Alpine plants on the rise

This coronation weekend I should be enjoying my best spring garden ever. So I thought last November, when I finished planting hundreds of tulips and picked spring-blooming pansies out of their boxes. I reckoned without time and that beloved category of recent rhetoric: wildlife in the garden.

Wildlife isn’t, for once, striped. On the rate front my garden has enjoyed peace since its activists received the Broxit for which they were agitated. They left the February crocuses peaceful. Instead, the saboteurs were hares, attacked by a muntjac, or deer that barks. In one night they mangled the leaves of every tulip at ground level. They returned two weeks later to bite off every bud that had popped up in the meantime, hundreds in all.

I know they were the culprits because I scared them early in the morning in one of the flower beds. The hares weren’t crazy in March. They were having a targeted snack. Wildlife is a broad category, sometimes myself included: wake up, gardeners, and keep most of it in the wild, where it belongs.

Without tulips, my hopes for a blooming spring have been pinned on hardy little plants, often loosely classified as “alpine.” They were my first gardening love, but if the weather continues in this year’s direction they might as well be my last. In their mountain habitats, alpine plants are at the forefront of global warming. High-elevation glaciers are melting; the snows fall later and disappear earlier; the summer sun is hotter and longer. The effects are measurable against exactly kept records and refute any remaining skepticism about climate change.

The saboteurs were hares attacked by a muntjac. In one night they mangled the leaves of every tulip. They returned two weeks later to bite off every bud that had popped up in the meantime, hundreds in all

As natural conditions worsen, I have looked to alpine gardeners as safe spacers of these heavenly plants. However, their gardens are also changing. At lower altitudes the Alpini hate wet winters. They also hate hard frost without a warm blanket of snow. From December 2022 to March 2023 they had them to the bitter end: mortality was the consequence, without even a bite from a hare or deer.

To my surprise, I lost several helianthemums, the sun roses which are usually safe bets. I have also lost almost everything to woolly leaves, including woodruff and verbascum, which survived the great heat of July and August. I’ve also lost old stagers, frozen in the two bouts of snowless bitter frost, St. John’s wort, a pink-flowered carpet of an easy plant called Frankenia thymifolia, and even some of the prostrate weeds that used to be my bulb cover. The best response to garden deaths is to replant immediately and hope losses occur only once in a decade. So I was on the prowl before other alpine gardeners reacted to what they needed to replace.

Three of Britain’s top Alpine growers deliver by mail, but their online listings show what they and we are waiting to regrow and replace. In Midlothian, Kevock garden plants are more used to frost than most of us and are relatively well stocked (kevockgarden.co.uk). In Cambridgeshire, D’Arcy and Everest is now booking orders for much of its current roster when next examples are available (darcyeverest.co.uk). In Lincolnshire, Pottertons has had worse winters, 2010-11 did even more damage, but they too have had to go back to basics and rebuild parts of their stock (pottertons.co.uk). These three nurseries are exemplary packers and shippers and I wholeheartedly recommend their UK mail order service.

Alpines go in and out of the trade, so it’s important to pounce whenever you can. Like a cat, I’m an avid pitcher. Kevock will be at the Chelsea Flower Show and D’Arcy and Everest will be at the Malvern Spring Festival and book orders there – D’Arcy and Everest offer a notification service so you can put your name in now for, say, the next lot of rock jasmine with woolly leaves and pink or androsaceae flowers. Timeliness and patience pay off.

Hope springs eternal in keen rock gardeners: enough survives in our gardens, even now, to encourage others. I have not lost a single gentian, primrose or bluebell. There are half-dark flowers on the liverworts, and the small-flowered daphnas are unharmed: the tall daphnas, which have grown like shrubs, have turned into a brown mush. The silver-leaved euryops is also unharmed, a 6-inch-tall stalwart that is easily rooted from cuttings taken this month. I still have faith in rock plants as excellent elements for balconies and small patios, where they can be grown in pots and planters. When in doubt, D’Arcy and Everest are masters of container rock gardens, as their online photos show. Small plants grow in small spaces: biodiversity is still possible.

To remind myself of happier results, I went to the National Alpine Garden Society spring show which is held annually in Solihull. The Company itself is a winner. For £40 a year you can be a part of it, have free entry to its many shows, join its seed distribution scheme and enjoy the quarterly newsletters, sources of invaluable advice and support. They are an incentive to travel to see the Alpini at their best in the mountain landscapes of other countries.

I missed the AGS spring shows when lockdowns canceled them. On my way to this reopened I let my mind wander as to what I would most like to find and buy. My two main shortcomings are the blue-flowered Lithodora oleifolia, a lime-tolerant variety of this lovely family, and Hypericum aegyptiacum, which makes a small bush of pretty yellow flowers against gray-green leaves. My lithodora had died of old age after the hot and stressful summer and the St. John’s Wort then died in the second hard frost.

Maybe I have a mental hotline for these spring shows, 60 years since I first witnessed them. It’s almost creepy that a member of the AGS offered a potted plant of exactly the two victims I wanted to replace. Pottertons then added a good white flowered Campanula Hannah plant, which a slug ate to death in my garden last fall. Rearmed, I was ready for the grand finale, displays of Alpini members vying for prizes in a room of their own.

So many things have been so turbulent in life since 2019, but I find it reassuring that there are Alpine gardeners who have grown plants like the beautiful Daphne cneorum pygmaea from seed sown in Autumn 2019 and are now able to showcase them to perfection. Not everything in Britain is getting worse. Pink-flowered Dionysias, superb Asian primroses, Bolivian oddities grown from seed – Alpine gardeners can still put on stellar quality displays. I awarded a personal first prize to a flawless pan of a blue-flowered paraquilegia with finely shaped gray-green leaves. The judges, for reasons beyond my control, had preferred a pink-red pulsatilla, which I too can grow outdoors.

Amateur talent inspires emulation, even if the exhibits need a cold frame or unheated greenhouse. How do I dispense with slug-prone bluebells when exhibitors elsewhere are growing alpine cushion plants without a hint of animal harm? Ideal exhibits propel us forward: I’ll build a slug-resistant rampart around the bluebells and even in wet winters, I’ll try again.

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