How to Create Clay Crevices in Rock Gardens from Esther Wrightman on Vimeo.
This is the the movie clip that was embedded in my presentation which many you may have seen in the last year at various rock garden society meetings. It illustrates how to make a clay crevice within your garden for alpine plants - in this case I am using a split tufa rock.
For…
Coming back from the recent NARGS Annual meeting in New Hampshire, we took a side-trip to stay with Robin & Juliette Magowan for a couple of days, knowing that they will be moving to New Mexico in the winter.
What a surprise on driving in the lane to the front entry. Greeting us before this curious, stiff 3-story New England style house is the most exuberantly luscious display one…
Gardening was just something that you did in my family; and knowledge of alpines was absorbed by osmosis, even as a kid. So many visits to relatives' homes and many family trips involved gardens. Thankfully gardeners are pretty interesting people and rarely are they only obsessed with just plants - they have other interests that are pretty intriguing to a kid. Boots showed us girls…
One of the best "trends" to hit mainstream gardening is container planting - trough gardening for most of us. Adaptable and accessible to most any situation, troughs can be used as accents to an alpine garden or perennial garden; or, they can be the sole feature with a varied number of sub-themes. Each container represents its own particular ecological/horticultural expression. Using…
In early April, Josef Halda stayed with us, putting the finishing touches to the lectures he brought for his NARGS North American tour. I have always admired the vertical, cleft formations that are so often seen in Czech trough and alpine gardens and imagined that they must be painstakingly constructed and slow to mature. Regardless, I was interested in knowing the process, and having…
We were on summer vacation towing 200 tons of rock in our trailer. Harvey was delivering tufa and stone troughs to Robin Magowan, Peter George and Bruce Lockhart. Combined with garden visits we were in for a good time.
We arrived at Peter's after 12 hours of driving. Peter has a large rock garden; astounding, almost impossible. At one end…
We have acquired what every gardener needs - another garden. Actually it is an extension (a large one) to the much appreciated though small tufa garden which Josef Halda made for us in 1999. The extension was also constructed by Josef in April 2002, and he planted it with oversized stock plants and other oddities from the nursery.
It is set up as an outcrop in a '…
