Betty Ford Alpine Garden

I have always had a soft spot for alpine plants.  Cold winds keep them short and tough.  Thin soil forces their roots to reach deep into crevices to find water and nutrients.  Short growing seasons mean that they must do their existential tasks—sprouting, flowering and setting seed—in a compressed time frame.  All of that is … Read more

Cliff Maids

Lewisias are beautiful plants that I include, along with ornamental sweet peas, in my litany of horticultural failure.  A few years ago, I was smitten by a lovely little pink-flowered lewisia that I saw at a plant sale.  I thought I understood its needs, so I brought it home and planted it in a reasonably … Read more

Moss Saxifrage

The name “Georg Arends” will ring a bell with astute gardeners, even if it only sounds faintly familiar.  Arends was a German nurseryman and plant breeder with an establishment in Ronsdorf-Wuppertal, an imposingly named town near Cologne.  He lived and worked from 1863 to 1952, a long career, that left an impressive legacy.  If you … Read more

Buck Garden

Most people think small when they think of rock gardens—miniature plants in confined spaces.  Leonard J. Buck (1894-1974) was not one of those people.  Buck, who made a fortune importing and exporting metal ores, created a thirty-three acre rock garden at his estate in Far Hills, New Jersey.  Buck has been gone for forty years, … Read more

Heron’s Bill

The Victorians and Edwardians had a passion for rock or alpine gardens, creating extensive pseudo-alpine landscapes from actual rocks, artificial rocks and various forms of debris, up to and including broken dishes.  Fashionable gardeners filled the cracks and crevices of these layouts with alpine plants newly discovered by plant hunters in various mountainous regions of … Read more