For about 500 years, people have been trying to recreate the alpine environment in their private and public gardens, according to Connor Smith, who was the keynote speaker at the North American Rock Garden Society annual meeting held in Cheyenne last month.
A young man, not quite 30 years old, Smith is also the face of rock gardening’s future. Though a Scot, he has been rock gardening professionally for four years in the Netherlands at the Utrecht University botanic gardens, where he is becoming proficient in Dutch and managing a crew of gardeners.
Several of the other attendees rock garden professionally. Kenton Seth, of western Colorado, co-author of “The Crevice Garden: How to Make the Perfect Home for Plants from Rocky Places,” (available in the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens gift shop), who designs and installs rock gardens public and private, listed components of rock gardening: travel, lifelong learning, tediousness (seed cleaning), interdisciplinary learning (botany and geology) and culture (there are rock garden adherents around the world).
Another, Mike Kintgen, who manages the Rock Alpine Garden at the Denver Botanic Gardens, is happiest talking about amazing rock garden plants and introduced us to several dozen classic examples, sometimes referred to as “cushion” or “bun” plants because of their tendency to form a mat or tight ball that can withstand alpine wind and weather.
I was attending the meeting because Panayoti Kelaidis, from the Denver Botanic Gardens and one of the longtime active members of NARGS, who Mark and I met when we invited him to talk about high plains native plants for the Habitat Hero workshop a few years ago, thought I’d be a good addition to the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens’ planning team.
I was curious about what kind of people are rock gardeners. Were they much like birders? Yes. The typical age range, 50s, 60s, 70s, with a sprinkling of older and younger, matches. People tend to pick up hobbies and membership in associated clubs when they are older and have more time.
A huge component of a NARGS annual meeting is the local field trips where members are dressed in sun-and-bug protective clothes, just like birders. Some trips were to local private and institutional rock gardens, and one whole morning was spent swarming the Vedauwoo Recreation Area. We parked two tour buses at the top parking lot, where the fee station is, and 108 people (not counting those of us from the planning committee) fanned out over the rocky flats to crouch over colorful wildflowers.
June is a great month for flowers at 8,000 feet elevation. I had just been on a hike there three days before, snapping pictures with my phone. I uploaded photos of 37 different flowering plants to iNaturalist that evening and within a day, someone who goes by the username “Oscarflip” had identified many of them to species. As I mentioned this to a small group I was with, Austin Saunders of Cheyenne, another young man, piped up, “That’s me.” Though we’d met previously — on a birdwatching trip — the NARGS meeting was Saunders’ introduction to the Cheyenne gardening community as well as NARGS.
Saunders can readily recall the scientific names of Laramie and Albany County native plants, and all their field identification marks, locations, favorite habitat, etc. My brain is stuck with the names I learned 45 years ago, and many have changed.
Saunders has gone one step further, planting these natives in his front and back yards. I realized, looking at his Castilleja linariifolia, Wyoming Indian paintbrush, our state flower, that I may never have seen it in the wild. It’s tall and rather scraggly compared to the compact, bright red bunches of paintbrush that we saw at Vedauwoo.
I say here the same comment I heard others make, that Saunders also has some design talent. Currently, he is available for hire for yardwork, but I suspect his talents will be better employed designing and installing native plant gardens, some perhaps with rocks. See him on Instagram: aguywholikesplants.
So, am I going to try rock gardening? I don’t know. I cringe at the idea of filling any garden space with rocks and gravel. But I also am intrigued with growing plants that require rocky conditions — alpine or desert.
There are Cheyenne gardeners ready to form a chapter of NARGS. If you are interested, email me, bgorges4@msn.com, and I will forward your note to the future chapter organizers.