Gardening trends may come and go. Yet there are some once ubiquitous styles of old-school horticulture that have been desperately out of fashion for so long that even someone in their 40s, like me, has only really seen them in the yellowed pages of dusty text books. Something so iconic of their time – the outdoor equivalent of crocheted doilies – that it is almost impossible to imagine them reinvented to be relevant and practical. So when something truly great comes along that shakes you out of your preconceptions, you have to be grateful. This is where I have to take back everything I have said about alpines.
I used to very unfairly think of this enormous and incredibly diverse group of plants from the world’s mountaintops as tiny and fussy. The kind of thing that was largely invisible amid the huge “currant bun” mounds of gravel and rocks you’d see in soulless 70s suburbia. Most of these had been long abandoned by the 90s when I was a kid, but even the most pristine examples I had seen in botanic gardens always had an imbalance of plants to hard landscaping. Vast, high-ceilinged glasshouses with huge concrete beds, where you had to play a kind of botanical “Where’s Wally” to spot any precious traces of greenery.
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