The Rock Garden

Such Are the Seasons

In our part of the country the year is evergreen, and against this green background bloom is almost continuous. There is no ending of one season, no beginning of the next. All melt together. Even when early and final frost puts a sudden end to summer, winter is not without its blossoms. Though the perennial borders are bare, there are drifts of color among the rocks and beneath the trees, where lowly saxatile plants bloom in the stern season when plants stay close to the ground for protection against the elements. At summer's end the toad lily and meadow saffron are in flower; and before these have bloomed themselves away, the autumn crocuses spread in small patches of delicate color, one species taking the place of another, linking summer to spring. And before the calendar year ends, another garden year has begun.

While branches are still bare, pale sunlight filters through to bring the early flowers into bloom, and this foretaste of spring "ere a leaf is on the bush" is more to the rock gardener than the season's lush fulfillment. When the trees are in leaf there is a cool green shadow beneath them, and bloom moves to the open parts of the garden where the tender bulbs flower from frost to frost.

"Such are the seasons," Theophrastus wrote from another land of continuous bloom. "To speak generally, there is no interval of time nor flowerless period; but even the winter produces flowers, for all that it seems to be unproductive by reason of the cold, since autumn flowers continue into winter, and to a much greater extent if the season be mild. For all things, one may say, or at least most of them, extend beyond their proper season, and all the more if the place be sunny; so that there is a continuous succession."

Many of the flowers Theophrastus mentions as blooming in succession bloom for us still, and among them are enough to fill a southern rock garden: the snowdrop, the "kind of anemone which is called the mountain anemone" (Anemone blanda), the squill, the lesser celandine, the wall flower, the iris, savory and thyme, the meadow saffron in autumn, "the crocus, both the scentless mountain form and the cultivated one; for these bloom directly the first rains come.... While the violet ... blooms throughout the year if it receives tendance."

Concerning the Gardener

All rock gardeners are snobs. I say this without fear of offending, for no one will take it to himself. "How right you are," he will say. "I have often noticed it in one or another, and there are times when I think you are something of a snob yourself."

Some snobbery is to be expected, for all are agreed that the cultivation of rock plants is the highest form of the art of gardening, and rock gardeners are essentially individualists, each with his specialty, his own dear delight. That every gardener should be a specialist is very right and proper, and that the specialist should hold himself a little above the common flower grower is understandable, but the specialist is perilously near the expert, and the expert is apt to put skill above enjoyment. Gardening ceases to be an art when the gardener admits that the choicest subjects are generally the ones presenting the most difficulties, and are therefore the ones most sought for.

But gardening is an art, and the rock garden is its purest form. Here the plants are grown for themselves alone—not for exhibition, not for cutting, and not primarily for display. All gardeners become rock gardeners if they garden long enough. They may not mean to, or even desire it, but it is natural to one long familiar with plants to single out certain individuals too newly come from wood or waterside to accommodate themselves to the perennial border and to put them where stones can protect their flowers from the weather and keep their roots cool and moist. One by one, special corners are singled out for special treasures, until they become so numerous that they must be drawn together. In this way the rock garden is created, and for this reason it is the most personal of all forms of horticulture.

A delight in the individual plant, a desire for the rare and choice, and a love of the miniature are traits common to all lovers of rock plants. From long intimacy with the earth and all that springs from it they become aware of the way a stem curls or a leaf unfolds. To those whose thoughts are "one with wind and leaf and mist," beauty has an elusive quality that depends more upon the texture of the petal than the size of the bloom. They take pleasure in the frail, the perishable, and the uncertain flower. But above all else they love these plants because they are small.

A passion for the minute and perfect and a desire to possess the smallest thing of its kind are not traits confined to gardeners. Do you remember how the old king in the fairy tale promised his kingdom to the son who could bring him a dog small enough to lie in a walnut shell? None of the tiny creatures they produced was able to do so. Always a paw or a tail or at least an ear protruded. At last the youngest son handed his father a hazelnut, begging him to crack it very gently. When this was done, a beautiful little snow white dog jumped out, wagged his tail, and licked the king's hand, and barked at the other little beasts in the most graceful manner. The delight of the king and the whole court was indescribable, and the king told his people to throw all of the other little dogs into the sea.

The old king reminds me of the rock gardeners who search for years for a tiny form of a forest tree, who desire a rose small enough for a thimble vase, a primrose smaller than a buttercup, a four-inch thalictrum with flowers like fine mist, an iris an inch high, or a sedum that is less than an inch. The rock garden is a world of dwarfs and creepers and trailers, frequently with names that indicate their size. Nanus, pumilus, and pygmaeus mean dwarf; minus and minimus are smaller and smallest; parvus, parvulus, and parvissimus are small, very small, and smallest; minutus means minute, and minutissimus means most minute. Then there is the unflattering pusilla for the small and insignificant, and exiguus, small and poor, while humilis means low-growing, demissus, low and weak, humifusus, sprawling, and procumbens, lying on the ground. The creepers have names like repens, reptans, and serpens. When these terms denoting a low or small form of a plant are added to the generic and a specific name, and perhaps to another varietal name describing the color or form of the flower, it sometimes seems that the smaller the flower, the longer and more complicated the name. A tiny primrose is Primula × polyantha lilacina plena; an inch-high stonecrop is Sedum dasyphyllum glanduliferum; while a houseleek that does not grow above a quarter of an inch is Sempervivum arachnoideum 'Colletti.' My friend Elsie Hassan of Birmingham, Alabama, says they all remind her of the little boy in the limerick,

Infinitesimal James
Had nine unpronounceable names.
He wrote them all down
With a terrible frown,
And then threw them all in the flames.

Regional Gardening

Years ago, when I first thought of making a rock garden in North Carolina, I felt as if I were left all alone to face the rocks. Everything that was written seemed to be written for the North. Nothing was written for me. For rock gardening, which had its origin in cooler climates, has been so long associated with the culture of alpines that it is hard to learn to think of it in terms of regional material. Southerners have been slow to resign themselves to the fact that alpines cannot be depended upon in a section where the winters are snowless or nearly so, summer nights are hot and humid, and the growing season is a long seven months instead of the bare three or four that plants from the mountaintops are accustomed to and require. Only after years of disappointment and failure are we now learning to grow material adapted to our region. "Time was," a Virginia gardener wrote, "when I felt that no plant that grew below the timber line held any interest, and that only seeds provided by the Swiss nurseryman Monsieur Correvon were worth planting; but now with my third rock garden in its fourth year, I have learned that it is futile to weep over a blighted edelweis, when so many lovelier plants rejoice in our summer heat and grow naturally close to our native stone."

The growing of alpines is suited neither to the habitat nor the temperament of the southerner, who is not given to fussing over flowers. One of the most endearing traits of the true alpine gardener is his tender solicitude for the comfort of his plants. "The alpine primrose," Anderson McCulley warns its lovers, "is better watered from beneath, but it will get along nicely if the hose or watering can is laid on the soil surface. A jar can be inverted over the crown of a plant to protect it when one is watering nearby neighbors. And when the temperature soars to the nineties, I usually stand a rock to the south of it for temporary shade." When the temperature soars to the nineties, few southerners will be thinking about the alpine primrose. They will be seeking shade for themselves.

This is not to say that alpines cannot be grown south of Washington, D.C. If I made any such statement, good gardeners would rise up on all sides to confound me. "I do not guarantee that you can grow a mossy saxifrage in full sun in Virginia or Missouri, or Primula mistassinica on pure sand in Ohio," Mr. Mitchell of Barre, Vermont, remarks in the introduction to his catalog of rock plants for New England, "but these difficult plants are being grown by skilful gardeners in all of these states." Which is all very true. I suppose that you can grow any plant anywhere if you have determination. But this book is not written for determined gardeners. It is for gardeners who would rather spend their energies on finding the plants suited to their region than in devising ways to grow those that are not suited to it.

If alpines will not grow in the milder sections of this country, what will? I asked myself this question long ago, and it is still only partly answered. It cannot be answered in a word; it cannot be answered by one gardener or even by one generation. It is the pleasure of each gardener to ask it anew, and always there will be a new answer. It is seeking that makes gardening, particularly rock gardening, an art that never grows old. Rock plants for the South must be sought in country gardens; they must be gathered from friends, imported from foreign countries, and culled from the lists of dealers in rare bulbs. They must be collected one by one, and they need not belong to the traditional types that we think of as saxatile. I would not even call them rock plants if there were any other term to cover the little bulbs, the perennials that creep and crawl, and the delightful low-growing shrubs that are, or should be, characteristic of the gardens of the South. "Rock gardening among southern gardeners must be an independent art, developed to meet peculiar climatic conditions," Violet Walker of Woodberry Forest, Virginia, once wrote. "This opens up an enormous field of rare, beautiful material which can give to the southern rock garden an individuality of its own."

Dear Violet. Her pioneering spirit found an outlet not only in her provocative articles but also in putting her theories to the test in piedmont Virginia. From her teeming rock garden in Woodberry Forest came flowers that now bloom in mine, and through her endless enthusiasm and generosity I learned to search out and grow the plants and bulbs that we once dismissed as unsuited to our gardens because they are not hardy in the North. She would sit on the hearth rug late into the night, telling me (while I made eager and illegible notes) of a nurseryman in Texas who could supply an exotic amaryllid or a collector on the West Coast who listed a rare allium. Through Violet I learned that regional gardening is not learned from books. It is built up little by little through the efforts of the gardeners of the region. When you become interested in working out a problem, you find that you are not alone.

All gardeners are great letter writers. Those with similar enthusiasms come together eventually, even though they may never meet in person, even though they live a continent apart. My correspondence has been cultivated as diligently as my garden, and its blossoming has brought me as much pleasure. One of the first fruits of letter writing was the realization that the region I garden in is much wider than I thought. When letters and plants came from farther and farther west, I realized that this area is not limited, as I had supposed, to the southeastern states. I found gardeners in Birmingham, Alabama; Jackson, Mississippi; Shreveport, Louisiana; Wichita Falls, Texas; and San Francisco, California, with problems much the same as mine.

I am writing for the South in general but primarily for gardens in Zone 8 of the Plant Hardiness Map of the Agricultural Research Service, USDA, where the average annual minimum temperatures range from 10° to 20°F. In Charlotte, North Carolina, we occasionally have temperatures nearer zero, and on very rare occasions a short period of subzero weather. Roughly speaking, Zone 8 begins in Virginia along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay and winds in a narrow strip along the coast through North and South Carolina, widening through Georgia and the Gulf States, then narrowing again to end in southwest Texas. It starts again in Arizona on the Mexican border and meanders in a thin stream up the West Coast all the way to British Columbia.

I would say in general that gardeners in USDA Zones 6, 7, and 9 have much the same problems and find the same type of plant material congenial. The main thing that these areas have in common is that the plants best suited to them are those that withstand heat better than cold. Temperature is not the only factor that determines where a plant will grow, but it is the one that you can do least about. Exposure, soil, and the amount of water a plant gets can be controlled to some extent, but not much can be done about the heat of the sun or the furious winter's rages.

Gardeners in these three southern zones also have in common their short and mild (or comparatively mild) winters and their long, hot summers, but they differ in the amount of moisture that comes to them. Claude Barr of Smithwick, South Dakota, once wrote to me,

A general statement which I believe is true is that all east of the eighteen-hundred-foot level where, roughly, the Great Plains begin, is moist and points west are dry. This notwithstanding that there is much talk of heat and drought all of the way to the East Coast. "Hot" on the Plains means not a humid or smothering heat but a dry, almost burning, dwarfing atmosphere. Sometimes a light shower doesn't create any humidity. Sometimes refreshing raindrops fall upon your hand while the air about your hand is hot and dry. In July, and rains mostly don't occur in July, the humidity following a good rain doesn't last thirty minutes.

The only relief is in the fairly cool nights. Most summers have no hot nights here in the corn belt. But these nights are sometimes so dry for weeks on end that there is no dew. Or the air can be heavy with moisture even when the ground is parched, and we may have heavy dews when there has been no rain for weeks on end.

In so vast a region as the southern half of the United States there are, of course, great differences in the plant material suited to various sections. A greater number of alpines can be grown in the mountains than at lower elevations, even though in midsummer the gardens at Nik-Nar, Asheville, North Carolina, look as parched as mine. When we came to Charlotte, which is definitely Piedmont, from Raleigh, which is at the edge of the Coastal Plain, I was amazed at the number of plants I could grow that had not been successful before. This is partly because the soil is better in the new garden and because things grow better under pines than under oaks, but the slight change in elevation does make some difference. There is even a difference in gardens in the same neighborhood, but in general the plants in my garden will grow wherever the winters are short and mild and the summers long and hot.

As Orland White of Charlottesville, Virginia, points out, "there are plenty of opportunities for rock gardening in this region. Andrew Jackson's country is naturally a superb sedumry. In late April and early May, Sedum pulchellum in pink perfection reminds one of Europe's heather. Efforts should be made to preserve the natural rock gardens, the Peaks of Otter, Crabtree Falls, Catesby's Mountain, and Stone Mountain." Even where there is no natural stone in the neighborhood, rocks can sometimes be salvaged from an old house or a chimney that is being torn down, or curbstones or cobbles from a street that is being paved. And these need not be used in the conventional way, for the affinity between rocks and plants applies to walls and steps and paved terraces as well as to ravines and mountainsides.

In the South we must be allowed some latitude in design as well as in choice of plants. Even where there is a shortage of stones, the gardener need not forgo the pleasure of growing tiny bulbs and dwarf shrubs and creepers and trailers and tufted perennials that luxuriate in the long, sweet nights of summer or come to life on winter days when the air is as soft as spring.