Give your garden some Sax appeal

Got a rockery, scree bed, stone wall? Peter Dowdall suggests you dress it up with some Alpine beauties.

There’s something special about Alpine plants. A good rockery or scree bed is something that appeals to some sense within me. The term ‘alpine’ refers to specific plants from the Alps but is now used as a catch-all term for all plants that exhibit similar characteristics and are suitable for growing in a rockery, scree bed, stone wall etc.

True alpines such as Gentiana can cope with any amount of cold and wind but the cold on these mountains is of the dry and extreme kind, not the damp, wet cold that we experience in this part of the world. To avoid losing some of the more precious plants in your rockery make sure to use grit or gravel around the base to avoid water collecting at the collar and causing the plant to rot. All alpine and rockery plants require a very well drained soil and to achieve this incorporate plenty of grit in the soil. They don’t like sitting in wet soil. However they don’t necessarily want to dry out so it can be a fine line.