Gardening trends may come and go. Yet there are some once ubiquitous styles of old-school horticulture that have been desperately out of fashion for so long that even someone in their 40s, like me, has only really seen them in the yellowed pages of dusty text books. Something so iconic of their time – the outdoor equivalent of crocheted doilies – that it is almost impossible to imagine them reinvented to be relevant and practical. So when something truly great comes along that shakes you out of your preconceptions, you have to be grateful. This is where I have to take back everything I have said about alpines.
I used to very unfairly think of this enormous and incredibly diverse group of plants from the world’s mountaintops as tiny and fussy. The kind of thing that was largely invisible amid the huge “currant bun” mounds of gravel and rocks you’d see in soulless 70s suburbia. Most of these had been long abandoned by the 90s when I was a kid, but even the most pristine examples I had seen in botanic gardens always had an imbalance of plants to hard landscaping. Vast, high-ceilinged glasshouses with huge concrete beds, where you had to play a kind of botanical “Where’s Wally” to spot any precious traces of greenery.
In my defence, it seems I was not the only one who felt this way. For years, the genre which once inspired cult-like devotion has been declining in popularity, with this year’s Chelsea Flower Show only featuring a single grower where once there would have been half a dozen. Thank goodness for that one! Right by one of the entrances of the main marquee I was stopped in my tracks by Scotland’s Kevock Garden Plants, which totally blew me away with their forensic level of detail, expertly replicating rugged alpine mountainsides in miniature. In a space not much larger than my bedroom, they had created a whole other world, populated by naturalistic communities of weird and wonderful plants. Standing absorbed in front of it during a couple of hours of filming, I felt like I, too, had been miraculously shrunk down and dropped into a fantasy land.
In the same way the terrariums I am obsessed with have suddenly seen a resurgence for their ability to encapsulate the feeling of vast, exotic landscapes on a tiny scale suitable for those with only tiny indoor spaces, it hit me that alpines are ideal for creating your own miniature worlds outdoors. One of those moments when you kick yourself for not having come to such an obvious realisation years earlier.
Even if all you have is a single large dish or tray on a balcony, with these plants you can lose yourself for hours in a paradise of your own creation, with species from all over the world. Aside from their insistence on full sun and a fast drainage substrate, most are straightforward to care for. The huge glasshouses they are often sited in are to keep the winter wet off them, but if you place your pot in the rain shadow of a building, or move it under cover in winter, that won’t be something you need to worry about.
With a new generation of aquarium stores selling an array of small, finely detailed rocks that look like miniature boulders and twisted hardwood twigs that resemble jungle branches, there are now far more hardscape options to really effectively cheat the convincing scale. The possibilities here for people who long to have vast gardens but live in small spaces are endless. I am blooming excited to get exploring. Thank you everyone at Kevock, for sparking my latest adventure.
Follow James on Twitter @Botanygeek
