The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Rockweler Rockgardens
Rock Plants Of Various Types
WHAT is a rock plant ?
From a half dozen authorities you might get as many different definitions. There are the sticklers who maintain that none but true alpines should be considered real rock plants, or grown in a rock garden. On the other hand, if one were to include everything described as a "rock plant" in some of the general seed catalogs, the conclusion would inevitably be that anything which can be grown in or near a rock garden is a rock plant.
In trying to arrive at some sort of a definition to meet our present purpose, we need be neither too technical on the one hand, nor commercial on the other. Mr. Reginald Farrer, the great English authority, gives it as his opinion that "anything that looks well and suitable" in a rock garden, "no matter where it comes from," may be classed as a rock-garden plant. Certainly this would include, on the one hand, many plants besides the true alpines, and exclude, on the other, many plants too large, too formal in habit of growth, or in other ways "unsuitable," which are often described as rock plants in the catalogs.
Another contention sometimes made is that no plant should be grown in a rock garden which may be grown equally as well elsewhere under ordinary garden conditions. Personally, I have never been able to see why such discrimination should be made. It might apply to that type of rock gardening which has as its first consideration the collecting and growing of alpine and other plants of similar character (see page 10). But where one looks upon the rock garden as a special form of landscaping, a particular medium for the creation of a suitable picture by the use of plants—in this case associated with rocks —then any plant which will add its bit to the beauty of the general effect, and is in harmony with the spirit of the com- position as a whole, qualifies as material legitimate to the hand of the artist who is creating it. And though he may be but an amateur artist, stumbling along as best he may in his ownunskilled way, the case is not altered.
Take, by way of illustration, the humble portulaca, sometimes instanced as the type of flower which should never be grown in a rock garden. It is an annual, will thrive in any sunny spot—a child can succeed with it, and rock-garden conditions are not in the least essential to its culture. But it seems to me that to an unusual degree it "looks well and suitable" associated with rocks—in fact, one of the most charming and altogether the simplest rock garden I ever saw was on an oceanside estate in Massachusetts, where the owner, a lady of unusual good taste, had used this one flower in the little crevices and among the hollows of the gray and moss-grown ledges which fortified the entrance to the place.
