Rock Gardening

Our garden did not lend itself to a rock garden, as such, in fact I think very few gardens do. A rock garden, to be really convincing must look as if the stratas of rock were really part of the ground, and it must be on a big scale. At Forde Abbey, near Chard, a delightful rock garden winds up through high banks, with enormous rocks that look right. The rock gardens at Wisley, Kew and Edinburgh are equally generous, but unless one has a natural outcrop of rock or a very deep dell or very high bank which will accommodate really large lumps of rock, I think rock gardening should be done in less orthodox ways. There is nothing more depressing than a few stones rising self-consciously from a suburban lawn, which is almost as bad as those dreadful Victorian ‘rockeries’, which were nothing but a collection of horrible burrs or lumps of concrete huddled together in a shady, dank corner, where nothing but ferns would thrive.

With all our stones it was inevitable that my mind should turn very quickly to rock plants.

The first home for alpine treasures was expedient rather than intentional, the two rocky beds against the walls of the barton. The second was also forced upon me rather than of my own choosing. The ‘Coliseum’ came into being because we had to dig out the soil that had silted down to the west end of the house. When we first came to live here we couldn’t understand why that end of the house was always so cold and damp, with a strange vault-like smell. It was some time before we realized that about six feet of the wall outside was receiving the clammy embrace of weeping clay of how to support the ground, which was several feet above the level of the foundations. On each side of the fireplace we made a series of steps from our plentiful supply of stones, hence the descriptive label.

I was instructed to plant what I could between the stones, to relieve the hard angular lines, At that time it was literally a case of making bricks without straw as I had practically nothing to use. Looking round the garden I came upon some stonecrop and pounced on it as an answer to prayer. There wasn’t very much and I broke it into small pieces and poked them between the stones. I had no idea that when it settles down in a place it not only starts raising a family but goes in for founding a dynasty as well. I think its name is Sedum spurium and it is the most inveterate invader 1 have ever met. Sometimes in the summer my heart softens when I see its really pretty flat pink rosettes, but most of the time it is war. Its round brown stems creep down walls, intertwine themselves in its classier neighbours, push under stones and across paths, taking possession with grim determination. If, by an oversight, it is allowed to stay on a piece of a flower bed for more than a minute, in two minutes that flower bed will be a solid mat of stonecrop of a particularly luxuriant quality. Every year I pull out barrowloads of it and I know I shall continue to do so until I die.

Perhaps an even greater error was the introduction of heixine, popularly called ‘Mind your own business’, why I cannot think, because that is the one thing it does not do. I had often seen it bubbling out of pots in cottage windows, and when I saw it spilling out of a broken-down greenhouse of an empty house I thought how pretty and green it was, and how nicely it would help me to soften the grim stones of the old fireplace and the Coliseum. So when a friend offered me some I accepted it with great enthusiasm. She brought it to me in a roll, like a piece of carpet, and I carefully broke it into hundreds of little pieces, tucking them in with love, and watering them with care, and looked forward to a nice little green line between my stones. Helxine is more attractive to look at than stonecrop, except that it does not flower, at least not visibly, but it is even more affectionate. Again I know that I shall be scrapping it from my beds and from under stones for the rest of my days. I tried to cover the top of the old fireplace with this busy little carpeter, but it does not care to come out in the open. Up the sides as much as you like, and everywhere else where it is damp and moist, but not where I most wanted it. Later I used creeping thymes to cover the unsightly broken wall. They like to be hot and dry, and will clamber about in the sun most obligingly.

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