Scottish Rock Garden Club Forum
General Subjects => General Forum => Topic started by: Anders on January 11, 2017, 09:10:43 PM
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The few times that I have arranged rocks in my gardens, I have tried to make them look natural and random, and they never do. There is not much to do in the garden now, so I have been organizing my digital photos (working my way up to 2009) and was reminded that natural landscapes can also be highly ordered and look non-natural. I did some field work at Station Nord (Northeast Greenland) where the permafrost ground is patterned in many places. Rocks, gravel and sand are nicely sorted according to size by repeated freeze-thaw cycles and placed in polygons with the smaller particles at the centre. The rest is cold, flat gravel left by the ice, no mountains, no large rocks (quite like my front drive), plain gravel km after km. There are few plants, but Cerastium alpinum (alpine mouse-ear), Papaver radicatum (arctic poppy, one of the more than 70 subspecies), Saxifraga oppositifolia (purple mountain saxifrage) and a few others are common in depressions and other sheltered spots. It would be nice if others would also uploade pictures of ordered landscapes for inspiration.
Anders
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A valid point that even in nature there are strange things that can look very odd indeed!
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Nature is beautiful in many ways. It is sometimes disconcerting too
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When looking at aerial photos for signs of buried archaeological features sometimes patterns are seen which are frost wedges, caused by glaciation in the UK. There are also two large pebble beaches in the UK, Chesil Beach and one stretching from Lossiemouth to Buckie.
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Nature is full of patterns and order. The sediment on most beaches (including presumably Chesil) will be partially sorted by long shore drift, resulting in larger pebbles at one end of the beach. You can often see a similar effect on screes and landslips, with larger rocks at the bottom.
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When looking at aerial photos for signs of buried archaeological features sometimes patterns are seen which are frost wedges, caused by glaciation in the UK. There are also two large pebble beaches in the UK, Chesil Beach and one stretching from Lossiemouth to Buckie.
Don't forget Dungeness.
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Ralph, I forgot Dungeness. It is said to be a site with a very large Botanical interest.
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It is indeed!