Rock gardening in non-alpine climates

How cute is this dwarf Marguerite Daisy, courtesy of Altagardener. Check out the growing medium!
http://pics.davesgarden.com/pics/2013/11/01/altagardener/29199d.jpg

All this is tempting! I'm so weak when it comes to plants.
Donna it is good to have a special source. Thanks!

I'm pretty relentless. Sometimes I really really want a plant. And if I can buy the seeds or it so much the better. Some sources, like JL Hudson, are really inexpensive ($2.50 a pack, and about $1 for shipping as many as - I think). For years their seeds were $1.50. One of the coolest plants I got the seed for was a seed called salvia ssp. tesquicola. Eas to germinate, indestructible, noninvasive. I REALLY loved using it in the peony beds at my former house.

And your Salvia really pops with the White Peony background. I usually choose seeds over buying a potted plant. Not only is it a more inexpensive option but It also greatly reduces importing new and harmful insect populations.

I was a seed person but for a while, the seeds were getting as expensive as the plants. So I opted for a plant and then to collect my own seeds. But of course now the price of plants went up with everything else. No more $3 perennials, even at the end of the season with few exceptions.
That is a beautiful combination,Donna. It looks like Salvia 'Cardonna'.

Loretta, harvesting your own seed and trading is a great solution to inexpensively expand your collection (relatively). It's a bunch more work and time is money, it just depends on what you have more of. The shipping costs sure don't help in any of those scenarios either, whether built into the price or not.

C'est la vie says the old folks (hey, I resemble that remark), that doesn't mean I have to like it. I'm always up for a good cost prohibitive commiseration party.

Yeah I use to trade seeds. It was fun but it was time consuming and after a while, I had way too many. Then I would get requests for SASE almost everyday in my email. At first I didn't mind but after a while, it got annoying and I took my list down. Bah humbug, right?

I agree. It's a tough and beautiful plant. The peony is Cornelia Shaylor. The fun part is that after the peonies are gone it keeps rolling. You can see the peony rings. The salvia pretty much continues through successive sharp frosts. The blue plant is cynoglossum, and old cottage garden plant. I have never seen it in a garden center. It's easy to start from seed, and then the seeds are sticky, so if rabbits pass through your yard it clings to them and they spread it around. Easy to pull out, and what other plant has so intense a blue color? It goes with a whole bunch of plants. I love it with lilies. This is lilium regale album. I love icy blue with white! I have regales in my new yard, and I am going to punch them up with some cynoglossum.

Everything looks so healthy and green!

My garden would hardly have been what it is if very kind people on Daves had not gifted me: polygonatum , numerous lilium, abbysinian glads, alliums.

And seeds! Look at the digitalis mertonensis I was able to grow from fresh seed!

Oh, and the campanula takesimana in the background? Don't go there!

I went there once when I got a freebee from Bluestone Perennials... Within about a month it had sent out tendrils about 4 feet in all directions. Since I noticed quickly, I was able to rip it out before it really established. Funny about Campanulas- they generally either invade, or die here. The only one that has remained is 'Blue Waterfall' which survives prolonged summer drought and neglect under a peony. Come to think of it, it belongs in this thread as it is at the edge of a rock wall!

The only campanula that doesn't do either is trachelium Bernice, which I just love. Doesn't spread, doesn't die.

I'm running all over the place hacking out takesimana. Trying to invade my roses, my viburnums, my alchemilla mollis, my dadffdils, for heaven's sake Happily, it is easy to spot with its distinctive leaves. I am using my dandelion digger to pull it out with its blasted tendrils.

My favorite don't is still gooseneck loosestrife. Put in by a landscaper, the four plants decimated almost everything in the bed. When I started pulling it out, it had thick snakelike tendrils four feet away. Why in the world does White Flower Farm offer it every year? You can tell from the picture from their web site that it is wicked.

http://www.whiteflowerfarm.com/33630-product.html

Blue waterfall is pretty. I am now very wary about camps, but I may try that one.

I have a rock garden on my front lawn where it get almost full sun. To keep the sizes down I grow the plants in pots which I sink up to the rim into the gravely ground(sand and peat over a base of 6" thick newspaper substrata). This gives a substrate of moisture from the wet newspaper. The actual plants are starved for foot and survive but grow extremely slowly. To reduce the heat I have stationed 'hose end misters,"which will reduce the immediate area from100F in the surrounding air to 80F in the RG

What plants have you been successful with, arfitz?

Anagallis monardi have done beautifully for me. I collect the seed in the fall in case they don't self-seed enough to please me. Almost any container can use a few true lapis blue flowers popping out.

That is a nice one that I haven't tried yet. So how long do they take to bloom from self sown seed?

So I couldn't resist after all this talk about pasque flower. There was a lonely one at a recent flower show and it wasn't too expensive so I picked it up. Then I splurged on Gentiana acaulis Maxima because even though I don't believe it will do well for me, Bottle gentian has stuck around for quite a few years so I chanced it. That one I might have paid too much for but it is a healthy size.

Very pretty Loretta...both of them.

I'm actually not sure. I think they bloomed in early summer from self-sown seed, and in late summer from hand-sown.

Thank you, Robin. I guess I should make a rock garden now but so far, no vision comes to me.

I think they should both do well for you.
For me, gentiana acaulis is more reliable than the summer/fall blooming gentians.
I think summer heat & humidity are too much for the fall-blooming gentians.

I hope you are right, Weerobin. Do you grow many other gentiana?

Dawn, early summer from self sown is great. I've been given seed for blue pimpernel in the past but they didn't germinate (probably because I waited too long to try). I'll have to try again. They are so cute.

Here are 3 spring bloomers: #1 G. acaulis #2 G. angustifolia #3 G. verna.
G. paradoxa blooms in July here - looks pretty good, still.

But bottle gentian (G. andrewsii) and G. septemfida (both late summer/fall bloomers) don't look very good.

LOVE the blue! Such a difficult color to get (most are purple) and you make it look easy!

You'll notice these are mostly planted in my quasi-rock garden planters.
Just 1/3rd bark-based plant mix with the rest gravel and those clay pebbles.
I never had any success with gentians planted in the typical soil in the yard.

I have a couple more blooming rock garden plants new this morning.
First is a draba - D. ramosissima.
Remarkable it survived our humidity. I've killed several others.
This one was advertised as more tolerant of humidity and lo & behold,
it's not only still alive but blooming. Not that it's very spectacular, but it's a start.
It's a small mounding classic rock garden species, so I'm pleased with it so far.
Second is a pendant pulsatilla, P pratensis Bohemica.
I'm not sure if it's going to open any further or not. We'll see.
A hairy little rascal to be sure.
Finally I see buds getting ready on Erigeron simplex.
Eager to see them open soon.
Lots of the other plants are showing signs of life,
so I'm interested to see how they evolve.

Boy, it all sure looks good to me, very nice. Perhaps what I should've said was "Manly yes, but I like it too!"

Haha! Me too! It looks like a fuzzy frit.
Thanks for the info on the gentians, Weerobin. You have such an interesting collection of plants. The clay pebbles and bark mix is new to me. Is that typical rock garden recommendations or is that something you came up with. Those pebbles are typically used for hydroponics?

I think there are dozens of formulas for rock garden mixes. And they also need to vary due to the demands of the individual plant sometimes. I had heard you can use clay pebbles as they are lighter weight than gravel, and since my plantings (at least for now) are in planters, I opted to try them. Only drawback is expense, but that problem was fixed when a local store stopped carrying their aquarium stock and deeply discounted their remaining inventory. I've got another 3 or 4 big bags of them. I usually use about 1:1:1 bark based mix/course sand/clay pebbles. Sometimes even less mix for those plants that want even more scree-like soil. I'm just experimenting, of course.

Oops, double post. Deleting.

This message was edited Mar 30, 2016 11:01 AM

As spring moves on, more plants are showing they've survived.
This one is alyssum wulfenianum. It's spilling over the side of the planter.
Looks quite vigorous & healthy, so certainly likes it tolerates conditions around here.

Hmm, you've already got things spilling over the sides of containers? I guess all the snow, hail and below freezing temps missed you guys. That's a nice looking Alyssum.

You're right about being surprisingly big in just it's first year. I'm wondering if it might do OK out in the yard without any pampering. I've got a bunch of ground-hugging thymes crawling their way down a limestone outcropping. A splash of yellow would look nice. Of course the thyme doesn't bloom 'til later, but whatever...

Well, it's freezing here today and the last I looked, the bleeding hearts that were already in bud are limp and half the flowers on my magnolia tree look like limp brown tissues.
That's a nice alyssum. Let us know how it does when not in flower. I got rid of what was probably alyssum saxatile because I didn't like the foliage. It looked puckery and sickly. Maybe it was.

All the more reason to get some color now Wee. I've got some Alyssum in my zone 6a garden that's perennial and would still be blooming with Thyme. Here it is last fall.

Is that perennial or does it just reseed?

It's perennial Loretta and probably reseeds. I haven't harvested seeds from it though.

Interesting posts. Thanks for all of the pictures. Enjoyable. I finally found the Pulsatilla v. It's on its way to my home. I'm going to have to go back and read the info about it, so I get it planted in the right location with right soil amendments.

Update on my rock garden plants
#1 is Erigeron simplex. Big lavender daisies.
#2 is a dwarf daphne, D Leila Haines. Only about 5 inches tall at present.
Just 2 branches each ending in a blooming puff of pink flowers.
Lots of dwarf dianthus budding up - blooms soon.