Don’t curb your horticultural ambition. By working with your natural surroundings, says Monty, even the wildest dreams can come true
I would really like a rockery. This would be partly for the alpine plants that I grow outside in alpine pans rather than among the stony clefts and nooks they belong in. I could have an alpine house. We had one at Berryfields, filled with little gems in pots, buried to their terracotta necks in sand and with ventilation on all sides to create the dry but cool environment they love. I could probably find the space and funds for a small one and give my existing alpines a much better life. However, alpines have never really entered the horticultural mainstream since the demise of the rockery as a common garden feature and I want the rockiness of a rockery, the great natural and architectural heft of slabs and chunks of stone.
There was a time when the extravagant creations designed to show off rocks and water were a feature of Chelsea gardens, and many still feature stone on a grand scale but usually more artfully and artily. Like alpines, ‘rockery’ has become unfashionable. But I am of an age when fashion and trends pass me by scarcely ruffling my surface. Call it any name you choose but I want a rockery.
And I really don’t think I can have one. It is not just for want of stone – although the rockeries that I admire at Wisley, Edinburgh, Chatsworth, Friar Park and the like have rocks on a scale that is staggering, especially when you consider they were all moved by train, steam engine, and horse and cart. The Victorian era was their heyday when the uptake of mountaineering by the Victorian middle classes who went to the nearest dramatic mountains to practise this hobby – which happened to be the Alps.
The botanists among them noticed the plants there and started to collect and bring them home, and to show them off they had to build mini-Alps in the back garden. In an age when you are obliged to wear a hard hat and a high-vis jacket to lift a bucket above your head, these assemblages seem to belong to an heroic age. Should I have my rockery I would want it to be heroic. A modest collection of stones interplanted with an agreeable selection of alpines simply won’t cut the mustard. The rockeries I love are astonishingly ambitious affairs, and it is the scale of imagination and engineering that I admire as much as the horticultural outcome. None of this has stopped me in the past. I feel comfortable with excess and over-towering ambition. Longmeadow was made from an empty field, has
