About the service
I build alpine rock gardens and rockeries from the ground up, and I start with the light rather than with the stone. Before a single boulder is moved I walk the plot and look for an open, gently sloping corner that keeps the sun from mid-morning until late afternoon. Alpines are plants of mountain screes: in shade they stretch, lose the tight cushion habit and rot at the collar, so the half-shade under an apple tree is the wrong home for them. The second thing I decide on site is water. Heavy loam that stays wet until April kills a rocky garden far more reliably than any mistake in the plant list, so I strip the topsoil and clay to a depth of forty to sixty centimetres, cart the spoil away and lay a proper base of coarse crushed stone and gravel, tamped in layers, with a sand blinding on top.
Stone comes next, and I pick it on site instead of from a catalogue. One rock type for the whole composition — weathered limestone, sandstone, dolomite or granite boulders — in several sizes, so the group reads as an outcrop rather than a delivered heap. The largest pieces are set first and buried to a third or half of their bulk, the bedding planes all run the same way, and every face is tilted slightly inwards and back into the slope, so rain travels to the roots instead of washing the planting pockets out. Between the rocks I form crevices and fill them with a lean mix of turf loam, coarse sand and fine grit, with no rich compost: fat soil gives soft growth and a dead plant by the second winter.
Planting gives the garden its character. Sedums, houseleeks, saxifrages, thyme, aubrieta, pinks and small bellflowers go into the crevices, dwarf conifers and slow shrubs hold the structure through winter, and small bulbs carry the first weeks of spring. The surface is dressed with gravel of the same rock, which keeps the collars dry, holds moisture below and stops soil splashing onto the foliage. At handover you get a season-by-season care plan and a walk-through of what to do in spring, in summer heat and before the snow.
What is included: site survey and layout; excavation and drainage base; stone selection and delivery; setting the rock work; mixing and filling the planting soil; planting and first watering; gravel mulch; a written maintenance calendar.
Stone comes next, and I pick it on site instead of from a catalogue. One rock type for the whole composition — weathered limestone, sandstone, dolomite or granite boulders — in several sizes, so the group reads as an outcrop rather than a delivered heap. The largest pieces are set first and buried to a third or half of their bulk, the bedding planes all run the same way, and every face is tilted slightly inwards and back into the slope, so rain travels to the roots instead of washing the planting pockets out. Between the rocks I form crevices and fill them with a lean mix of turf loam, coarse sand and fine grit, with no rich compost: fat soil gives soft growth and a dead plant by the second winter.
Planting gives the garden its character. Sedums, houseleeks, saxifrages, thyme, aubrieta, pinks and small bellflowers go into the crevices, dwarf conifers and slow shrubs hold the structure through winter, and small bulbs carry the first weeks of spring. The surface is dressed with gravel of the same rock, which keeps the collars dry, holds moisture below and stops soil splashing onto the foliage. At handover you get a season-by-season care plan and a walk-through of what to do in spring, in summer heat and before the snow.
What is included: site survey and layout; excavation and drainage base; stone selection and delivery; setting the rock work; mixing and filling the planting soil; planting and first watering; gravel mulch; a written maintenance calendar.
