Where have all the alpines gone?

Where have all the alpines gone?

Here, I want to ask this question, and I am illustrating it through the generous donation of pictures by Harry Jans, but I do not get round to talking about him 'til the very end. Harry is, you could say, the light at the end of the tunnel.

When I was growing up, alpines and rock gardens were a big thing. There were various things every serious gardener had to have, and a rockery was one of them. For a plant-mad teenager, helping my father build a rockery was a thrilling project. I remember studying closely a magazine pull-out special on how to layer the rocks, for stability as much as naturalism. My dad had taken very early retirement and spend an awful lot of his time in the garden. We moved to a town in Kent in 1968 and I remember him building a whole series of low rockeries, using retaining walls made out of old paving slabs – clearly he must have sweet-talked someone in the local council for these.

My first independent venture here was a 'peat garden', again something many serious gardeners used to have, before peat became so politically-incorrect. Actually, for us in Sevenoaks, it made sense, as the soil is so poor and sandy that it is rhododendron and ericacous plant paradise, without having to add much to it. I remember my first independent trip to a local rock plant nursery, to buy plants. There were then quite a lot of nurseries in the south-east of England which sold alpines, peat plants and other choice, slow-growing plants. I remember this one was called Robinsons, and I remember being surprised at what a mess it was (I understood better why, when I came to run my own nursery many years later). I remember Mr. Robinson wrenching the weeds out of the pots of the plants I had bought. Another was W.E.Th. Ingwersen's, down a long track on the edge of the estate that William Robinson once owned in Sussex. The son kept the business going long enough for it to coincide with my own modest nursery, and I remember him coming to RHS flower shows in London, plants packed into an old camper van, a few years later he gave up the business.

But, where have all the alpines gone? Last year, I decided I would try to research some in order to evaluate plants for possible use on small-scale green roofs. And could I find a nursery? Eventually I got them all from Potterton's Nursery in Lincolnshire, a very long way from home. There are a couple of others, but only a fraction of the number that there used to be.

I was well aware that rockeries were thoroughly out of fashion, but it took a while for me to realise just how much they have taken so many alpines with them. One thing which brought it home to me was reading the autobiography of Lawrence Hills, the founder of what is now called Garden Organic. Hills had started out as a specialist propagator of alpines, and he was clearly a very busy man, churning out vast numbers of plants – this was back in the 1930s. A skilled propagator was clearly someone who would have no problem in finding a job.

Rockeries and alpines had come into fashion in the late 19^th century and had something of a heyday in the interwar years. Travelling in Switzerland and Austria was one of the spurs for this. Germany too went through a rock garden craze at the same time. Grand rockeries were quite simply, a status symbol for wealthy gardeners. Expensive they may have been to build and maintain, but they would have been cheaper than the greenhouses full of (mostly) orchids which had been the previous way to show off your combination of wealth, status and good taste. The ever-expanding middle classes went in for them too, so the market for plants was clearly enormous. With the demise of the rockery, there has been a massacre of plant availability. I am in the almost-final stages of writing a plant reference book right now, which highlights history in cultivation; one of the things which I am realising is just how many 'alpine' type plants have vanished from general cultivation.

Back in the day, when I had my nursery, which was 1985 -1993 (not very long I know, but I rapidly realised this was no way to make a living!), I started off doing a mix of hardy perennials and alpines. I had calculated (wrongly) that a thriving local branch of the Alpine Garden Society would be good customers. I also realised quite quickly that the whole concept of the alpine had come down in the world; for many garden centre managers, and customers, it meant something which could be shoved into a 9cm pot and sold for 99p. Now, even a great many of the 'small but cheap because it spreads quickly' type of alpine have disappeared.

What the Alpine GardenSociety did do very effectively was have shows, indeed it still does and has an excellent online encyclopaedia. Growers would turn up with pots of plants, grown to a kind of unnatural perfection. Such as Primula allioni or Dionysia or Androsace species grown in perfect hemispheres so covered in flower you could hardly see the leaves. The shows were competitive, and maybe it was this competitive element which brought out an odd kind of underlying nastiness which is generally rare in the garden world. I remember one local show secretary being a particularly aggressive character who once reduced a nurserywoman to tears over some misdemeanour or other.

I find the disappearance of the alpine sad. These are often exquisitely beautiful plants, often not at all difficult to grow if a few basic needs are met, and remarkably well-adapted to that obsession of the garden media industry – the small garden (yes, I am writing a small garden book at the moment, for my sins (was we often say in Britain), and no, since you ask, there are no alpines in it). But how do you grow alpines if you do not build an unfashionable rockery, and do not want to grow them in pots like the AGS gardeners with their travelling mini botanic gardens? This conundrum appears to have so defeated the British garden community that they have given up on alpines altogether.

Years ago, I spotted the answer. In, of all places the one country in Europe that lacks rock. Holland. In fact I remember actually sploshing through a minor flood to admire the wonderful sculptural rock gardens built at Utrecht Botanical Gardens by Wiert Nieuman. These had been built out of scrap building materials, with plants squigged into the cracks. Perfect drainage, which is requirement number one, and the possibility of putting all the sun-lovers on the south side, the shade lovers (like Ramonda myconi, the Balkan answer to the African Violet) on the north side and those that like a little bit of sun on the east and west sides. Problem solved.

Harry Jans' is a leading Dutch grower of alpines, I'm showing his garden here - he uses a lot of tufa but artfully arranged in a completly different way to the old-fashioned rockery. Time to re-think alpine growing in a sculptural and design-led way and start growing these amazing plants once again.

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