Plant snobbery

[TC]

My motto is, "if you like it and can grow it, do so" .  I have seen so-called alpines which should be grown as a challenge to your cultivation skills. A lot of these have looked like wayside weeds to me.  I have often thought that our common daisy, if suddenly introduced from the Himalayas, would receive rave notices.  It can survive almost any weather and soil conditions and is one of the earliest to flower, repeating until late Autumn.  Yet plant snobs regard it as a pernicious weed
On one of the TV gardening programs this year, I heard that Irises were the must have plant of the year.  I didn't realise that I was such a trend setter.  Like my wardrobe, I am in fashion about every ten tears.

[Carol Shaw]

Thank God we don't all like the same plants - imagine how boring it would be if every garden you visited looked the same! For me annuals are just too much like hard work and the resulting mass of colour would look out of place in our garden. Prior to our passion for alpine plants we had a cottage garden complete with roses, lavender, delphiniums and lots of other large and colourful perennials... slowly but surely they all went!

[Peter Korn, Sweden]

It´s nothing wrong with any plant if just the spot is right. I have grown Dahlias, Begonias, Annuals and Roses and I liked them then. Now I have problem to find a spot for them in the garden.
At the moment I like it barren. Just rocks and grit, not to much colour. Even a Lewisia tweedyi could be to much in some beds.
But the pink Dandelion is nice in the selling area.

[Lesley Cox]

That sounds a bit like the garden I visited at Holmfirth 26 years ago. It could have been Geoff Rollinson's. There was a beautifully built stone wall, very long and quite tall, and inserted into a tiny hole there was a single very small plant of, if I remember rightly, Androsace alpina, just that, nothing more in many square metres of stone work. The premise was that the proportion of plant to rock was about the same as in the wild, so this was genuine "alpine" gardening. Something like that anyway. As the song says, "great work if you can get it" but most of us haven't the space for such idiocies.

[Anthony Darby]

Aha, your pink dandelion much more better than mine. Do you get seed Peter?

[Carlo]

I'm in for seed on the dandelion too! Very nice. I've had T. pamiricum in the past (and hopefully in seed ex lots this year) and also grow one here with red in the leaves (name escapes me at the moment). I'd love to have a good pink for lectures, teaching garden, etc.

[mark smyth]

I'll hopefully be buying the red leaved, T. faeroense, over the winter

[Peter Korn, Sweden]

Lesley
I would like to have it like that. A big rockgarden with only a few plants, but that´s impossible. I want to grow everything so I have to plant a lot in every bed. But I try to make different environment where the plants can grow in a natural mess. I often plants a lot of each.
And as you can see, it would look very strange with Begonias etc. in a bed like this.

I get a lot of seed on the Taraxacum. It´s not weedy, never appears in the lawn and it don´t like competition. But i don´t think I have collected any this year. I have only sowing a few fresh seeds for the nursery.

[fermi de Sousa]

Hi Peter,
from your last pictures it appears that you've completed yet another section of your garden and have moved half a mountainside to do it!
I hope you'll show us pics of it as it developes. I'd love to come and see it again in person in another year or two, or when the budget allows!
cheers
fermi

[Andrew]

Many of the plants I wont grow now are those that I've experimented with in the past, or accepted as gifts from well-meaning friends and which have turned out to be rampant invaders of space and have proved difficult to eradicate: one example that comes to mind is the poached-egg plant (name escapes me).......

Limnanthes douglasii ?

There is a patch of it in garden under the shade of a tree and it seems well behaved. I have not tried to get rid of it though!

[DaveM]

Thanks, Andrew it is the name I was looking for. I think you are lucky, because it likes damp, even wet conditions. The garden where I grew this plant was on heavy boulder clay, very water retentive, so it really enjoyed life to the full.

Peter, I do like the pink dandelion, Taraxacum pseudoroseum. These are real alpines. Pic 1 was snapped in the upper Turken Aksu (pic 2) in the Tien Shan (Kyrgystan) at 1800+m. And, just look what it was growing with: yes it is snow-in-summer - Cerastium cerastioides! Now just let that get a hold in the garden.......