easier than people think, ha ha! Beyond that though it does become a real art form, which the crevice gardens can show, a little like the early days of the AGS when using rocks was as important as (or more than) the plants. Jiri's pictures of crevice gardens show that rather beautifully. (I should say I have a long way to go to emulate any of this!).

For me the rock garden itself, is as important as the plants. The plants are very beautiful as they flower, mostly also nice when they don't flower.
A rock garden nicely constructed is beautiful throughout the years and enhances the beauty of the plants growing in it.

This is a picture of the north side of my big rock garden, that side I totally renewed. There are almost no plants to see yet (only little ones, that you can't see), but I love these marble rocks, they look good even without plants. Actually it's a big crevicegarden, but you don't notice. Underneath the rocks there are hundreds of roof tiles, vertically arranged, so all the plants grow in crevices.

There are big stones in your rock garden, Astragalus.

[astragalus]

The large rocks are natural.  The property is a series of stepped ledges and outcroppings ending in a small cliff.  The wall are man (woman) made, but there is one huge rock I moved with the aid of gravity, a very long crowbar and every principle of physics I could remember.

[Leiomerus]

You must be lucky, Astragalus,  the only natural stones I can find here are little boulders.
I must admit I am lucky too, they are dismantling the old little road in front of my house. A new road is needed.
Underneath the old road, there are tonnes and tonnes of rocks.
So I asked the workers in a friendly way if I could have some rocks.
'How much', they asked. 'A truck load ?'
No problem, the result you see in the picture.
15 tonnes of rocks for free ...
I gave them some alpines and they were as happy as I was with my stones.

[astragalus]

Looks like a wonderful start for something creative, Leiomerus.

[Leiomerus]

Oh yes, this will result in something creative (I hope).
I still have some space left for another rock garden .....

[Lesley Cox]

A great Christmas present for a rock gardener Leiomurus. I like your rockfall in the previous picture you posted It looks very like some of the screes in our mountains. Just needs Ranunculus haastii and a few other plants like Leptinella dendyi to be the real thing!

[annew]

I had a much smaller pile to start with - 2 years ago a friend was replacing a patio with a conservatory and kindly offered me the Yorkstone slabs. They've been sitting waiting for time to play with them until now! I also have a very small space to put them in. So here is my tiny crevice bed in construction.



The Big Rubber Mallet which workmen left in our garden 25 years ago, and which has helped to build everything we've ever built, had to come into play again to make sure the spinal stones were solid.

After a few hours, it looked like we had done a terrible job of burying a Stegosaurus in the garden.