The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

American Rock Gardens

Equally probable it is that the plants will smother one another. Much of the care of rock plants consists in throwing out weedy and crowding sorts and protecting the weaker ones. The robust creepers, as Cerastium, must be well penned in by the walls of the pocket and given plenty of room to hang down over the ledge face. Often it is best to keep the plants of the four groups—erect, tufted, creeping, and drooping— by themselves, yet for variety making this separation not too obvious, allowing some erect plants to grow among the drooping ones and bulbs among the creeping kinds. The tufted sorts prefer isolation, and these are usually on the highest spots.

For pleasure of the eye, the greatest possible variety should be sought, at the same time keeping a unified but not uniform effect. It is possible to make the planting too wild and unkempt, but more often a rock garden looks entirely too much dressed and too well tended to represent the moods of nature. There is a certain unity and plan in the arrangement of the wild flowers of the fields, and this intangible scheme should be our guide in planning the placing.

With all this striving for variety in unity, it is well to keep somewhat apart the flower masses of the same date of bloom, getting fewer of the flower combinations than is planned for a flower border. The requirements of finished pictorial composition are less desired here, the effect being decidedly more toward the very uneven and picturesque, with the tenets of the art of manmade pictures as little in evidence as possible. Further, each plant is to be enjoyed to a degree of itself, and it is distracting to have several adjoining pockets all in best bloom at once. Without making the arrangement spotty, it is better to stage the bloom of any week rather widely over the whole garden area, leaving each flower group set off by stones and foliage with quite a patch of one plant and then no bloom for a distance, as often is the case in nature. Yet companion crops, as tiny yellow Daffodils blooming in purple Aubrietia, are always desired and welcomed. It is hopeless to explain in words how to do it and yet not overdo each requirement.

Not only do we wish the interests of the plants well distributed over the area of the garden, but through the weeks of the year as well. Of course the climax of flower comes in the spring months; therefore, much thought must be expended to maintain interest at other times of the year. Many plants of evergreen foliage must be used (see list A in Chapters VI and VII), more than half the total planting being of this nature. Little bulbs may be added rather freely as second crop in the pockets, the bloom appearing before (or after) that of the major occupant of the pocket (or as companion bloom). Interest of foliage, as of Fern, Sempervivum, or Mossy Saxifrage; of habit, as tufted mats of *Diapensia or irregular stems of Cotoneaster; or in fruits, as of *Cornus canadensis, can always be employed to carry on the pictures when flowers are absent. A garden of this nature, when devoid of interest, indicates a poor play on the part of the planner.