Rock garden primer: start with a slope, fine tune your soil and add plants that merit a closer look

摘要

Rock gardens come in many forms. Depending on the sun exposure, slope, soil conditions, and plants, they can mimic the open tundra of the American West, the steep cliffs of the Rocky Mountains, the granite outcrops of a woodland forest in the Northeast or Upper Midwest, or the rocky coast of the Pacific Northwest. When my husband, Bill, and I moved from New York City to a house in the Colorado plains, at the base of the Rocky Mountains, I quickly decided to fill the landscape around our new home with some of the beautiful flowers I'd seen in the surrounding countryside. The only problem was that I had no idea how to grow these rock-garden plants. So I built my own slope (see sidebar, p. 62) and experimented with gravelly soil mixes (see sidebar, p. 63), various types of rocks, and tiny plants with big flowers like those I'd seen in the wild. Today, I have a series of rock gardens around my house, and they have given me so many hours of delight that rarely do I even consider other types of gardeni