Department: Alpine
Worked on the
Crevice Garden for the first time this morning.
 |
| Photo 1: The Crevice Garden. |
Clearing the last of the oak leaves from it, cutting down dead and weeding including over vigorous self sowers that were taking over like
Erigeron karvinskianus. Plants die a lot here because they can't take the damp and it is hard to get plants established. They are trying to show a wide variety of alpines. There aren't meant to be big gaps of gravel between the rocks, they are meant to be more like cracks. So everytime a gap is filled with a new plant, we try to hammer in thin pieces of rocks to wedge them in also. The crevice garden is built straight onto the pavement, it is pure sand at the bottom. When planting, a little of general alpine mix soil is used to help plants get established. We planted in a small
Salix that reaches about 25cm, we assume it is a creeping one and some
Sempervivum which likes the vertical cracks, we set them in as if they are spilling out of the crack. The roots of the
Salix were very long - about 1/2 a metre at least.
 |
| Photo 2: Sarah holding up the roots of a miniature Salix. |
After that I helped Chloe with the top embankment beds, lifting and transplanting some red
Heuchera. She is trying to group plants together better as they are spread out quite ineffectively and just getting lost within a big bed.
Heuchera we discovered didn't just grow in a clump but horizontally, producing a long thick stem that has growing points. When we replanted them, we buried the horizontal stem just under the soil surface. There was a lot of roots from a nearby
Prunus to contend with. We transplanted some
Tulipa praestans 'Fusilier' between them.
 |
| Photo 3: Roots of Heuchera. |
I finished off potting a Sempervivum.
