Gardening and landscaping: How to grow alpine plants

Plants from high, rugged, mountainous areas are among the most beautiful garden flowers out there. Once you have grown a few, you will want to make room for more.

They are the ultimate survivors in the garden. Once they are established, they grow and fill your garden with abundant colour and textures with very little demand for extra attention.

You have probably come across some of them or even grown them yourself. They are the sedums, the phlox, the gentians and some of the yucca varieties. They are favourite candidates in rock gardens, scree gardens or even cracks in walls or between paving slabs.

The variety of plants is enormous. Your first challenge will, therefore, be which ones to pick. Some produce attractive flower colours and shapes while others have interesting foliage colours and textures. Some thrive in alkaline soils, others need acidic soils.

It is safest to go for the varieties you like from your local nurseries that have been proved to flourish in your microclimate. Nothing however stops you from exploring others from areas with similar climates as yours.

The important factor for success with alpines is good drainage. They can’t stand wet soils.

If you grow them in a rock garden, make special planting pockets by arranging the rocks into horseshoe shapes and filling the spaces with the proper soil mixture. It is possible to grow plants that need different soil types in the same rock garden provided you fill the different pockets with suitable soils.

Alpines can also be grown in other unconventional places. You can grow them in cracks and crevices in walls. All you need to do is wrap their roots in dump moss and then push them into the holes and cracks.

Another great place to grow alpines is between stone slabs when making a path. In such a case, leave gaps between some of the slabs, fill these gaps with a suitable soil and plant trailing alpines.

When grown in the right soil, alpines will require very little extra care to thrive. Feeding is only required when the plants look as though they have completely stopped growing—which should not be more often than a few years.

Watering is only necessary in very dry weather while weeds can be kept to a minimum by covering any bare soil with coarse gravel.

The writer is a landscape architect