why create a Crevice garden?

[gote]

Nice big stones are a problem for all of us.
I am in the happy position that I own a small excavator. With that I can easily handle stones up to half a ton or more.
The trick is to use rope. Tie a cross, push the stone onto the cross and hitch the four rope ends to the teeth of the scoop.
It is quite easy.
Now everybody does not have one but they can be rented in many places and it is a big rockery crevice garden or whatnot that cannot be completed in a weekend.
Think about it. They are easier to run than you think
Göte.

[David Nicholson]

Peter, I had to lay down and rest after looking at the pictures

David, nice, now that I could cope with and without an excavator as well!

[Maggi Young]

Göte's way is easiest, no doubt about that! 
With heavy lifting, much success can be attributed to technique and not merely strength. Using leverage etc. it is amazing what can be achieved .

[David Nicholson]

Göte's way is easiest, no doubt about that! 
With heavy lifting, much success can be attributed to technique and not merely strength. Using leverage etc. it is amazing what can be achieved .

Yeah!

[David Shaw]

Unfortunately, I am about the largest mini-digger/excavator we could manouver round our garden.

[Maggi Young]

Unfortunately, I am about the largest mini-digger/excavator we could manouver round our garden

Yes, me too!!

[Hjalmar]

Give me where to stand, and I will move the earth. Archimedes.

Thanks for posting these pictures, Peter, that's almost a video. I tried moving around stones that were a lot smaller than that. If the ground is flat it is easy, but if there's just a tiny uphill slope it's very tough. I am really amazed that you manage to get those huge stones to the top of your sand piles without any machines. I imagined that you used some system with ropes and tackles.

I might contact you about that evening course. But if you make us do that kind of exercises I am not sure I manage to get home afterwards.

[Peter Korn, Sweden]

Hjalmar, it´s mostly women on my workshops and they are always surprised how big stones they can move when I have showed them how to do it. I think you would survive.
The biggest problem is the stones that I´m able to lift. That is the ones that break my back. If they are bigger I have to use some technique.
If the stones are not too big it´s easy to get them into a wheelbarrow. This is how I do it.

[gote]

Well if you cannot get a modern machine through, you have to use one of the ancient ones: lever, incline and so on. If the Egyptians could, we can .
Peter has shown in an excellent way how to do it. I often do it the same way myself even if my age prevents me from tackling stones that are quite as big.
However, I would like to add a couple of tips Unfortunately I do not have any pictures.
The essential tool is a pointed steel bar (called a spit?) about 1.5 m long. It will also serve well when making holes for posts.
The second most essential is a large size carpenter's crow bar. It is very useful when moving stones a small distance and for lifting when planting in horizontal crevices.
The third is an assortment of wood pieces: cross section 4x10cm to 5x15cm. lengths from 20cm to 1.5m. The short ones are needed as support when the bars are used as levers. They also serve as temporary supports. One lifts one edge of the stone with the bar resting on one piece and then pushes another piece under the stone. By repeating the procedure and piling the wood, one can lift surprisingly large stones fairly high up.
The long planks are used as slides Stones slide much easier on a hard surface than on soil. One pushes the stone by pushing the end of the bar into the soil and using it as a lever. Better is to use some type of winch or tackle. Sometimes round pieces can be used as rollers. This kind of wood is really scrap from the lumber yard and should be cheap.
The foremost "tool" of all is, however, a helper. One who hangs on to the wheelbarrow from the other side when it is weighed up. Who is able to push the plank stump under the lifted stone edge, Who is able to push the stone sideways (using the other bar) when you are lifting - Who can get the beer 
The basic trick - which is obvious really - is to use not your strength but your weight. One of the few occasions when my overweight is a good thing 
I hope this is a little helpful.
Göte

   
   

[Susan Band]

In Scotland we call a long steel bar you make posts holes with a guddle. Don't know if this is the English word for it as well?

[Kristl Walek]

I have never been aesthetically fond of the traditional vertical crevice garden (ex the Czechs, ex Halda)....so when I undertook mine about 10 years ago, I wanted a "horizontal" crevice garden built with what was available on my property (LARGE pieces of limestone).

In North America every farm has a "rock corner" where all the rocks excavated from the fields are put. And I was lucky to inherit a few such piles, as they had been strategically placed in "all four corners" of my property from the corn farmers surrounding me.

Two of us (and on occasion a third helper) moved all the rocks without use of any heavy equipment (wheelbarrows, sleds, pulled behind a small lawn tractor, dolleys, etc). A lever and a sledge hammer (to make some of the rocks fit) were the only other major tools used. And I was NOT YOUNG when this was undertaken, arthritic and with back problems (am even less young now- and won't get into the physical analysis except to say it's just this side of pathetic).

The basic principle was to build from the ground up (then across, and up again) in layers, to create deep crevices, choosing rocks carefully and piecing them, puzzle fashion. Each layer, as it was built, was stuffed tight with soil (I used the best soil possible, as a crevice garden like this is a one-time adventure, never to be re-built, and impossible to add other soil, once it is constructed). Total height is about 4 feet (?) and the length is approximately 20 feet.

A tufa section was incorporated into one part of it.

Begun in September and working only on weekends when my friend Milo was available, it was finished by December.

I apologize for the quality of the pictures---but these are pre-digital days, and were scanned in from my old SLR.

And....because I was the photographer, no pictures of me doing my share of the grunt work...

And, because I could not resist posting a picture of my wonderful, recently-departed Bernese Mountain dog, who adored this "mountain" from it's creation. It was quite difficult, in fact, keeping him off it, after construction.

I'll see if I can find "after planting" pictures.

[art600]

Kristl

Why do you call this a crevice garden?  I would recognise it as a rock garden.  Similarly Peter's gardens are hardly crevices.

The vertical crevice gardens are certainly different - and I lke you do not really like them.

[Kristl Walek]

Yes, it certainly *looks* like a traditional rock garden---but it would, because all the obvious visual markers are present.

However, the building of it was entirely different - giving ULTIMATE and first priority to crevices (all the way down).

There are in fact NO to few horizontal planting areas (on the flat where there is soil). All that exists are crevices throughout the entire garden--and plants are ALL planted in the crevices. I don't quite know how else to explain it.

It's solid rock except for crevices. Not rocks and planting spaces.

[art600]

Kristl

I like the look of it but the ratio of plants to rock must be very low compared with the traditional rock garden.

[Carlo]

Arthur,

I'd say that's exactly the point.

Most of our rock gardens look like mountain meadows, not "rock" gardens. Reducing the plant to rock ratio brings the garden more into balance with what a "alpine" habitat looks like.

Furthermore, one of the main reasons for constructing such a garden is to employ the crevices to grow plants that would struggle in rock gardens (as in your "traditional" rock garden), or that prefer the long, narrow root runs and snuggling right up to the rock's surface underground.