NARGS Emerald Chapter

David Sellars’ talk (4/21/10) was every bit the pleasure I had anticipated. David took us on an entertaining and informative romp as he invited us to see and think about mountain landscapes, where and how the most exciting rock plants grow in nature, and how we might incorporate this knowledge in designing and planting our rock gardens.

David Sellars photographing Lewisia tweedyi

David presented classic alpine views: some to illustrate his idea of landscapes built as ‘fractals’—that is, recurrent shapes and angles that are nested at successively smaller scales. Interesting idea, but perhaps not a direct clue for rock garden design—you might, as a famous 19th Century British Earl did, order up a garden-sized replica of the Matterhorn complete with fractal chalets and fractal chamois. More directive was David’s presentation of the ‘disorder’ of alpine habitats. He showed us Pyrenean cliffs dotted with Saxifraga longifolia; massive moraines and tiny outcrops in the Dolomites with Silene acaulis and Eritrichum nanum; cliffs, rubble fields and road ballast in the Bighorns with such treats as Aquilegia jonesii, and rocky meadows in the Olympics. Here, David said, the best habitats for alpine plants (or, perhaps, the habitats of the best alpine plants) are in disturbed soil, at the disorderly (chaotic) end of an ordered landscape. Nature may, perhaps, tolerate straight lines, but saxifrages, androsaces, and campanulas are not drawn to them.

David moved on to discuss garden design by way of Reginald Farrer’s beloved orderly limestone strata—here, we were shown the massive, stair-step rock gardens at Kew and RHS Wisley. These formations are almost hideous when juxtaposed to the mountain scenes, but they have influenced our idea of where plants should grow. Like David, when I visited Utah’s Tony Grove Lake, I ran toward the stairstep formation he showed us, to be disappointed by the plants, just a few common buckwheats. (What David didn’t show—a few hundred yards away, there were big boulders covered with Petrophytum caespitosum and other choice rock plants.)

David ended with a project in his own garden—reclaiming a bank from an overgrown rhododendron. His rock work appears to be human-powered, using local rock—primarily rounded glacial granite boulders. He pointed out that his first approach after clearing the bank was almost brickwork, and almost back to what he’d done years before. His chaotic solution was imposed by using rocks of varying size, placing the largest more or less randomly. He finished the project with a tufa jewel-box for choice saxifrages, including S. longifolia grown from seed he collected in the Pyrenees

In the end, whether we share David’s dislike of Kew-like order or the precision of a Czech crevice garden, we should be comfortable in designing plant-friendly rock features with local stone and a personal touch.

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